China’s new stance on North Korea is key

The US envoy to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, has described the new set of sanctions with which North Korea is being punished for pursuing its nuclear weapons programme as “the most stringent… on any country in a generation”. That is important. But the real game changer in the protracted dispute between the paranoid dictatorship in Pyongyang and the outside world is the shifting position of China.

For too long, the world’s emerging superpower has preferred to ignore or play down the outrageous, destabilising behaviour of North Korea’s despotic regime. But in recent months the calculation in Beijing has begun to change. Where before the costs of intervening seemed too great – potentially causing a flood of refugees into China in the short term, and a unified and powerful regional rival in the long – now it is the price of doing nothing that seems highest.

The reality has struck home in China that North Korea really is single-mindedly focused on developing a nuclear warhead that it can reliably fire at targets as far away as Los Angeles or London. That puts China at the centre of the world’s greatest security dilemma, which can only be peacefully resolved by Beijing putting its considerable influence to work.

On every level – economic, diplomatic, political, military – there can be no long-term de-escalation of this crisis without China. So it is vital that China’s foreign minister has now effectively instructed his North Korean counterpart to stop nuclear tests and missile launches. Doing so places China unambiguously in the constellation of nations trying to rein in Kim’s regime. No more sitting on the fence. And nor should there be, for if China wants to be regarded as a global power – as it surely does – then it must assume a degree of global responsibility.

For ensuring that it does so, some tangential credit must be laid at the door of Donald Trump, whose behaviour and outbursts have combined to exacerbate the uncertainty currently swirling around North Korea. Whether witting or unwitting, this strategy seems to have helped prod China into the reaction for which the international community has long been looking.

Beijing said that the new sanctions regime signalled both a “crisis point” and also, importantly, a potential “turning point for returning to negotiations”. This is because, while China is certainly key to keeping an unrepentant North Korea securely in the cold, China is also the only certain way of bringing a future – reformed – North Korea back into the global fold.