It is fashionable in Washington to deride, or even condemn, every move President Donald Trump makes that is a departure from past, staid U.S. foreign policy. Secretary of State Tillerson's terse public statement on Wednesday's North Korean KN-14 missile test into the Sea of Japan was the latest example of departing from past diplomatic norms, and should be read by China and others as an indication that the U.S. Administration is nearing the end of its patience with North Korean antics. Trump’s new and public pressure on Beijing may be the best course to avoid a catastrophic conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
Trump’s decision to depart from past practice was most vividly seen in the Financial Times interview published April 3. By telling the Chinese leader that the United States is capable of handling the problem on its own, Trump is challenging 20 years of U.S. foreign policy conventional wisdom that the road to a solution on North Korea runs through Beijing. Now, with the North Koreans clearly intent on building a nuclear-armed ICBM capable of targeting the continental United States for the first time, Trump is framing the Chinese President’s choice starkly. In essence he is saying that it is time for China not just to make some tactical adjustments in its North Korea policy, but to make a strategic choice to bring great pressure on North Korea. Moreover, if China is unwilling to make that strategic adjustment, the United States will reluctantly have to begin to take unilateral actions that may run counter to China’s national interests.
Although we can argue the merits of signaling President Xi so publicly before their first meeting, there is precedent for changing the negotiating approach to China by candidly warning Beijing that it is endangering its own interests. Prior to Xi’s fall 2015 visit, the Obama Administration signaled to Beijing that it was fed up with the outrageous cyber attacks to gain commercial secrets and that it would impose sanctions on Chinese firms if the United States and China could not reach an agreement on ending cyber intrusions against U.S. corporations for the sake of commercial espionage. Xi responded quickly by sending the country’s security czar, Meng Jianzhu, to Washington with authority to negotiate a cyber agreement. As noted recently by a former senior Homeland Security Department official, the success of this strategy has been “underreported in the press,” and “cybersecurity experts have concluded that Chinese hacking of U.S. companies decreased substantially” after President Xi’s and President Obama’s summit.
Some Trump Administration critics have said that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will never willingly give up his nuclear weapons, and advocate not negotiating with the North but rather let it stew in its own juices.
I believe this may be premature and a dangerous misreading of the North Korean situation. Sanctions should not be seen as a tool for changing Kim’s mind but rather for pressing the North Korean elite so that they will decide that building nuclear weapons could lead to the country’s demise. Insufficient attention has been given to the insights on North Korean fragility provided by the former North Korean Deputy Chief of Mission in London who defected to South Korea last summer. In an interview with the BBC, for example, he said, “I'm sure that Kim Jong-un's regime one day will collapse by a people's uprising." If we learned anything at all from the fall of the Soviet Union and the Arab spring it is that authoritarian leaders look from the outside to have an unassailable monopoly on power—until they suddenly do not.
Hopefully, if China and the United States work together to substantially raise the price of North Korea’s nuclear policy, the elite will convince Kim he must negotiate or lose power. If the choice is between nuclear weapons and survival, Kim is likely to choose survival. The key question is whether there are tools to convince the North’s elite to press Kim. If Trump can convince the Chinese leader of the dire nature of this situation, there are many more tools available. China’s decision to reduce coal imports last month was a good start, one that clearly drew a nervous condemnation from the North, but China can do much more. For example, the North Korean military cannot operate without the jet fuel from China. Even a temporary halt to this supply would send a shockwave through the elites.
Chinese leaders would be wise to heed Trump’s warning on North Korea. Any of the immediate options open to the United States to go it alone, from secondary sanctions on Chinese companies and individuals violating UN Security Council sanctions to increased U.S. military deployments in Northeast Asia, to covert action in cyberspace, will rebound to China’s national security detriment. In addition, if the United States is forced to threaten military options, China could find itself having to decide which side it is supporting in a potential military crisis. It would be a tragic mistake for Beijing to conclude that Trump is bluffing and that it can maintain its business-as-usual approach to the North Korean crisis.
