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The visit of President Xi Jinping to North Korea has to be seen beyond a fact that it is taking place after seven years or in being the first overseas trip of the Chinese leader. In the last one month the diplomatic calendar of President Xi has been quite packed: first the summit with the President of the United States, Donald Trump that was quickly followed by the state visit of President Vladimir Putin of Russia; and now paying a call on Chairman Kim Jong Un who has been throwing his weight around in East Asia and beyond.
President Xi came to a changed North Korea under Chairman Kim, no longer to be seen as a vassal or a client state of China; coming to rein in an erratic leader; or lecturing to Pyongyang on how to go about in its relations with its neighbors and the United States. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to say that perhaps President Xi’s visit was more to probe the mind of Chairman Kim who has been taking steps on issues of nuclear proliferation and reunification. Chairman Kim has made it very clear that the concept of de-nuclearization is no longer in his vocabulary and is a thing of the past. And re-unification of the Koreas has been tossed out too.
Naturally President Xi must be worried with a bordering nuclear armed state with a mercurial cultist leader who has been threatening his immediate neighbors like Japan and South Korea with his show of nuclear weapons and missiles; and once in while reminding Washington that its nuclear wares can reach the shores of America, or at least some of its bases in the Pacific. And Beijing knows quite well that if push came to shove in the Korean peninsula, it will be dragged in with or without the prodding of Pyongyang. China may want to have North Korea to keep South Korea and Japan on tenterhooks but not in a full-fledged conflict that will invariably draw in the United States. And President Xi is also aware that Japan’s military posturing is changing.
Chairman Kim has also been playing his cards quite well. He knows that China continues to be one of his chief benefactors economically and diplomatically being perhaps one of a very few nations helping to beat crippling sanctions and of help occasionally at the United Nations. And one way Pyongyang had made sure that China remains engaged is by playing the Russian card. By sending thousands of its soldiers to the Ukrainian front—hundreds of whom have returned in body bags—Pyongyang has earned a special place in President Putin’s scheme of things by way of generous economic and financial assistance, perhaps even in military modernization of missile production and whatnot. Obviously, President Xi would want to balance things out.
Chairman Kim cannot be dismissed as some sort of an unguided missile just wandering around. He has shown the immediate neighborhood and the Indo Pacific the depth of friendship with Russia by sacrificing his soldiers in the Ukraine. He has also shown the United States the wasted opportunities of de-nuclearization: three times President Trump had met Chairman Kim between 2018 and 2019, in Singapore, Vietnam and the Demilitarized Zone, but little came out of those meetings. Now the Trump administration is faced with the hard truth—bringing back Pyongyang to nuclear negotiations after it had clearly rejected the idea but also going on to expand its arsenals and production facilities.
More than anything, Washington must have come to know that it cannot do an Iran with North Korea or attempting to bomb into submission. North Korea is not in the process of acquiring a nuclear weapon; it is a nuclear weapons state and with missiles capable to carrying nukes, no small thanks to China and Pakistan. And the Iran war has several lessons to offer, one of which being the horizontalization of a conflict that had no business to even start without clearly defined objectives. Just as how Iran started attacking America’s allies in the region, North Korea too is quite capable of inflicting damages on American allies. That Pyongyang sets itself for destruction is a story for another day; and one that would hardly bother a regime that cares little for its own people.
Hopefully President Xi would have had the opportunity to tell Chairman Kim that his rhetoric and nuclear-cum- missile bombast is giving ideas to the neighbors as well. The government of Sanei Takaichi in Japan does not need too much pressure from within to re-work its forward posturing military strategy or significantly increasing defense spending. In a country where even whispering about nuclear weapons was a taboo at one time given the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is now an open debate on whether Tokyo should go the nuclear route.
As it is there is a feeling in some quarters that Japan is just a “screwdriver away” from a nuclear weapon. And President Xi knows too well that his good friend Chairman Kim is giving a pretext to some others to move in a direction that would not be in the best interests of the Asia Pacific.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this article/column are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of South Asian Herald.
