When it comes to denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and shrinking America’s trade deficit with China, President Trump is finding it increasingly difficult to have it both ways.
Administration officials have grown concerned since the president returned from his summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last month that his mounting trade war with China has influenced Beijing’s cooperation on North Korean denuclearization, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The president himself suggested as much during a tweet last week, claiming that China “may be exerting negative pressure on a [nuclear] deal because of our posture on Chinese trade.”
But as Trump readies another round of tariffs on Chinese goods worth $200 billion, some experts believe the damage has already been done. They say it will be tough for U.S. officials to continue ratcheting up the pressure on China without simultaneously jeopardizing nuclear negotiations with its neighbor.
“It certainly makes the situation a lot more complicated. The maximum pressure campaign and sanctions on North Korea that compelled them to come back to the table had a lot to do with Chinese cooperation,” Victor Cha, former director of Asian Affairs for the White House National Security Council during the Bush administration, told NPR last month.
It’s inevitable, according to Cha, that Chinese President Xi Jinping will “link what [Trump] is doing on tariffs … to Chinese cooperation on North Korea.”
Since signing a joint statement with Kim at their June 12 summit in Singapore, Trump has enacted tariffs on $37 billion worth of Chinese goods. The president and his advisers claim such aggressive actions will eventually force Beijing to end its theft of American intellectual property and agree to some version of a framework that guides Chinese trade practices. Trump has long complained that the country deliberately devalues its currency, plays by its own rules on trade, and forces American companies to transfer their technology to Chinese partners.
“China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology,” Trump said in June. “Rather than altering those practices, it is not threatening United States companies, workers, and farmers who have done nothing wrong.”
So far, Beijing has retaliated with tariffs on an equal amount of U.S. goods and rebuffed suggestions that disagreements over trade have impacted the country’s posture toward North Korea.
“China’s attitude on this issue is consistent and clear-cut,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters during a press briefing last Monday. “We will continue to play a positive role in and make constructive contributions to realizing the denuclearization of the peninsula and achieving the long-lasting peace and stability of the region.”
But there are indirect ways China can express its displeasure with the U.S. without “pulling the North Koreans back,” as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., described the situation following Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s latest visit to Pyongyang.
“Beijing is always looking to go soft on enforcing sanctions or pushing for diplomacy rather than pressure on North Korea,” said Bruce Klingner, a former senior intelligence analyst on Korea, who added that China “is not to blame for North Korea’s behavior.”
Some interpreted a series of comments about Pompeo’s trip that were subsequently published in state-run North Korean media as a turnaround in the regime’s commitment to denuclearization. According to the reports, officials in Pyongyang viewed Pompeo’s attitude as “regrettable” and the overall outcome of the most-recent high-level talks “worrisome.”
“Pompeo’s trip was very important. He needed to be able to put meat on the bones of the Singapore communicae, which was not as strong or encompassing as previous agreements” between U.S. administrations and North Korea, Klingner said. “He needed to make some headway in getting North Korea to publicly and unequivocally embrace the Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible Dismantlement (CVID) concept.”
“And as we saw with the very strong rebuke after Pompeo left, that was clearly not the case,” Klingner added.
Graham, who has often advocated for a harder line on China than many of his Republican colleagues, told Fox News he saw “China’s hands all over” the apparent about-face by North Korea.
“When it encounters obstacles to its aspirations of dominance, China uses all levers of power to get its way — and that’s likely how, over the weekend, a Beijing client state, North Korea, delighted Pompeo’s critics by doing a 180 on its polite-host act and stopped pretending it’s committed to true denuclearization,” New York Post columnist Benny Avni wrote on Tuesday in a follow-up to Graham’s comments.
Klingner described such claims as an oversimplified assessment of the relationship between China and North Korea, and one that assumes Kim did intend to surrender his nuclear weapons program despite years of contrary actions by the isolated regime. The latest round of tariffs likely decreases China’s willingness to enforce United Nations sanctions against Pyongyang, but that doesn’t support the idea of a strong cause-effect relationship between actions on trade and Trump’s North Korea strategy, he said.
“It might seem superficially that China is pulling the string on North Korea, but that is not the way the situation really is,” Klingner said, suggesting the people drawing that conclusion may be “trying to shift blame for the lack of progress [on denuclearization] to an outside entity.”
Pompeo, however, gave assurances last week that Kim is still committed to dismantling his nuclear weapons program and allowing the international community use various methods to verify its destruction. Meanwhile, Kim sent a strong signal of thawed relations with Beijing in a visit to agricultural and construction sites at the Chinese border on Tuesday.
“China-North Korea relations are not a substitute for U.S.-North Korea relations,” Won Hye-young, a South Korean official told reporters when asked about Kim’s trip. “Survival of the Kim regime sits at the core of the denuclearization issue and thus, fundamentally, it is the U.S. and North Korea that must negotiate at the end of the day.”
