China Looms Over Response to Nuclear Test by North Korea
Kyodo News, via Associated Press
A TV news report in Tokyo showing the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, after the country’s third nuclear test.
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR and JANE PERLEZ
Published: February 12, 2013 413 Comments
UNITED NATIONS — At the United Nations, the desire to impose ever harsher sanctions on North Korea to try to curb its development of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles has long stalled in the face of Chinese opposition — the standard chain of events playing out here again on Tuesday after North Korea said it had carried out its third nuclear test.
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A Secretive Country Gives Experts Few Clues to Judge Its Nuclear Program (February 13, 2013)
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Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press
South Korean soldiers during an exercise near the border.
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Security Council diplomats and the experts who track sanctions enforcement are quick to tick off the contents of a deeper toolbox that could be used to try to corral Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions.
They include banning specific, high-tech items used in the nuclear program, like epoxy paste for centrifuges; limiting or outlawing some banking transactions; and a far more stringent inspection of ships bound to and from North Korea.
But the sanctions in place are almost exclusively focused on nuclear and ballistic missile activity.
“If we had the kind of product listing and focus on financial flows and interdiction on North Korea that we placed on Iran, we would not be in this spot,” said George Lopez, a professor at Notre Dame and a former member of the United Nations panel of experts charged with monitoring sanctions compliance.
The problem has always been what China will bear in terms of restricting its protégé and neighbor, as well as whether it will cut back fuel shipments and other trade with North Korea.
“Moving forward, China really holds the key to what extent the actions will be different this time,” said Suzanne DiMaggio, an expert at the Asia Society.
The signs are hard to read.
China will almost certainly join the United States in supporting tougher sanctions over Tuesday’s test, accompanied by sterner reprimands from Beijing against its recalcitrant ally in Pyongyang, which ignored Chinese entreaties not to take provocative actions.
But as impatient as China might be with North Korea, there is little chance that the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, will move quickly to change the nation’s long-held policy of propping up the walled-off government that has long served as a buffer against closer intrusion by the United States on the Korean Peninsula.
The Chinese military, and to a lesser extent the International Liaison Department of the Chinese Communist Party, assert strong influence on China’s Korea policy, and both powerful entities prefer to keep North Korea close at hand, Chinese and American analysts say.
While the People’s Liberation Army is not even able to conduct military exercises with the North Koreans — the government in the North forbids such contact with outsiders — Chinese military strategists adhere to the doctrine that they cannot afford to abandon their ally, no matter how bad its behavior, analysts here say.
At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party looks upon the North Korean Communist Party — led by Kim Jong-un, the grandson of the nation’s founder — as a fraternal brotherhood. Indeed, relations between the two countries are conducted largely between the two parties rather than between the two foreign ministries, the more normal diplomatic channel.
In an early sign that Mr. Xi is unlikely to veer from past policy, the state-run news agency, Xinhua, criticized the United States and its allies for essentially forcing the North’s aggression by causing the country to feel insecure.
But within this basic contour there could be some adjustments by Mr. Xi, according to Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Peking University, an advocate of a tougher policy by China against North Korea.
“One nuclear test will not make China’s new administration decide to ‘abandon North Korea,’ but it will definitely worsen China-North Korea relations,” Professor Zhu wrote in a recent article in The Straits Times of Singapore. “North Korea’s nuclear test will make the new Xi Jinping administration angry, and give China a headache.”
Mr. Xi, who became head of the Communist Party and military council in November, will ascend to the presidency of the country next month.
To improve China’s strained relationship with the United States, Mr. Xi — who has shown himself to be more nationalistic than his predecessor — could start with getting tougher on North Korea, including at the Security Council.
The Obama administration excoriated Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, after North Korea’s second nuclear test in 2009, accusing him of “willful blindness” to that country’s actions.
“With Hu out of the picture, the administration is intent on determining whether Xi Jinping will prove more attentive to U.S. security concerns,” said Jonathan D. Pollack, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution.
“How Xi chooses to respond will be an important early signal of his foreign policy priorities and whether he is ready to cooperate much more openly and fully with Washington and Seoul than his predecessor,” he said, referring to South Korea.
China’s calculations will be crucial to what happens at the Security Council, where the policy has always been to pursue unanimity over toughness; it is considered far better to get all members on board to send a message to North Korea rather than have China abstain or worse, veto.
In the absence of any real leverage, Washington and its allies are left warning Beijing that if it does not keep North Korea out of the nuclear club, it risks an arms race in its own neighborhood.
President Obama spoke Tuesday morning, hours after the test, with South Korea’s outgoing president, Lee Myung-bak, in what the White House described as an effort to agree on a common strategy at the Security Council and in the two country’s military posture on the Korean Peninsula, where troops have faced off against the North since the armistice was signed 60 years ago.
A statement issued by the White House after the conversation included a rare reference to American’s “nuclear umbrella” over South Korea, a reminder to the North that an attack on South Korea would be viewed as an attack on the United States. While that has been true for decades, it is rarely highlighted in American statements.
“Threatening a missile-capable warhead with a successful third nuclear test gives the United States, South Korea and Japan good reason to step up their regional ballistic missile defense capabilities,” said Siegfried S. Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. “That should give the Chinese government some pause.”
The United States faces its own geopolitical calculations. Some experts say it needs to keep up the tough talk, even if it understands that its efforts at the Security Council may not do much to limit the North’s capabilities. Even the strongest sanctions and increasing isolation have not caused the North to back off its nuclear program, which the leadership sees as both a deterrent to possible American aggression, and which gives the impoverished country’s governing elite a success it can show its suffering people.
Now experts say the North may be simply trying to wait the United States out, hoping it will eventually recognize its program as it did Pakistan’s. But experts say Mr. Obama cannot recognize North Korea as the nuclear state it increasingly is without giving signals to Iran — which the West believes is pursuing a nuclear weapon despite its denials — that it could try the same path.
As the world’s powers struggle to refine their policies, North Korea continues to make technological advances. A long-range rocket test in December has been judged by outside experts to have been a success after many failures.
And Tuesday’s test, if it was as large as originally thought, appears to suggest that the nuclear arms program is also moving ahead. (The first test in 2006 was considered a partial failure.)
“It moves the question of North Korea as a nuclear contender from ‘if’ to ‘when,’ ” said one senior Obama administration official. “The ‘when’ may still be years away, but at least now it is in sight.”
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