N. Korea gets wish as neighbors sidelined
China, S. Korea largely impotent as peacemakers in escalating feud
SEOUL, South Korea — Over the years, as North Korea raced to build a nuclear arsenal, the world often has turned to its neighbors for help: China, because of its economic leverage over the North, and South Korea, because it would suffer the most in any military confrontation.
Now, with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, engaged in a dangerous war of words with President Donald Trump, China and South Korea have been left squirming on the sidelines, with Kim having been essentially granted his wish: dealing directly with the United States, which Pyongyang believes has the most to give.
To the North Koreans, the United States can offer a peace treaty, diplomatic recognition, the easing of decades-old sanctions and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea, which Pyongyang considers its existential threat.
When Trump threatened on Tuesday to “totally destroy” North Korea, it gave Kim a perfect chance to square off directly against the United States, said South Korean intelligence officials and analysts who study Kim’s motives. In an unprecedented personal statement Friday, Kim called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and the North Korean foreign minister raised the prospect of exploding a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific.
To back up such talk, Kim probably will carry out more weapons tests, analysts said.
Tensions ‘escalating’
Further raising jitters Saturday was a tremor detected near North Korea’s underground nuclear-testing site. It raised fears of another detonation, but South Korea’s meteorological administration said it appeared to have been a natural earthquake.
“We now can’t avoid the military tensions on the Korean Peninsula further escalating,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a North Korea expert at the Sejong Institute, a research think tank outside the South Korean capital, Seoul. “Part of the reason that the standoff between North Korea and the United States is intensifying is that South Korea lacks capabilities to confront North Korea while the North ignores the South and insists on dealing only with the United States.”
As the crisis spiraled over the last few days, China found itself a bystander — an uncomfortable role for President Xi Jinping, who was most likely seething about Kim and about the North Korean government’s criticism of China’s most vaunted institution, the Communist Party, as its leadership prepares to meet, analysts said.
The quiet in Beijing illustrated China’s almost complete lack of influence in controlling its estranged ally and its unsuccessful efforts to persuade Trump to tamp down his language, they said.
Fearful of failure
On Saturday, China said it would ban exports of some petroleum products to North Korea, as well as imports of textiles from its neighbor, to comply with new sanctions by the U.N. Security Council. China’s support of the new sanctions was largely a nod to Trump and would not be sufficient to bring the North Korean economy to its knees and force it to the negotiating table, Chinese experts said.
Fearful of failing and of losing face in a peacemaking role, Xi would be reluctant to make any further diplomatic or strategic moves before the party congress opens in Beijing on Oct. 18, analysts said.
“I think China’s diplomatic leverage over North Korea is zero,” said Feng Zhang, a fellow at the Australian National University’s department of international relations. “North Korea doesn’t want to see Chinese envoys and is not interested in Chinese views.”
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea also has found his room for diplomacy shrinking, as North Korea and the United States locked themselves in what he called an escalating “vicious cycle” of provocations and sanctions.
North Korea has not even bothered to respond to Moon’s calls for dialogue as it accelerates its missile and nuclear tests. When he came to power in May, Moon found little leverage left over North Korea: Under his conservative predecessors, South Korea had cut off all trade ties and pulled out all investments in North Korea.
Meanwhile Trump has said “talking is not the answer” and ridiculed South Korea for “talk of appeasement.”
In response to what it called the North’s “reckless behavior,” the Pentagon said on Saturday that the Air Force had sent B1 bombers and F-15 fighters over waters north of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. It was the furthest north “any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft have flown off North Korea’s coast in the 21st century,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
Despite the tightening sanctions, Pyongyang is unlikely to stop weapons tests until it believes it has enough leverage to enter talks as an equal with Washington, some South Korean officials and analysts say. It will reach that point when it has secured a capability to deliver a nuclear payload to the mainland United States, they added.