[Mr. Xi has displayed contempt for Mr. Kim, who is half his age and whom he has never met. His new envoy for North Korean negotiations, Kong Xuanyou, cannot go to Pyongyang because the North Koreans will not let him.]
By
Choe Sang-Hun and Jane Perlez
 |
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Kim
Jong-un, center, at a missile launch at an undisclosed location, in a picture
released by
the Korean Central News Agency this month. Credit Korean
Central News Agency, via
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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SEOUL,
South Korea — Over the
years, as North Korea raced to build a nuclear arsenal, the world has often
turned to its neighbors for help: China, because of its economic leverage over
the North, and South Korea, because it would suffer the most in any military
confrontation.
Now, with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un,
engaged in a dangerous war of words with President Trump, China and South Korea
have been left squirming on the sidelines, with Mr. Kim having been essentially
granted his wish: dealing directly with the United States, which Pyongyang
believes has the most to give.
To the North Koreans, the United States can
offer a peace treaty, diplomatic recognition, the easing of decades-old
sanctions and the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea, which
Pyongyang considers its existential threat.
Since Mr. Kim came to power nearly six years
ago, North Korea has accelerated its nuclear and missile tests to grab
Washington’s attention and to force negotiations on terms favorable to
Pyongyang, according to South Korean intelligence officials and analysts who
study Mr. Kim’s motives.
When Mr. Trump threatened on Tuesday to
“totally destroy” North Korea, it gave Mr. Kim a perfect chance to square off
directly against the United States, they said. In an unprecedented personal
statement on Friday, Mr. Kim called Mr. Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard”
and the North Korean foreign minister raised the prospect of exploding a
hydrogen bomb over the Pacific.
To back up such talk, Mr. Kim will probably
carry out more weapons tests, analysts said.
Further raising jitters on Saturday was a
tremor detected near North Korea’s underground nuclear-testing site. It raised
fears of another detonation, but South Korea’s meteorological administration
said it appeared to have been a natural earthquake.
“We now can’t avoid the military tensions on
the Korean Peninsula further escalating,” said Cheong Seong-chang, a North
Korea expert at the Sejong Institute, a research think tank outside the South
Korean capital, Seoul. “Part of the reason that the standoff between North
Korea and the United States is intensifying is that South Korea lacks
capabilities to confront North Korea while the North ignores the South and
insists on dealing only with the United States.”
As the crisis spiraled over the last few
days, China found itself a bystander — an uncomfortable role for President Xi
Jinping, who was most likely seething about Mr. Kim and about the North Korean
government’s criticism of China’s most vaunted institution, the Communist
Party, as its leadership prepares to meet, analysts said. The Korean Central
News Agency, which is run by Pyongyang, referred to a coming party congress in
Beijing in unflattering terms on Friday.
The quiet in Beijing illustrated China’s almost
complete lack of influence in controlling its estranged ally and its
unsuccessful efforts to persuade Mr. Trump to tamp down his language, they
said.
Fearful of failing and of losing face in a
peacemaking role, Mr. Xi would be reluctant to make any diplomatic or strategic
moves before the party congress opens in Beijing on Oct. 18, analysts said.
Mr. Xi was left merely humoring Mr. Trump by
agreeing to tougher sanctions at the United Nations this past week.
“I think China’s diplomatic leverage over
North Korea is zero,” said Feng Zhang, a fellow at the Australian National
University’s department of international relations. “North Korea doesn’t want
to see Chinese envoys and is not interested in Chinese views.”
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has also
found his room for diplomacy shrinking, as North Korea and the United States
locked themselves in what he called an escalating “vicious cycle” of
provocations and sanctions.
North Korea has not even bothered to respond
to Mr. Moon’s calls for dialogue as it accelerates its missile and nuclear
tests. When he came to power in May, Mr. Moon found little leverage left over
North Korea: Under his conservative predecessors, South Korea had cut off all
trade ties and pulled out all investments in North Korea.
“We need a breathing room, an easing of
tensions,” Mr. Moon told reporters on Friday on his way home after attending
the United Nations General Assembly meetings in New York.
Mr. Trump, however, has said “talking is not
the answer” and ridiculed South Korea for “talk of appeasement.” In response to
what it called the North’s “reckless behavior,” the Pentagon said on Saturday
that the Air Force had sent B1 bombers and F-15 fighters over waters north of
the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas. It was the furthest north
“any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft have flown off North Korea’s coast in the
21st century,” the Pentagon said in a statement.
Despite the tightening sanctions, Pyongyang
is unlikely to stop weapons tests until it believes it has enough leverage to
enter talks as an equal with Washington, some South Korean officials and
analysts say. It will reach that point when it has secured a capability to
deliver a nuclear payload to the mainland United States, they added.
Although the regional powers in Asia say they
want North Korea to stop developing nuclear weapons, they are also playing a
complex game of geopolitical chess among themselves, which is partly why the
North Korean nuclear crisis has been such an intractable problem for more than
two decades.
While Mr. Trump is hinting at military action
to rid North Korea of its nuclear weapons, South Korea opposes the use of
force, fearing war on the peninsula and an attack on Seoul. China also does not
want war on its border, hoping that North Korea will remain a useful Communist
buffer against South Korea and its ally, the United States.
Mr. Kim’s refusal to listen to China shows
how far apart China and North Korea have become, said Chen Jian, emeritus
professor of history at Cornell University.
“Kim and North Korea are making more trouble
and headaches for Xi and Beijing than anyone else in today’s world,” Mr. Chen
said. “Why should China fight a war against the U.S. for Kim and North Korea’s
sake?”
On Saturday, China said it would ban exports
of some petroleum products to North Korea, as well as imports of textiles from
its neighbor, to comply with new sanctions by the United Nations Security
Council. China’s support of the new sanctions was largely a nod to Mr. Trump
and would not be sufficient to bring the North Korean economy to its knees and
force it to the negotiating table, Chinese experts said.
Mr. Xi has displayed contempt for Mr. Kim,
who is half his age and whom he has never met. His new envoy for North Korean
negotiations, Kong Xuanyou, cannot go to Pyongyang because the North Koreans
will not let him.
Knowing that Mr. Kim is a lost cause, Mr. Xi
would be more likely to turn to Mr. Trump for solutions — but only after the
end of the party congress.
“Beijing will try to cool down things with
Trump before going to Pyongyang,” said Sun Yun, a fellow in the East Asia
division at the Washington-based Stimson Center. “Xi just had a phone call with
Trump earlier this week, and the Chinese see this channel of communication as
open and effective.”
In a reflection of North Korea’s festering
anger at China, the Korean Central News Agency carried a column by a writer
called Jong Phil at the same time it issued Mr. Kim’s denunciation of Mr. Trump
on Friday. The commentary said that North Korea owed little to the Chinese and
that Beijing should consider North Korea more than a “buffer zone” that
protects it from “gangsters’ invasion.”
The commentary also questioned whether the
Chinese news media should be “entitled to enter the coming party conference
hall” because recent reports had been “betraying the peoples of the two
countries.”
Some China experts considered the commentary
an attack on a fellow Communist government in almost unheard-of terms.
“This is a very big and serious matter, and
certainly unprecedented,” Mr. Chen of Cornell said. “Even during the Cultural
Revolution, when Chinese-North Korean relations reached the lowest point, and
the Red Guards were making all kinds of nasty attacks on Kim Il-sung — Kim
Jong-un’s grandfather — the eldest Kim avoided personally attacking his
‘comrades’ in Beijing.”
Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, and Jane
Perlez from Beijing.
