North Korea: Let China Pay the Bill

Once again, North Korea is in the news with a fresh provocation to its South Korean neighbor and the region. This time Pyongyang has fired salvos of artillery rounds onto South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island, killing two South Korean soldiers and wounding several others. Last, March a North Korean torpedo sank a South Korean warship causing the death of 46 of its crewmembers. Just days ago, the North Koreans revealed to the world their secret uranium enrichment capabilities, sowing consternation in Soul, Tokyo, and Washington. These threats to peace follow a long line saber-rattling outburst and aggressive actions dating back to the early 1990s.

The response from the United States and its allies in East Asia has been unthreatening, predictable, and even conciliatory to the rogue regime over the past two decades. Despite its near-death economy, hollow conventional military, and lack of an alliance system, North Korea enjoys one ace in the hole–its patronage from China. Beijing not only provides food and fuel to its backward client but also benefits from sweetheart deals for the North’s abundant coal deposits and other mineral wealth. The People’s Republic of China, in return, shields its warlike protégé from the full force of United Nations sanctions and Security Council censure. Beijing takes shelter in the subterfuge that it only wants to preserve North Korean stability, lest instability result in massive waves of refugees flocking into China. Should the North collapse the most of its population would actually flood South Korea. They would pour across the Demilitarized Zone, which has been breached by transportation links connecting the two Korean states for years. So long as the Chinese communist government support its wayward fellow quasi-Marxist regime in Pyongyang, North Korea remains safe from a destabilize military counter-response from the Republic of Korea or the United States.

America’s only realistic reply to North Korea’s nuclear-arming and peace-disturbing attacks is action from China. The road to stability on the KoreanPeninsula runs through Beijing. Sino-American relations, however, are worse now than in many years. Washington’s recent arms packages to Taiwan, which the PRC considers a province, have angered Beijing. The Sino-American reoccurring spats of charges and counter-charges of currency manipulation further complicate constructive relations to rein in North Korea. Finally, the economic and military rise of China of late put Beijing in unreceptive frame of mind to Washington’s beseeching it to help clamp down on Pyongyang’s rhetorical bluster and bellicose swagger. The Obama administration finds itself between a rock and a hard place toward North Korea’s latest antics.

At the least, the White House needs to move toward genuine deterrence by beefing up U.S. naval and air power in the region, to make China pay in the court of world opinion for its despicable support of the repressive and corrupt dictatorship in Pyongyang, and to take off the table any more arms control deals bought by American concessions to the North Koreans. The United States also should re-list North Korea back on the State Department’s roster of terrorist states. The George W. Bush administration took North Korea off the list in a mistaken belief in the Pyongyang’s commitment to de-nuclearization. It should also press South Korea to close down its economic development projects in the North and to suspend all food aid to the North. If China wants a belligerent satellite, then let Beijing pay the entire bill.