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China’s President Xi Jinping called U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday morning urging American restraint in reaction to North Korea. Tensions between the United States and North Korea have risen to new levels ever since Pyongyang’s April 16 failed missile test. Top U.S. officials have repeatedly warned Pyongyang against more provocations—a warning Pyongyang does not seem likely to heed. “We’ll be conducting more missile tests on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis,” a high-ranking North Korean official recently told the BBC. After that, Trump’s number two, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, said that “The president and I have great confidence that China will properly deal with North Korea,” adding a reminder that Trump had earlier said. “if China is unable to deal with North Korea, the United States and our allies will.” Meanwhile, China’s trade with North Korea in the first quarter of 2017 has actually increased, by a whopping 37.4 percent from the same period last year. Will Beijing start enforcing sanctions? How can the U.S. persuade China to push Pyongyang to denuclearize—a stated goal of both great powers? —The Editors
Comments
Michael Swaine

The Chinese clearly believe that events regarding North Korea are escalating to a dangerous level. And they have sent some signals that they are today even less happy with Pyongyang than before and notably concerned about Trump’s bottom line and willingness to use force. As a result of these two factors, and Xi’s recent positive conversations with Trump, the Chinese are arguably already willing to support more onerous sanctions, to a point. It is highly unlikely that they are going to shut off all economic intercourse with North Korea (and certainly not indefinitely) in the hopes of forcing denuclearization talks. It could just as easily lead to conflict. They do not want to take such a high risk. This ever-cautious stance was also indicated by Xi’s phone call to Trump on Sunday evening Washington time in which he reportedly yet again urged the president to exercise restraint and seek to engage the North Koreans.

Trump could of course try to escalate pressure or incentives on Beijing by threatening some type of kinetic strike (e.g., against any North Korean missile launches), or offering various trade incentives, or even a reduction in arms sales to Taiwan (thus violating the Six Assurances), but these are unlikely to prove possible politically or to prove successful. And a full-blown attack on North Korean missile and nuclear sites would only generate war and result in a catastrophic failure of U.S. policy beyond anything yet seen.

The real question is: What is Trump’s game plan if something less than a full-court press on sanctions (either with or without China) fails in the near term, neither stopping missile or nuclear testing nor bringing Pyongyang back to the table for denuclearization talks? What then?

The Chinese are not the key to solving this problem. But the U.S. does need their active cooperation in any way forward, to stand any reasonable chance of “success.” They could play a positive role in pressuring and/or encouraging Pyongyang to avoid actually deploying a nuclear-armed missile of any range, which should be the near- to medium-term goal, followed by a freeze. Temporary Chinese suspensions of oil and other trade could be used to achieve such goals. The Chinese might agree to that, on a limited basis.

Long term, what is needed is a dialogue with Beijing, Seoul, and Japan about the future of the peninsula and a revived Structural Framework-type arrangement, presenting Pyongyang with a very stark choice between isolation and irrelevancy or security and development.
Bruce Klingner

There is a stark dichotomy between how Trump administration officials privately describe the recently completed North Korea policy review and the impression one gets from the blustery, swaggering public threats of preemptive attack. The policy that has been blessed by the interagency process includes emphasis on restrengthening the U.S. military to reverse degradations in capability resulting from defense budget cuts and an augmentation of ballistic missile defense.

What is likely to be the most striking difference from the Obama Administration will be a willingness to actually use existing legal authorities to more vigorously impose sanctions on North Korea and Chinese violators. While Obama talked a good game on sanctions, he only timidly and incrementally enforced U.S. laws. U.S. bureaucrats privately comment that they have long had lists of sanctionable entities but were prevented by senior Obama officials from targeting them.

Trump’s declarations before and after his summit with Chinese President Xi Jingping reflect the adage about March weather, “coming in like a lion and going out like a lamb.” In the run-up to the summit, President Trump vowed to press China to “solve” North Korea, vowing to use Chinese trade with the U.S. as leverage to force greater Chinese action against North Korea.

Yet, after the summit, Trump quickly flip-flopped, abandoning his strong rhetoric and instead proclaiming President Xi Jinping was “going to try very hard” on North Korea and that “I think he wants to help us with North Korea.” Trump acknowledged that his softer position on China was due to its perceived help on North Korea, asking, “Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” Trump continued to heap praise on China, declaring that “Nobody’s ever seen such a positive response on our behalf from China.”

It is disturbing that the president so quickly abandoned his strong rhetoric and pledges to increase pressure on Beijing to fully implement required U.N. sanctions and no longer turn a blind eye to prohibited activities taking place on its soil. The Trump administration’s intent to enforce U.S. laws, including imposing secondary sanctions on Chinese violators, is now on hold pending Beijing fulfilling pledges made privately during the summit.

Trump would benefit from reviewing China’s previous pledges to “do more” on North Korea. After each of North Korea’s previous nuclear and missile tests, some U.S. experts have assessed that Beijing had hardened its position toward North Korea, ended its unconditional support to Pyongyang, and predicted that some forthcoming provocation (now long since passed) would trigger even more decisive action by China.

In January 2016, the Obama administration released seven Iranian-born prisoners in what President Barack Obama called a “one-time” “humanitarian gesture” intended to sweeten the nuclear deal hammered out between Washington, D.C., and Tehran. The prisoners — who Josh Earnest insisted were guilty only of “sanctions violations or violations of the trade embargo” — were exchanged for five Americans, unjustly held by Iran since as early as 2011. In fact, some of the Iranian prisoners were national-security threats, and it wasn’t a straight prisoner swap: The Wall Street Journal revealed that on the day of the exchange the U.S. flew $400 million in cash on an unmarked cargo plane to Iran.

When it came to its negotiations with Iran, duplicity was the hallmark of the previous administration’s public statements. (Sanctimonious preening was a close second.) But supporters assured skeptics that the administration was acting in the country’s best national-security interests. Now comes a new bombshell investigation that shows the lengths to which the previous administration went to secure Iranian cooperation, even when it meant putting American security at risk.

According to an investigation by Politico, in addition to the prisoner release, the Justice Department quietly “dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives.” Several of them were wanted for alleged roles in helping to funnel materiel to Iran-backed terror outfits, such as Hezbollah, or for participating in the global network to procure components for Iran’s nuclear program. One was believed to have helped supply Shiite militias in Iraq with a particularly deadly type of IED — one that killed “hundreds” of American troops. Furthermore:

Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort. And as far back as the fall of 2014, Obama administration officials began slow-walking some significant investigations and prosecutions of Iranian procurement networks operating in the U.S.

As Politico says, “through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks.”