U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will hold top-level talks in China on Saturday as the United States looks to an economic squeeze of North Korea it hopes will compel the reclusive country’s retreat from nuclear arms and missile programs, Reuters reported.
The United States sees China as critical to averting a military confrontation with Pyongyang, which is fast advancing toward its goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the United States.
U.S. officials say Beijing appears increasingly willing to cut ties to North Korea’s economy by adopting U.N. sanctions, after long accounting for some 90 percent of its neighbor’s foreign trade.
But to succeed in reaching any kind of diplomatic solution, Tillerson would need to overcome some basic U.S. assumptions about North Korea and China.
The first would be getting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to view nuclear weapons as a liability, not a strength. The U.S. intelligence community does not believe Kim is likely to willingly give up his weapons program.
“(Tillerson‘s) working against the unified view of our intelligence agencies, which say there’s no amount of pressure that can be put on them to stop,” Senator Bob Corker told a Senate hearing on Thursday.
Kim, Corker said, saw nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles as “his ticket to survival.”
The second big challenge for Tillerson would be getting China to impose economic sanctions on North Korea so harsh that Kim might question his future if they persisted.
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say they believe China’s priority is stability on the Korean peninsula, since a political collapse would almost certainly push destabilizing waves of refugees into northeastern China.
Tillerson, who was due to arrive early on Saturday in Beijing, is expected to hold talks with China’s top diplomat State Councillor Yang Jiechi, Foreign Minister Wang Yi as well as President Xi Jinping.
China says it will strictly and fully enforce U.N. resolutions against North Korea and its Commerce Ministry on Thursday said North Korean firms in China and joint ventures in China and overseas would be shut down by January, in line with the latest UN resolution.
But the latest sanctions need time before they begin to bite, the official China Daily cautioned in an editorial on Friday.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who is due to visit China in November, has called for it to do more on North Korea and has promised to take steps to rebalance a trade relationship that his administration says puts U.S. businesses at a disadvantage.
The U.S. State Department did not suggest any major announcements would be made on Tillerson’s trip but the China Daily said it needed to be more than a “routine show of mutual goodwill” ahead of Trump’s visit.
“The guest and his hosts must ... straighten at least one thing out - what each can expect from the other to ensure the situation on the Korean peninsula does not deteriorate and spiral out of control,” it said.