China has, in fact, proposed a plan for solving the North Korea problem. As part of an approach that it calls “suspension for suspension,” the Chinese government has offered to broker a deal in which North Korea suspends its rapidly advancing nuclear and missile programs in exchange for the United States suspending its regular military exercises with South Korea, as a prelude to negotiations to eventually rid the North of nuclear weapons. [...]
Whereas U.S. officials want North Korea to renounce nuclear weapons—or at least take steps toward “denuclearization”—as a precondition for talks, Chinese officials consider denuclearization an end goal of negotiations, not a starting point. Whereas U.S. officials see North Korean militancy as the sole threat to security on the Korean peninsula, Chinese officials perceive North Korean and American provocations as twin threats—“two accelerating trains coming toward each other” and refusing “to give way,” in the words of China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi. Whereas U.S. officials identify China as the central actor in the peninsular drama, holding the fate of North Korea in its hands, Chinese officials place their country just off-stage, merely directing feuding parties toward peace. While U.S. officials experiment with ways to exert pressure on North Korea, Chinese officials seek out pressure-relief valves. U.S. officials worry that nuclear negotiations with North Korea, which have backfired in the past, are a trap; Chinese officials claim dialogue is the only way out of the crisis. (Chinese embassy officials declined to comment on the record for this story.) [...]
The main form of pressure under discussion is economic. Trump’s Treasury Department recently imposed sanctions on a Chinese bank for allegedly laundering money for North Korea, and the administration is mulling further “secondary sanctions” on Chinese companies that do business with the North Korean government. It has also floated a range of punitive trade policies, from a tariff on steel imports to retaliation against Chinese intellectual-property violations. U.S. officials have long avoided such actions out of concern that punishing China would make it less cooperative, not more, on North Korea. But Anthony Ruggiero, a sanctions expert and former Treasury Department official, argues that this analysis misses the way that targeted financial measures work. Beyond drying up funding for North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, he has written, economic penalties could, for instance, “drive a wedge between Chinese banks that covet their access to the U.S. financial system and Chinese leaders who indulge North Korea. If the banks fear they will be the next target of U.S. sanctions, they will pressure political leaders to change course.” (There’s recent precedent for this: The U.S. sanctions campaign to contain the Iranian nuclear program coerced China into reducing its trade and financial ties with Iran.) [...]
Even if Trump were to go all in on pressuring China, it’s far from clear that doing so would achieve the desired result: the dismantling of North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program. That’s in part because of an additional disconnect in how China and America assess and rank the threats posed by North Korea. As Jennifer Lind of Dartmouth College has pointed out, North Korea is presently a national-security priority for U.S. officials because Kim Jong Un is building missiles that could carry a nuclear device to the United States, but Chinese officials don’t share that sense of urgency. North Korea has possessed nuclear weapons and shorter-range missiles that can hit China for years now. And while China opposes North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, its top security concern with regard to North Korea is something different: the collapse of Kim Jong Un’s government creating chaos in the North, which in turn could produce a refugee crisis, loose nukes, and an opportunity for the U.S. military presence in the region to expand right up to China’s borders. The Chinese government is therefore unlikely to crack down on North Korea to the extent the Trump administration wants, no matter how much pressure the United States applies, since that could lead to Kim’s downfall. Why would the Chinese fulfill America’s dreams only to usher in China’s nightmares?
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