IT was once accepted wisdom in Washington that although Beijing welcomed the uncertainties that nuclear-armed North Korea introduced into US Asian policy, it would use its economic clout to ensure that the Pyongyang regime and its leader Kim Jong-un would stay in line. Last December the Chinese said they had stopped delivering coal to North Korea. If effective, it is a major inconvenience for the regime. But if China stopped oil and grain shipments, North Korea would grind to a halt and begin to starve.
But the consequences of Beijing’s political umbrella over Pyongyang are now threatening to get out of control.
North Korea has just fired four missiles from close to the Chinese border which traveled over a thousand kilometers and landed in the Sea of Japan. The tests are in breach of UN Security Council Resolutions which China, a permanent member, has backed. Pyongyang has also threatened to fire rockets at a joint US-South Korean exercise currently taking place.
The scandal-racked government in Seoul is seriously alarmed and has sharpened yet further its defensive posture. More importantly the Americans are bringing in an ultra-modern missile defense system the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). These rockets working with deep probing radar as supposed to be able to launch and destroy an incoming missile before it has even begun the descent toward its target. Washington maintains that the THAAD is now essential. The problem is that given the distances involved and the fact that one Pyongyang’s rocketry base is close to the Chinese frontier, the missile systems’ radar and rockets can reach into China.
Thus far, China’s main response has been a commercial crackdown in China on the South Korean company part of whose golf course has been taken over to site the THAAD system. But given Washington’s pushback against Beijing’s military and naval assertiveness, the Chinese leadership will be looking for further response. It has always been credited with playing the long game. But the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House with his reactive and seemingly ill-considered government by Tweet may well have frustrated its game plan, albeit temporarily.
Trump the property mogul always played hardball. The skill that attracted American voters was his art of the deal. His record business record seems to show that time and again he did not so much negotiate as surround competitors with a series of difficult options on the basis that in the end they would take the least unpleasant. And if the bargaining was not heading where he wanted, he was always prepared to walk away from the deal.
Unfortunately, this approach is facile when it comes to international politics. The new president’s acceptance of a congratulatory call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen might have seemed a good business tactic putting Beijing on notice that Washington was no longer prepared to play Mr. Nice Guy with President Xi Jinping and the communist party leadership. Pressing ahead with the THAAD system in South Korea is on the same level as President George W. Bush’s European missile defense shield, abandoned by Obama in 2010.
President Vladimir Putin famously recalled that during his days as a KGB spy the key piece of advice he was given, that he should never draw his pistol unless he was prepared to use it.
