Defense Secretary Jim Mattis departs Sunday for China at a complicated time: While the Trump administration needs Beijing’s help pressuring North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, tensions between the U.S. and China are on the rise.
President Trump is engaged in a trade war with China. The Pentagon is accusing Beijing of the wholesale theft of U.S. technology and intellectual property. And the U.S. military is no longer exercising with China’s navy.
Yet Mattis is scheduled to arrive Monday less than a week after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was again warmly received by China’s President Xi Jinping, someone Trump has said is key to convincing Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons. The Pentagon has not said if Mattis will get his own meeting with the Chinese leader, but Mattis is scheduled for three days of meetings with numerous Chinese officials, before stopping in South Korea and Japan to brief the U.S. allies about the results of the talks, before returning to Washington.
The U.S. still needs China to maintain economic pressure on Pyongyang, which Mattis said has yet to take any major steps toward “complete, irreversible, and verifiable denuclearization.”
“Obviously, it’s the very front end of a process. The detailed negotiations have not begun,” Mattis told reporters Wednesday. “I wouldn’t expect that at this point.”
Meanwhile, Trump has already declared the threat over and the problem solved.
“The big thing is it will be a total denuclearization, which has already started taking place,” Trump said at his Thursday meeting with his Cabinet.
But there is plenty to talk about, besides North Korea.
In a speech in Singapore this month, Mattis was sharply critical of Chinese military activity on islands built on top of reefs in the South China Sea, accusing Beijing of “intimidation and coercion.”
“China’s militarization of artificial features in the South China Sea includes the deployment of anti-ship missiles, surface-to-air missiles, electronic jammers, and more recently, the landing of bomber aircraft at Woody Island,” Mattis said June 2 at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue, a regional security conference.
“China’s militarization of the Spratlys is also in direct contradiction to President Xi’s 2015 public assurances in the White House Rose Garden that they would not do this.”
Mattis cited China’s expansive maritime claims and aggressive military posture as the reason he publicly disinvited the Chinese navy from participating in the Rim of the Pacific exercise, which is underway in the waters near Hawaii and California.
“China’s behavior is inconsistent with the principals and the purposes of the RIMPAC exercise, the world’s largest naval exercise, an exercise in which transparency and cooperation are hallmarks,” he said.
Mattis has made six trips to the region since he took office, but this will be his first trip to China.
It’s also the first visit since the U.S. changed the name of Pacific Command to Indo-Pacific Command and installed a new four-star commander, Adm. Philip Davidson.
At Davidson’s change-of-command ceremony, Mattis gave a subtle dig at China that may have gone over the heads of some in the audience, but surely wasn’t missed by Beijing.
“For every state, sovereignty is respected, no matter its size and it’s a region open to investment and free, fair and reciprocal trade not bound by any nation’s predatory economics or threat of coercion, for the Indo-Pacific has many belts and many roads,” said Mattis, a not-so-veiled reference to China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” a program of Chinese financial assistance designed to extend Beijing’s military and economic dominance over smaller, weaker countries.
In his Singapore speech, Mattis said his message is that “cooperation with China is welcome wherever possible,” but “make no mistake, America is in the Indo-Pacific to stay.”
