Chinese President Xi Jinping would like to preserve “a nuclear North Korea” as “a perpetual threat” to the U.S., a leading House Republican warned Wednesday.
“An indefinite standoff between the United States and a nuclear North Korea is in China’s strategic interest,” Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., said at the outset of a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing on the North Korean crisis. “[Xi] certainly wouldn’t mind wiping out the progress that we’ve made, turning back the clock a year or two, and maintaining control over a perpetual threat to the United States that he can modulate through economic leverage.”
Yoho, who chairs the Asia-Pacific subcommittee, allowed that President Trump’s recent summit with Kim is both “a tremendous propaganda win” for North Korea and yet also “a tremendous opportunity” to resolve a decades-long impasse. But he also expressed worry, along with Democratic lawmakers, that Trump made unilateral concessions to Kim that play into China’s hands.
“While North Korea agreed to nothing new, the United States took the unprecedented step to indefinitely suspending our joint military exercises with our ally of the Republic of Korea,” Yoho said. “There’s been widespread disappointment, regardless of party or affiliation, that the United States would make these concessions when North Korea’s only track record is for cheating and double-dealing. Importantly, nothing would make China and Russia happier than for the United States voluntarily to scale back our strategic capabilities in Northeast Asia.”
Yoho and Calif. Rep. Brad Sherman, the top Democrat on the subcommittee, worried that the events of the summit will hamper Trump’s ability to maintain — much less increase — sanctions pressure on the regime.
“We’re not going to be sanctioning more; we’re going to be sanctioning less,” Sherman said. “We’re not going to be making it hard for Kim to breathe, we’re going to be letting our foot off his neck.”
That joint criticism frustrated Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif. “This president has made more progress towards bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula than any other president, any other American leader, in our lifetime,” he said. “We should be proud of him and it should be unacceptable that this unrelenting hostility and negativity — to the point that foreigners look at us and believe that the Democratic party is trying to wish that our president didn’t succeed in this peace effort — that’s how loud, and aggressive, and unacceptable that criticism has been.”
Yoho gave Trump some credit on that front, but not nearly as much as his GOP colleague might have liked.
“Regardless of how these talks resolve, we can all be grateful that we’re further from conflict than we were at the end of last year and I would guess two months ago,” the subcommittee chairman said. “Simply holding a summit is not an accomplishment, by itself. The administration has taken an important first step, but much work needs to be done.”
