DPRK: China Loves Me, China Loves Me Not
Two recent blog posts by John Pomfret over at the Washington Post got me thinking about how much more complicated China’s position on North Korea has become since the beginning of the Obama Administration.
As Pomfret points out in his May 27 post, for many years the U.S. has been waiting for China to solve the North Korea problem without realizing that our goals are not aligned.
First, there’s a silly assumption in Washington that our interests (no nukes in North Korea) are the same as China’s. But they’re not. China’s first interest in North Korea is making sure the Kim regime doesn’t collapse. China’s second interest? Making sure the Kim regime doesn’t collapse. From Beijing’s perspective, nukes in North Korea rank somewhere around 10th.
Pomfret goes on to give a great explanation about why regime change is the real threat to China. At the end of the day, as long as the DPRK could be coaxed to the negotiating table, China was satisfied that it was not falling apart.
Then, a few days later, in a June 6 post, we get the following from Pomfret:
There are surprising noises coming from China these days about North Korea. One influential Chinese academic thinks China’s policy — long supportive of the hermit kingdom — might be changing.
So, what happened in less than a week? Has China finally realized that no nukes is their number one priority? Not exactly. Turns out China, as evidenced by the Zhu Feng article that Pomfret is referring to, may be realizing that the regime in Pyongyang is not interested in negotiations and doesn’t care what Beijing thinks.
If in fact this is true, the Obama Administration should get the credit for forcing this incipient shift within China. Not because of its own North Korea policy, of course. I don’t think that Obama has any more of a clue about how to change North Korea than Bush or Clinton did before him. The difference between this Administration and the previous two is a distinct disdain for drama.
Bottom line is that by not overreacting to the latest string of DPRK provocations, the Obama Administration is keeping the spotlight on North Korea where it belongs. Let’s be honest — the Bush Administration was prone to answering the North Koreans’ insanity with a little crazy talk of its own. This gave China the cover it needed to consider the problem to be a case of two unreasonable sides that needed it to play peacemaker in the middle. But when one side starts stops inciting the other, and the other reacts by increasing its irrational behavior, China starts to lose face in the process. No longer is Beijing the reasonable party standing between two unreasonable countries — suddenly it is the patron of the only country unwilling to sit down at the table.
Like I said, none of this suggests that Obama knows how to solve the DPRK problem (or for that matter the Iran problem or the Cuba problem, etc.). What it does suggest is that maybe the Administration has learned an important lesson from the last two Administrations: the first step to solving these intractable problems may be to avoid any reasonable suggestion that the source of the problem is the U.S. itself.
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