{"id":39723,"date":"2018-06-05T11:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T01:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=39723"},"modified":"2018-06-05T10:49:57","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T00:49:57","slug":"a-north-korean-opportunity-for-america-and-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/a-north-korean-opportunity-for-america-and-china\/","title":{"rendered":"A North Korean opportunity for America and China"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

It is not obvious, but North Korea could be the best thing for the relationship between the United States and China since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Whether or not that potential is realised, it is not difficult to understand why it exists.<\/p>\n

The contemporary Sino\u2013American relationship was born nearly a half-century ago on a foundation of shared concern about the threat posed to both countries by the Soviet Union. It was a textbook case of the old adage, \u2018The enemy of my enemy is my friend.\u2019<\/p>\n

Such a relationship could survive just about anything\u2014except the disappearance of the common enemy. And this is of course precisely what happened with the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the demise of the USSR at the beginning of 1992.<\/p>\n

The US\u2013China relationship, however, showed surprising resilience, finding a new rationale: economic interdependence. Americans were happy to buy vast quantities of relatively inexpensive Chinese manufactured goods, demand for which provided jobs for the tens of millions of Chinese who moved from poor agricultural areas to new or rapidly expanding cities.<\/p>\n

For its part, the United States was mesmerised by the potential for exporting to the vast Chinese market, which was hungry for the more advanced products it wanted but could not yet produce. Many in the US also believed that trade would give China an increased stake in preserving the existing international order, increasing the odds that its rise as a major power would be peaceful. The related hope was that political reform would follow economic growth. Calculations such as these led to the US\u00a0decision to support China\u2019s entry into the World Trade Organization in\u00a02001.<\/p>\n

Now, years later, the economic ties that had become the foundation of the Sino\u2013American relationship have increasingly become a source of friction that threaten it. China exports far more to the US than it imports, contributing to the disappearance of millions of American jobs, and has not opened up its market as expected or delivered on promised reforms. Moreover, China\u2019s government continues to subsidise state-owned enterprises, and either steals intellectual property or requires its transfer to Chinese partners as a condition of foreign companies\u2019 access to the domestic market.<\/p>\n

This critique of China is widely embraced by US\u00a0Republicans and Democrats alike, even if they disagree with many of the remedies proposed by the Trump administration. And the criticism is not limited to economic affairs. There is growing concern in the US about China\u2019s increasing assertiveness beyond its borders. The Belt and Road Initiative appears to be less a development program than a geoeconomic tool to expand Chinese influence. China\u2019s broad claims to the South China Sea and its creation of military bases there are viewed throughout the region as a provocation.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s domestic political development has also disappointed observers. The abolition of the presidential term limit and President\u00a0Xi Jinping\u2019s concentration of power have come as an unwelcome surprise to many. There are also concerns about the suppression of dissent (often cloaked in the guise of Xi\u2019s anti-corruption drive), the clampdown on civil society, and the repression of western China\u2019s Uyghur and Tibetan minorities. The net result is that it is now commonplace for official US\u00a0government documents to pair China with Russia and to speak of it as a strategic rival.<\/p>\n

All of which brings us back to North Korea, whose nuclear weapons and long-range missiles are viewed by China as a genuine threat\u2014not to itself, but to its regional interests. China does not want a conflict that would disrupt regional trade and lead to millions of refugees streaming across its border. It fears that such a war would end with a unified Korea firmly in America\u2019s strategic orbit. Nor does it want Japan and other neighbours to rethink their long-standing aversion to developing nuclear weapons of their own. The Chinese government also opposes South Korea\u2019s missile defence system (acquired from the\u00a0US in response to North Korea\u2019s missile deployments), which China sees as a threat to its own nuclear deterrent.<\/p>\n

The US does not want to live under the shadow of a North Korea that possesses long-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear payloads to American cities. At the same time, the US has no appetite for a war that would prove costly by every measure.<\/p>\n

China and the US thus have a shared interest in making diplomacy work and ensuring that any US\u2013North Korean summit succeeds. The question for China is whether it is prepared to put enough pressure on North Korea so that it accepts meaningful constraints on its nuclear and missile programs. The question for the US is whether it is willing to embrace a diplomatic outcome that stabilises the nuclear situation on the Korean peninsula but does not resolve it for the foreseeable future.<\/p>\n

A US\u2013North Korean summit that averted a crisis that would benefit neither the US nor China would remind people in both countries of the value of Sino\u2013American cooperation. And the precedent of the world\u2019s two major powers working together to resolve a problem with regional and global implications might provide a foundation for the next era of a bilateral relationship that, more than any other, will define international politics in this century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is not obvious, but North Korea could be the best thing for the relationship between the United States and China since the collapse of the Soviet Union. 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