[During his campaign, Mr. Trump said he was interested in sharing a hamburger with the 33-year-old leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un. He seemed to suggest he had a smidgen of respect for, or at least curiosity about, the maverick leader, the most recent incarnation of a longstanding dynasty.]
By Jane Perlez
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A coal briquettes factory
in Qingdao, China. The Chinese government announced
on Saturday that it would
stop importing coal from North Korea. Credit Wu Hong
/European Pressphoto
Agency
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BEIJING
— For years, the United
States and others have pressed China’s leaders to suspend imports of coal from
North Korea to push the reclusive state to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
For years, the Chinese leadership resisted — until Saturday, when it suddenly
announced in a terse statement that it would do just that.
But if Beijing was sending a message to North
Korea, it was also directing one at President Trump, who has complained that
China was not putting enough pressure on North Korea.
Now President Xi Jinping of China has
essentially said: We have done our part in enforcing sanctions. Over to you,
Mr. Trump.
The challenge comes at a tantalizing moment.
For weeks now, plans have been afoot for a North Korean government delegation
to meet in New York in early March with a group of former United States
officials who have long been involved in North Korea policy.
Will the Trump administration issue visas to
the North Koreans, a move that would suggest the new president is interested at
least in hearing from Pyongyang through informal channels?
There have been indications that Mr. Trump
was willing to take a quite different tack from President Barack Obama.
During his campaign, Mr. Trump said he was
interested in sharing a hamburger with the 33-year-old leader of North Korea,
Kim Jong-un. He seemed to suggest he had a smidgen of respect for, or at least
curiosity about, the maverick leader, the most recent incarnation of a longstanding
dynasty.
Mr. Trump’s response to the recent North
Korean missile test was restrained, perhaps the result of Mr. Obama’s warning
after the November election that North Korea would be the incoming president’s
most dangerous foreign policy challenge.
“If the visas are issued, it will be a clear
message that the Trump administration is prepared to go the extra mile and
engage North Korea,” said Evans J. R. Revere, a former principal deputy
assistant secretary of state.
There should be little expectation, he
warned, of any policy shift by the North, which has shown every indication of
wanting to continue building its nuclear program.
The planned meeting, sponsored by the
National Committee on American Foreign Policy, headed by Donald S. Zagoria,
falls far short of talks between the two governments and has been designed as
an initial sounding board.
“I have been organizing such meetings with
the North Koreans since 2003, and our goal is to increase mutual understanding
as well as to encourage the kind of frank dialogue that may not be possible in
official talks,” Mr. Zagoria said.
The gathering would be the first of its type
in New York in five years because the Obama administration opposed holding even
informal talks on American soil given North Korea’s expansion of its nuclear
weapons program. That North Korea is holding two Americans hostage was another
impediment.
Meetings with North Korean officials arranged
by Mr. Zagoria and other groups were held in world capitals during the Obama
era, including Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Berlin last year.
The decision whether to allow the meeting to
proceed in New York is now freighted with more than the usual complications.
Over the last 10 days, North Korea has shown
its full colors. First, the regime flaunted its expanding nuclear capabilities
with the test of an intermediate-range ballistic missile that uses a solid-fuel
technology that will make it easier for the country to hide its arsenal.
Then, last week, Kim Jong-nam, the half
brother of the North Korean leader, was assassinated in Malaysia in a crowded
passenger terminal at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The South Korean
government has publicly accused North Korea of the killing, and six North
Koreans have been linked to the plot.
Without these two incidents, the Trump
administration could have won praise for breaking the logjam with North Korea
by allowing the New York meeting to go ahead, said a former participant in such
meetings who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the topic.
But the assassination of Kim Jong-nam would
allow opponents of North Korean engagement to charge that granting visas only
rewarded bad behavior, the person said.
Soon after the killing, Republican and
Democratic members of Congress called for the United States to return North
Korea to its blacklist of states that sponsor terrorism, from which it was
removed nine years ago.
The Trump administration faces another,
perhaps more profound, decision on how to handle North Korea. Annual joint
military exercises, set for March between South Korea and the United States,
are expected to involve an American aircraft carrier, advanced stealth
fighters, B-52 and B-1B bombers and a nuclear submarine, according to South
Korean news reports.
This annual show of force, not far from the
demilitarized zone between North and South Korea and off the Korean coast, has
traditionally been viewed by North Korea as an American preparation for an
attack against its forces.
With the heightened tensions on the Korean
Peninsula, and Chinese-North Korean relations at a low point, the risk of a
strong response by the North to the exercises — through the launch of missiles
or a nuclear test — is higher than usual, said Peter Hayes, the executive
director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability in Berkeley,
Calif.
Last year, for example, the North conducted
its fifth nuclear test during joint American-South Korean military exercises.
“We are likely entering a new and extremely
dangerous phase of the Korean conflict,” Mr. Hayes said. He suggested ramping
down the exercises to “avoid inadvertent clashes and escalation to nuclear war,
and to probe North Korean intentions.”
China would like the Trump administration to
deal directly with North Korea. Beijing’s suspension of coal imports from North
Korea was a signal that China was being tougher than usual, offering Mr. Trump
a concession to bring Washington to the table with the North.
But how much impact a suspension of coal
imports would have on the rudimentary and seemingly resilient North Korean
economy was far from clear.
The Foreign Ministry insisted Tuesday that
the suspension of coal imports was a bureaucratic procedure. In the first six
weeks of 2017 China had already imported almost all its annual quota of coal
allowed under the United Nations sanctions, the ministry said. Whether China
had actually paid for those imports was not addressed.
“It won’t be as huge as many expected,” said
Zhang Liangui, an expert on North Korea at the Central Party School of the Communist
Party. “Outsiders have underestimated the North’s capability to cope with
sanctions.”
Nor is Mr. Zhang optimistic that any talks
with North Korea, formal or informal, will result in a diminishing of the
North’s nuclear capabilities.
“North Korea has said more than 50 times that
it will not participate in any talks that have denuclearization on the agenda,”
he said. “I don’t think President Trump could pull this off and talk the
Koreans out of it.”
Yufan Huang contributed research.
