Is North Korea a player in the U.S.-China trade war?
Kim Jong Un’s visit to Beijing this
week was brief. After a 20-hour journey to the Chinese capital aboard his
armored green train, the young North Korean leader spent barely a day at his
destination. But it was still an important visit — and the target audience
appears to be President Trump, who’s pursuing ambitious foreign-policy
goals with both North Korea and China.
Kim’s fourth visit to China in 10
months wasn’t quite as spectacular as prior trips: Kim attended a banquet
with President Xi Jinping on Tuesday evening, which was also his 35th
birthday, The Washington Post’s Anna
Fifield reported. The following morning, he toured a factory producing
traditional Chinese medicines, had lunch with Xi and then headed back home.
Speaking to the state-run Global Times
newspaper, Chinese analysts said the real focus of the trip was not
pharmaceutical but geopolitical. North Korea and the United States are
planning for a second meeting between Trump and Kim, a sequel to their
historic meeting in Singapore last June.
Despite ambitious talk after that
event, the first-ever summit between sitting North Korean and American
leaders, each side has since accused the other of violating promises that
were made. While North Korea has stopped overt testing of missiles and
nuclear weapons, it has not denuclearized. Meanwhile, U.S. and U.N.
sanctions on Pyongyang remain in place. The hope is that a second summit
might make some real progress after months of stalling.
But Trump’s trade war with China
complicates things. While Kim was in Beijing, negotiators from the United
States were also in the city working on the next steps toward calming the
economic standoff between the two nations.
Trump tweeted Tuesday that the talks were going “very
well!” The Wall Street Journal’s
Lingling Wei also reported some positive movement in the dispute after
an unscheduled third day of discussions. Other observers, however, looked
at the timing of Kim’s unannounced trip to Beijing and wondered about the
effect it might have on U.S.-China trade diplomacy.
China has obvious reasons — at
least theoretically — to gain from tying nuclear and trade diplomacy
together. Xi could potentially use China’s leverage over North Korea as a
valuable concession in trade talks with the United States, trading
flexibility from Washington for more support in pressuring Pyongyang.
There’s no doubt Beijing has plenty
of leverage over North Korea. China is, by far, Pyongyang’s largest trading
partner — accounting for 90 percent of North Korea’s international trade
volume since 2000, according to a recent report from the Korea Development
Institute. One of the most impressive feats of Trump’s “maximum pressure”
North Korea policy was persuading China to implement U.N. sanctions against
Pyongyang, something it was long hesitant to do.
The reality may be somewhat
different. It appears that China did expect to get more leeway on the trade
issue if it helped push North Korea into talks with the United States
last year. Indeed, Trump repeatedly said as much:
That clearly hasn’t worked. A
little over a year after that tweet, the Trump administration imposed
tariffs on China, sparking the trade war that he had seemed to be willing
to postpone. But it’s also worth noting that Trump subtly criticized Xi
last June for not sticking to the implementation of sanctions on North
Korea. “He has really closed up that border,” Trump told reporters in Singapore.
“Maybe a little less the last couple of months. That’s okay.”
As for North Korea, Kim could play
China against the United States, turning to one for relief whenever the
pressure from the other got to be too much. Trump continues to talk about
his summit with Kim as a key foreign-policy victory, and the promise of
further wins will be a potent bargaining chip for Pyongyang.
Scott Snyder wrote for the Council on Foreign Relations
that Xi and Kim may be bound by “both mountains and rivers and by their
respective efforts to manage Donald Trump.”
Despite their proximity and
potentially shared interests, though, Xi and Kim can still seem like
distant neighbors. Kim didn’t visit China for the first five years he was
in power; Xi largely ignored the young North Korean leader in that time as
well. The two men met face-to-face for the first time only shortly before
the Trump-Kim summit last year. The Chinese leader has not made good on his
talk of visiting Kim at home.
But for now, the two leaders may
hope that their democratically elected peer, facing domestic political
scandals, economic uncertainty and the start of the 2020 U.S. presidential
campaign, may be eager to reach a deal that pleases all parties.
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