On Wednesday, President Donald Trump issued a statement via his Twitter account that acknowledged what many predicted would happen. The president, he tweeted,
The outcome the president complains about—that China is circumventing the sanctions—was easily foreseeable. “China and Russia will almost certainly use the U.S.-North Korean rapprochement as an excuse to circumvent sanctions on Pyongyang even more flagrantly than they already do,” we wrote in mid-June after the Trump-Kim summit.
Trump’s statement is internally contradictory and diplomatically nonsensical. North Korea is “under tremendous pressure from China” but China is circumventing sanctions to provide “money, fuel, fertilizer and various other commodities?” What? The truth is closer to what Trump said just a week ago in announcing that he was cancelling the just-announced trip to Pyongyang of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Trump tweeted: “because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were (despite the UN Sanctions which are in place).”
As Trump has ramped up his trade war with China, Xi has been less helpful on North Korea. And since China accounts for almost 90 percent of North Korea’s trade, there’s the problem.
It’s hardly surprising that China would react to Trump’s increasing trade hostility by causing trouble in North Korea. At one point, Trump himself seemed to understand the incentives. “I explained to the President of China that a trade deal with the U.S. will be far better for them if they solve the North Korean problem!” he tweeted in April 2017.
But here we are. With more belligerence and intransigence from North Korea and mischief-making from China, what does the president propose to solve the North Korean nuclear problem that he’d declared solved nearly three months ago? A preemptive concession—ending joint U.S.-South Korean war exercises, as both the Chinese and North Koreans have long wanted.
What the president seems not to grasp is that the joint exercises were a form of sanction. Pyongyang calls them “provocative,” and Trump repeated the claim when he agreed to stop them. But their purpose wasn’t merely to provoke. Their purpose was to force the North Korean regime to spend resources it didn’t have: The North matched the U.S.-South Korean exercises with military drills of their own, a destitute nation spending money on jet fuel and precious ammunition.
Trump says he halted the exercises, though, because they were “tremendously expensive” for the United States, not for the DPRK. This makes no sense either. If the exercises were too expensive, why would we reimpose them in a “far bigger” and more expensive way?
Whatever his reasons, we’re encouraged to see the president publicly shaming the Chinese for propping up Kim’s dictatorship—albeit with a lot silly rhetoric about warm relationships and the greatness of Xi.
The truth about North Korea hasn’t changed. Kim Jong-un is a calculating psychopath and his regime bases its power on extortion and murder. He has no plans to give up his nuclear weapons; indeed there is evidence that Pyongyang has already begun concealing components of its nuclear program in order to deceive future inspectors. As long as the Kim crime family remains in power, “denuclearization” in any meaningful sense is a fantasy. The only responsible policy is to reimpose joint military exercises, sanction the entities trading with the North Koreans—whether Chinese, Russian, or Iranian—and otherwise to hasten the collapse of the world’s most odious regime.
