>China ‘accepts nuclear North Korea and thinks US must do so too’<

Donald Trump’s frustration with China was clear. After his recent Asia tour, the American president claimed that his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, had pledged to use Beijing’s economic might to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programme.

A two-month pause in Pyongyang’s missile tests fuelled hope in Washington. But then came last week’s launch of the North’s biggest and most advanced missile.

“The Chinese envoy who has just returned from North Korea seems to have had no impact on Little Rocket Man,” Trump tweeted, deploying his favourite insult for Kim.

For now, at least, there seems no prospect that Beijing will cut off oil supplies to the North — probably the only sanction that would truly reduce the secretive state to its knees. Why?

Xi does not like Kim, whom he considers arrogant and disrespectful. Nor is China happy about North Korea’s acquisition of the atomic bomb, which brings the threat of war to its backyard and could end up with the return of US tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea and, worst of all in Beijing’s eyes, the emergence of a nuclear Japan.

Those Chinese concerns raised hopes in the US that Beijing would exert its political and commercial influence to rein in its truculent ally — and to switch off the lights in the North if it did not comply. But that perspective misses a key point, said Tong Zhao, a Beijing-based expert on the North’s nuclear programme. “Beijing and Washington have fundamentally different interpretations of the threat and intent behind North Korea’s weapons programme. That means they have a very different strategy to handle it.”

North Korea has made clear that it regards the development of nuclear weapons capable of striking the US as guaranteeing political survival — and therefore sees it as a priority above even the economy.

Kim’s dash for the bomb is shaped by his obsession with the demise of two Arab dictators. In December 2003, Saddam Hussein was dragged from his hiding place in Iraq after his regime had been crushed by a US-led invasion and his boasts about its weapons programme turned out to be false.

Just six days later Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, Libya’s leader, struck a deal with the West to relinquish his weapons of mass destruction.

During the Arab Spring eight years later Gadaffi was overthrown after US airstrikes backed rebel forces. After two months in hiding, he was captured, butchered with a knife and shot dead.

“You cannot overestimate the importance of those events to Kim’s psyche,” said a western diplomat recently posted to Pyongyang. “He is convinced that Saddam and Gadaffi suffered their fates because they did not have WMD to defend themselves. From his perspective, he is not going to make the same mistake. So he is determined to build a nuclear arsenal. And he will never negotiate it away.”

Kim is ruthless, morally repugnant and often reckless, but Beijing is convinced that he is not the madman of some caricatures. Nor does it think that he has a death wish. And so, despite Pyongyang’s bellicose threats against the US, China does not believe the North would deploy a “first use” strike. For such an attack would guarantee annihilation by the US of the regime that nuclear weapons are supposed to protect.

Indeed, while Beijing is not happy about a nuclear North Korea, it is, for now, more fearful of risking the collapse of the North if China severed all economic ties.

China is certainly alarmed by the prospect of millions of North Korean refugees flooding across its border, although that would ultimately be an economic burden that it could handle. More importantly, it does not want to lose one of the world’s last remaining communist states — and an ally, however badly behaved and unpredictable — and see the Korean peninsula united under a democratic government backed by the US. That would bring the spectre of American troops and military hardware stationed at China’s border.

Weapons analysts and US and South Korean intelligence believe that the North is fast closing in on the final, crucial technological breakthrough — fitting a long-range missile with a nuclear warhead that is small and robust enough to survive the extreme stresses of atmospheric re-entry.

In the wake of last week’s test, Beijing will probably agree to stiffer sanctions, perhaps even sending home all North Koreans working in China, severing another source of much-needed hard currency for Pyongyang.

But the nationalist Global Times newspaper, which often reflects senior Chinese party views, was scornful of the impact of such measures.

“The leverage exerted by the international community on North Korea is almost exhausted,” it wrote. “Now Pyongyang is extremely confident. Condemnation by the UN security council and possible new sanction measures are equal to a few more grains of dust on its body, or a few more drops of rain.”

The North’s breakthroughs in its weapons programme are believed to have been bolstered by engine technology acquired via Russia or Ukraine and know-how smuggled from other overseas players. High-level meetings between Iranian and North Korean officials have prompted concern that the American enemies are co-operating on their military and missile development.

Such collusion could be a precursor to the North selling its nuclear capability to Tehran or terrorist organisations, especially as deepening sanctions bite, US defence hawks believe.

Beijing appears blasé about such proliferation fears, however. Tong said China believes that once the North becomes a fully fledged member of the nuclear club, it will not endanger that status by inviting international retaliation for sharing nuclear know-how.

What does alarm Beijing is the insistence by Trump and his national security advisers that a military option for trying to destroy the North’s nuclear project is on the table. “Chinese concern about military conflict is certainly rising, but they also believe that Trump is indulging in brinkmanship and psychological warfare, making these threats to up the pressure on Pyongyang and to push China to do more,” said Tong, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Centre for Global Policy in Beijing.

Beijing doubts that the US would launch a military action that would be certain to result in mass casualties across the Korean peninsula and possibly Japan. But the danger of brinkmanship, of course, is that it could tip over the brink. “The scope for misunderstanding and misjudgment is growing,” Tong added.

Meanwhile, China continues to tout its own preferred “freeze for freeze” solution to the crisis. It is urging the US to suspend its frequent military exercises with South Korea and Japan — viewed in Pyongyang as preparations for invasion — in return for the North suspending its nuclear programme.

That proposal has garnered no interest in Washington or Pyongyang. But Beijing believes those attitudes will change if North Korea does secure its holy grail — a nuclear weapon that can strike the US.

“The Chinese leadership believes we have passed the point where military force can stop the North Korea acquiring nuclear capability,” said Tong. “And there is a belief in Beijing that the US will have to accept that reality, too.”

Bron: The Sunday Times 3/12/2017 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...o-too-qw59p5v2t

Eigen mening: Ik ben het eens met het idee van de Chineese president Xi Jinping. Laat Noord-Korea met rust om conflict te vermijden. Volgens mij wilt Kim Jung Un zijn nucleaire macht enkel defensief gebruiken. Hij wilt niet onderdoen aan de andere grootmachten zodat hij zelf ook iets te zeggen heeft in de wereld. Maar hem zomaar zijn arsenaal uit te laten bouwen lijkt ook niet een aangenaam idee. Daarom keur ik ook alle provocaties die uit het Amerikaanse Witte Huis komen zeker af. Deze lokken enkel een grotere drang naar een uitgebreider nucleair arsenaal uit bij Kim Jung Un. Ook lijkt het geen goed idee om globaal Noord-Korea economisch te straffen. Wij zal daar onder lijden? Kim Jung Un niet echt veel, maar zijn al vrij arm volk wel. En dit volk is op zich zo onschuldig als een doorsnee burger uit welk land dan ook.

Als men een plan zoekt om Kim van zijn nucleaire gedachten af te brengen moet dit dus niet door economisch te sanctioneren gebeuren. Uitgaande van mijn gevoel lijkt het het beste om Noord-Korea te vriend te houden. Hierdoor verlaagt men al sterk de kans op een nucleaire ramp. Hoe ze dit het beste doen weet ik niet. Maar het zou al zeker helpen moest men de Amerikaanse president zijn Twitter stilleggen.