Is China Taking Away Kim Jong-un’s Nuclear Option?

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The innocuous-sounding Global Times is basically the id of the Chinese Communist party. A stridently nationalist tabloid newspaper with a flair for Breitbartian excess, the CCP-owned Times has, in recent weeks alone, referred to Australia as an “offshore prison,” warned of a “large-sale war” should the U.S. block China’s illegal expansion in the South China Sea, and written scathingly of the “Dalai Lama clique.” And now the newspaper’s editorialists have set their sights on an unusual target: North Korea.

In a staff editorial published Wednesday, the Global Times warns Pyongyang against conducting a widely predicted sixth nuclear test. (Experts suggest a detonation will likely come this month.) Citing a Trump administration “brimming with confidence and arrogance following the missile attacks on Syria,” the GT cautions the North Korean regime that a nuclear test will only anger a U.S. president who is “willing to be regarded as a man who honors his promises.”

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