Hey, Trump, here's why China won't 'go into' North Korea
Donald Trump said during the first presidential debate that "China should go into North Korea" to halt that country's nuclear program and control its unpredictable leader, Kim Jong Un.
"China should solve the problem for us," Trump said in Monday night's debate. "China is totally powerful when it comes to North Korea."
While China does hold a lot of sway over its belligerent communist neighbor and ally, what the Republican candidate said is very unlikely to happen. Here's why:
• China is North Korea's protector, chief trading partner and economic lifeline. Although China condemned North Korea's latest nuclear weapons test on Sept. 9 — and agreed to sanctions in response to a test in January — Beijing shows no signs that it will actually crack down on North Korea.
China views North Korea as a necessary buffer between its border and U.S. ally South Korea, where nearly 30,000 American troops are stationed.
And China wants to prevent a situation that could start a wave of North Koreans from spreading chaos across the border into China.
“China does not want to put in motion instability (in North Korea) that would advantage the United States,” said Scott Snyder, an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Their first priority is to maintain stability on their border. That means they’re unwilling to put North Korea’s survival at risk.”
• North Korea faces international sanctions, but the penalties lack bite since the country is isolated from global trade and finance.
While the United States says sanctions have been effective, a recent analysis by John Park of Harvard University and Jim Walsh of MIT concluded that sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council “have not worked" and were at times counterproductive.
"In some ways, the sanctions have had the net effect of actually improving (North Korean) procurement capabilities,” Park and Walsh wrote.
North Korean trade with nations other than China has come to a virtual halt. But China allows numerous state-run companies from North Korea to operate on its soil and those have learned to adapt, the analysts wrote in their study, “Stopping North Korea, Inc.: Sanctions Effectiveness and Unintended Consequences.”
The North Korean managers in charge of these companies have hired better Chinese middlemen, moved to China to improve their effectiveness and expanded their nuclear procurement operations in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and North Korean embassies around the world, the study found.
And China, which also sells North Korea the trucks used to carry and launch long-range missiles, allows those companies to operate on its soil.
• Some analysts believe the U.S. should threaten to take action on its own or use economics to pressure China.
China's economy depends on trade with the rest of the world, and the United States is its largest trading partner.
“It would work to our disadvantage (economically), but we have to remember that North Korea is quickly developing a nuclear capability to put nuclear warheads on ballistic missiles that can reach the continental United States,” said Gordon Chang, author of Nuclear Showdown; North Korea Takes on the World.
So far, past Republican and Democratic presidents have opted to maintain good relations with China, because upsetting the enormous amount of trade between the two countries could result in the loss of millions of U.S. jobs.
Trump's plan to impose a 45% tariff on imports from China (and a 35% tariff on Mexican goods) "could unleash a trade war that would plunge the U.S. economy into recession and cost more than 4 million private-sector American jobs," according to a recent report by the pro-trade Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.