I published an op-ed in the JoongAng Daily today, which this post re-prints.

Basically my argument is that China will increasingly be singled out and globally embarrassed for enabling North Korea if the post-comfort women deal cooperation between South Korea, Japan, and the US holds. If the democracies can work as a team on North Korea – finally! – and if we drop Russia from our regional analyses – as we should because Russia plays no role other than occasional spoiler regarding North Korea – then the game basically boils down to China on one side and the democracies (SK, Japan, and the US) on the other, meaning China stands out globally as North Korea’s protector.

All the Chinese obfuscation of the Six Party Talks or ‘regional solutions’ is falling away. It is now painfully obvious that China alone now is what is keeping North Korea afloat, allowing it to escape the worst pressures of all the sanctions piling up, and arguably even preventing it from collapsing by providing so much informal aid to North Korea. And by aid, I don’t just mean direct shipments of rice and fuel; I also mean the access to the outside world that allows Pyongyang to get luxury goods, use dollars, traffic its illicit production, and so on.

So let’s keep the democracies working together in a common front on NK. That is huge progress, and it shines a very clear spotlight on China now as NK’s last, only enabler. The sheer embarrassment of that is bound to impact prestige-conscious Chinese elites going forward.

The full op-ed follows the jump.

As North Korea approaches its first communist party congress in thirty-six years, its nuclear and missile programs seem to be accelerating. The early months of 2016 have seen repeated tests, launches, and claims of yet more to come. In response, there has been a dramatic increase in efforts to sanction North Korea, both multilaterally at the United Nations, and bilaterally by individual countries.

The depth and coordination of individual sanction efforts by the United States, South Korea, and Japan suggest that the long-sought trilateral cooperation among these three regarding North Korea may have finally arrived. Further, all this new sanctioning increasingly places the onus of North Korea solely on China. Indeed, regional policy toward North Korea is now effectively a waiting game: we are all waiting for China to – finally! – decide that North Korea is a genuine threat to the neighborhood and take serious action.

The trilateral cooperation is a major step. Since the North Korean nuclear test this January, South Korea, Japan, and the US have worked together more closely than ever on the Northern threat. Both President Park and Prime Minister Abe have flown to Washington for alliance consultations, and high-level diplomats from all three countries just met again on April 19 to coordinate their sanctions regime. This is real progress.

Importantly, this would not have been possible without the comfort women deal of late last year. By the end of 2015, the comfort women issue had come to so dominate Korea-Japan inter-governmental relations that little diplomatic cooperation was possible on North Korea or almost anything else. The deal broke that impasse and finally made sustained South Korean-Japanese cooperation possible.

This is an important positive outcome of that deal, and it will be interesting to see how South Koreans respond, given that the deal is not very popular here. Most South Koreans wanted the comfort women issue resolved, but few feel like the particulars of this deal were fair, and the comfort women and civil society groups have broadly come out against it. So this is a tough trade-off for Koreans: Japan is now more clearly an ‘ally’ on North Korea. In the past, it has threatened to cut side-deals with North Korea which would undermine a US-South Korean common front on the North. That possibility is now over, but the cost for Korea is dropping the comfort women issue. And there is a cost for Japan as well: it can no longer seek to unilaterally resolve the abductee issue with Pyongyang. These trade-offs, in the interest of the larger goal of presenting a united democratic front toward North Korea, are the unfortunate nature of international politics.

If the long-desired achievement of a South Korean-Japanese-American common front toward North Korea is one major outcome of the past few months, the other is the now very clear isolation of China as North Korea’s last, only enabler. China has sought to obscure this reality for as long as possible. It has sought to include Russia in the Six Party Talks, even though Russian Pacific power collapsed decades ago. It has sought to derail a South Korean-Japanese rapprochement by stoking memories of the Pacific War. It has argued that the US is the reason for North Korean behavior. It has fudged statistics on how much it trades with North Korea, and it has dragged its feet on sanctions implementation at the UN.

The goal of all these efforts is to cover the stark reality that North Korea would not be what it is today without Chinese forbearance. If we drop Russia from our regional analyses and treat the regional democracies (ie, South Korea, Japan, and the US) as one bloc going forward, it is now blindingly obvious that China holds the key to North Korean change. Regional politics now reminds one of ‘waiting for Godot,’ as we all wait for China to one day wake up to the recognition of just how dangerous North Korea really is both to its own people (about whom China evinces no interest) and its neighbors as well.

There is some evidence that China is slowly coming around. For years, Chinese academics have printed op-eds in western papers decrying North Korea. In the eight years I have lived in Korea, I have never met a Chinese student, academic, or official who genuinely approved of North Korea. Beijing knows well that North Korea is a terrible place. But its hardliners still see it as a ‘buffer’ against the regional democracies.

What is needed now, then, is for Beijing to suffer the prestige costs of its support for Pyongyang. The democracies can sanction North Korea ever harder, but cutting the Chinese umbilical cord is the real goal. The last few months have made it undeniable that North Korea stumbles on because of Chinse support. So we in the democracies must now insure that China is routinely blamed for North Korean behavior, as it was roundly condemned in the global media for its tepid response to the January nuclear test. When North Korea embarrasses China enough, then it will change. This is our way forward.

Filed under: China, Japan, JoongAng Daily, Korea (North), Korea (South), Media, United States