The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Beijing is not scrapping ‘freeze-for-freeze’ plan
China contradicts Trump suggestion on Korean tensions.
BEIJING— China said Thursday it will stick by its “freeze-for-freeze” plan to de-escalate tensions in the Korean Peninsula, contradicting a suggestion by President Donald Trump that it had turned against it.
The proposal calls for North Korea to freeze its missile and nuclear tests in return for the United States and South Korea suspending their annual joint military exercises.
On Wednesday, Trump suggested Chinese President Xi J in ping had acknowledged to him that the plan was a nonstarter.
The apparent Chinese contradiction of Trump’s statement also highlights the lack of coherent policy put forward by the United States to actually usher North Korea along the path of denuclearization.
“President Xi recognizes that a nuclear North Korea is a grave threat to China, and we agreed that we would not accept a so-called ‘freeze for freeze’ agreement like those that have consistently failed in the past,” Trump said on Wednesday in a briefing on his just-concluded trip to Asia.
But a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry said Beijing insisted that dialogue was the only solution, and that its proposal was still on the table.
“Suspension-for-suspension is the most realistic, viable and reasonable solution in the current situation,” Geng Shuang told a regular news conference.
“I stress that it’s only the first step, not the end.”
The plan has been rejected by Washington for a number of reasons, experts said: partly because it would undermine South Korea’s defenses at a time when the threat is higher than ever, and potentially spook a key ally, partly because a similar idea was tried in the early 1990s and failed, and partly because it implies some kind of moral equivalence between the actions of the United States and those of North Korea.
The proposal also lets China off the hook, and plays into its attempts to portray the issue as solely a problem between headstrong governments in Washington and Pyongyang.
Experts say the risks of backtracking are also asymmetrical: the United States might cancel its annual military exercises, but if North Korea reneged on its side of the deal in subsequent weeks or months, those exercises would be very hard to reschedule.
China is the main eco- nomic backer of the North Korean regime, accounting for more than 80 percent of its official foreign trade.
It says it is strictly implementing sanctions agreed by the United Nations Security Council, but experts say it is unwilling to go further, because it refuses to take action that might destabilize or bring down the regime, or simply turn a nuclear-armed Pyongyang into an enemy of Beijing.
In his comments Wednesday, Trump also claimed his Asia trip had forged new unity over the issue of North Korea’s denuclearization, and said Xi had agreed “to use his great economic influence over the regime to achieve our common goal of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.”
James Acton, co-director, nuclear policy program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Trump administration deserved credit for raising the profile and urgency of the issue, and for pushing China to impose stricter sanctions than in the past.