President Trump’s decision Thursday to walk away from denuclearization talks with North Korea could result in the president tightening his demands with China during their upcoming trade talks. The president needs China’s help to force North Korea to make a deal, but if those talks remain stalled then the president can afford to get tougher on trade with Beijing, experts note.
“North Korea has mattered on China trade,” said Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The president says, ‘You know, if they help me on North Korea, I’ll cut them some slack on trade.’ I think that he’s still happy with them on Korea … but if that shifted, the deal would be in trouble.”
Scissors was paraphrasing Trump, but the characterization is pretty close.
“We have tremendous trade deficits with everybody, but the big one is with China. … And I told them, ‘You want to make a great deal?’ Solve the problem in North Korea,” the president said in a 2017 Wall Street Journal interview. “That’s worth having deficits. And that’s worth having not as good a trade deal as I would normally be able to make.”
The president has said his trade policies with China are the reason why Pyonyang has been willing to talk at all. “President Donald J. Trump feels strongly that North Korea is under tremendous pressure from China because of our major trade disputes with the Chinese Government,” he said in an August tweet.
On Thursday Trump praised China as a “big help” on Korea, even as he abruptly cut short a trip to Vietnam to talk to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. “Sometimes you have to walk. And this was just one of those times,” Trump told reporters.
Dimitar Gueorguiev, assistant professor of political science at Syracuse University, said that the efforts to get a trade deal with China may have unintentionally harmed the North Korea talks. Beijing has “enormous” leverage over Pyongyang, Gueorguiev noted, but has to be cajoled into using it. The president, eager for a trade deal, announced Sunday that he’d hold off on scheduled tariff increases on $200 billion in Chinese goods. That eliminated a tool the president had to put pressure on China.
“The Trump administration, more so than any previous administration, has been willing to link security and economic issues. You could make the argument that going too quick on the trade negotiations reduced the leverage on the North Korea negotiations,” Gueorguiev said.
Trump is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping sometime in March to discuss trade, after relenting on the previous March 1 deadline for China to accede to U.S. demands or face higher tariffs.
The president’s decision to halt the North Korea talks Thursday also shows that he is willing to walk away from a bad deal, said Gary Hufbauer, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“The signal there is, Trump will walk up to the line, and if he is not happy with it, he’ll walk right back,” he said. “I think that is meant to be a signal to China as well as North Korea.”
