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Obtuse triangle: China, Korea and the
US
By Stephen Blank
Even
as new fears of a war between North Korea and America
over the former's nuclearization grew last week,
counteracting forces, largely inspired by China, began
to bring both sides back from the brink.
Even as
tough rhetoric filled the media came the announcement
that Beijing had sent an envoy to North Korea who had
met with Kim Jong-il. And soon afterward came statements
indicating that North Korea might after all relent on
its insistence on talking only to Washington and accept
some form of multilateral discussions, if not actual
negotiations. Still, we are a long way away from any
kind of resolution of the crisis precipitated by North
Korea's defiance of its signature to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Agreed Framework of
1994 and its ensuing decision to go nuclear.
The
interesting corner of this unbalanced and thus obtuse
triangle is China. It seems clear that Beijing sent its
emissary to Pyongyang with a tough message to negotiate
lest China feel obliged to deploy its economic pressure
upon North Korea for yet a second time to compel it to
negotiate with the United States and other countries. It
also seems clear that Beijing's mounting anxiety that
Pyongyang was intent on traversing a collision course
with Washington that the administration of President
George W Bush might only be too happy to join drove it
to this uncharacteristically public display of its power
vis-a-vis North Korea. China's anxiety is well-founded.
If the US goes to war with North Korea over the latter's
nuclearization, then US forces will probably destroy
North Korea and bring about the unification of Korea,
with US troops deployed right on its border with China.
At the same time, the prospect of war on behalf of North
Korea presents China with no good options.
On
repeated occasions Chinese spokesmen have publicly and
clearly warned their US interlocutors that under no
circumstances would the United States be allowed
unilaterally to decide the fate of the Korean Peninsula.
China will not be passive or quiet and thus will act,
quite strongly if necessary, to safeguard its interests
and equities in Korea. That warning could easily signify
a willingness to use force either against the Americans
or, as some China specialists have warned, against North
Korea's territory to prevent Washington from fashioning
a unilateral solution that would place its troops on or
close to China's border. Since this war could easily
become a nuclear one and the Korean War itself was a
sufficiently horrible experience for all concerned,
these are hardly easily acceptable options. Yet if North
Korea is metaphorically tied to China, its decision to
go over the cliff inevitably drags China along with it,
something Beijing is naturally reluctant to accept.
Therefore Beijing is exerting every effort to persuade
Pyongyang to enter into genuine negotiations with
Washington before its nuclearization becomes an issue to
be settled exclusively by the deployment of troops.
At the same time it is not at all clear that
whatever North Korea decides to do will be acceptable to
China, not to mention the US, or that Pyongyang will
even negotiate in something approaching good faith.
China's discomfiture at North Korea's refusal to respect
its interests and take its advice will then once again
become public. And once again China will try to bring
pressure, mainly economic, to bear upon North Korea. But
that pressure is a diminishing asset, especially if
North Korea does indeed develop a real nuclear
capability.
Since there is, in fact,
considerable, if suppressed, tension between these two
states, a North Korean nuclear deterrent can and
probably will also be used to counter China's efforts to
gain influence on the peninsula, perpetuate the status
quo and gradually rise to be No 1 in Asia. China's hopes
of doing so clearly are due in no small measure to its
ever improving ties to South Korea. A nuclear North
Korea with a tense relationship with China as well as
everyone else impedes that ascent, and Beijing knows it.
But this new burst of Chinese diplomatic
activity also affects the other side of the triangle,
namely Sino-US relations. Before September 11, 2001, it
was obvious to everyone that the Bush administration had
officially marked out China as enemy No 1, or at least
as its principal strategic competitor in Asia. September
11 and its aftermath changed all that to the point where
US officials now talk of a strong partnership or even
quasi-alliance with China against terrorism, cite China
approvingly as a model for North Korea to emulate, and
have evidently utterly forgotten the earlier long-term
geopolitical rivalry with China for primacy in Asia.
While Washington has undoubtedly been correct in
insisting that the issue of North Korea's nuclear
weapons must be resolved through multilateral fora, it
does not seem to have understood that its refusal to
deal directly with Pyongyang has strengthened Beijing's
role as perhaps the only effective interlocutor among
all parties to this crisis. Thus if the crisis can be
resolved short of war, China stands to gain immensely in
status and probably more tangible ways as well.
Certainly its claims that it cannot be left out of any
future resolution of the Korean issue and to enhanced
status in Asia will have to be heeded.
For this
reason we may ask whether the intensity with which the
United States has prosecuted the "war on terrorism" and
the war against Iraq has not led it to forget the need
for an overall strategy in Asia and a China policy that
is based on broader geopolitical goals and realities
than hunting down al-Qaeda. As this Korean crisis
suggests, victory in those other two wars may come at
the price of strategic neglect of trends in East Asia.
And there is no way that one could call such neglect
benign.
Stephen Blank is an analyst of
international security affairs residing in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
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