Pressure on china the key to north korea

Pressure on china the key to north korea

This year’s session of the UN General Assembly, the first one to be addressed by US President Donald Trump, served to highlight the inability of the world to tackle a problem like North Korea. The US president threatened to destroy the nation of 25 million people, if the US and its allies are threatened or attacked.

If this raised eyebrows rather than curdled blood, a further threat to undo the Iran nuclear deal served to reinforce scepticism about the value of any American promise or assurance. The fact is that successive US administrations have had little success with their North Korea policy.

President Bill Clinton managed to use diplomacy for the US-DPRK Agreed Framework to put a freeze on North Korea’s plutonium programme and later enabled a moratorium on missile tests. That was in the era of Kim Jong-il, present leader Kim Jong-un’s father.

But since then, Washington has eschewed the path of direct diplomacy and unlike his father, Kim Jong-un does not have truck with foreign leaders. The fact is that there are no good options. But continued highdecibel rhetoric from Washington does not help. Rather, it only serves to strengthen the North Korean resolve given that the country has built its entire existence around the idea that the US is out to destroy them. Trump’s tough talk is playing into North Korea’s victim complex.

The US must rely on containment, deterrence, sanctions and diplomacy. North Korea is not willing to give up its nuclear capabilities; the experience with Libya has made that clear for Pyongyang.

There is a sense that China, which accounts for 90% of trade with North Korea, can do more. The global community must put more pressure on China to put its leverage to good use. Beijing should not have the luxury of pretending that it is trying its utmost to make the Kim regime behave responsibly