North Korean behaviour slap in the face for China: U.S.

With no agreement between U.S and China in sight on a proposed UN resolution, new sanctions against North Korea that tested a nuclear device a month ago and launched a satellite last week in violation of existing international restrictions, could take longer. “There hasn’t been a set of measures agreed to yet,” U.S State Department Spokesperson John Kirby said even as U.S and Chinese diplomats continue their negotiations in the UN.

U.S and China have been engaged at multiple levels over the last month over the issue, but the latest North Korean act of escalation has driven a wedge between the two countries. A day after China protested the U.S-South Korea joint move to revive talks on the long-pending missile defence system THAAD, or Terminal High-Altitude Air Defence, in response to the satellite launch, the U.S said the North Korean behaviour was “a slap in the face right at Beijing.” The U.S. is evidently cut up with the Chinese response to North Korea and views it inadequate and perfunctory.

“We want China to be a full cooperative partner in an international effort through the UN to take tougher measures against the North….We want them to be a part of that effort, and not just in the adoption of tougher measures but in the enforcement of them,” Mr. Kirby said, reiterating the U.S. position that China has been lax in enforcing sanctions. “We believe that the Chinese certainly share the same sense of urgency that’s shared in the region. They may not have the same view in terms of exactly what measures ought to be adopted, but that’s why it’s, again, important to have discussions inside the UN,” he said.

Mr. Kirby said when Secretary of State John Kerry met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing in the last week of January, “there was general agreement that the North needs to be held to account for this activity [the January nuclear test].

The details of new measures were not discussed between the foreign ministers and a month after the nuclear test, things have not moved further. Meanwhile, the North upped the ante further with the satellite launch, which the U.S. and its allies see as a façade for ballistic missile testing. “But now the hard work of actually drafting these new measures has to be done and enforcing them,” Mr. Kirby said.

The Pentagon on Monday, however, confirmed that the North placed a satellite in its orbit.

“China is and has every right to be deeply concerned about what the North is doing. And this missile launch on the weekend of the new year I think can be seen rightly as a slap in the face right at Beijing. So they have every right to be concerned, and they are,” the spokesperson said.

China and U.S. disagree not only on the nature of the sanctions and their enforcement but perhaps also on the objective. Asked whether China agreed with the U.S. position that measures must lead to complete denuclearisation of the North, Mr. Kirby said: “We believe that the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the peninsula is key to this….I will say broadly speaking that the Chinese also don’t want to see a Korean peninsula that is any further destabilised than it already is.”

U.S., however, shares the Chinese concern that sanctions should not cause chaos and mayhem in the peninsula, which a collapse of the North Korean regime could lead to. “I think when you consider a sanctions regime, you always have to think through intended and unintended consequences. …you have to think about the possibility of them having an effect, an effect that you want to see as an outcome,” he said.