The visit to Beijing
North Korea’s Kim prepares for hard talks ahead
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s visit to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, in advance of his upcoming meetings with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in April and President Donald Trump in May, ought to be a caution to Mr. Trump and his new secretary of state: Step carefully and do your homework.
The visit cast the North Korean leader as reasonable and willing to negotiate, including, perhaps in stages, denuclearization.
By holding the meeting the Chinese government inserted itself into the peace process. The players would not simply include the North Koreans, the South Koreans, and the Americans. The Chinese would have something to say about the Korean peninulsa.
But the Korean leader also went to China as an equal, not a supplicant. As several experts have noted, there is no evidence that he asked China’s permission to hold the summit with Mr. Trump.
It is important to remember that the Korean peninsula is geographically a relatively small offshoot of China, with a short border with Russia, extending between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. The population of the two Koreas is 75 million; that of China, 1.4 billion. In strategic terms, the word to describe Korea’s situation is “vulnerable.”
Even more relevant to Mr. Kim’s visit to Beijing, his first foreign trip since becoming North Korea’s leader, is the sequence of events in the Korean War. His grandfather Kim Il Sung’s army invaded South Korea in 1950 and drove down to the tip of South Korea before U.S. forces were organized enough to repel them. American forces then pushed the North Koreans nearly to the Yalu River, on the border with China. Then the Chinese People’s Liberation Army intervened and pushed the U.S. forces back in bitter fighting to the 38th parallel, pretty much where the war started, and where everyone has remained.
If anyone is thinking about the United States fighting another war in Korea, he should read carefully a history of the 1950-53 one. The Korean peninsula is a harsh setting for a war.
In any case, with this visit a historic and personal relationship has been repaired and renewed, and the Chinese have asserted themsleves, but not, let us note, at U.S. bidding — at their own and North Korea’s. The American president and his
foreign policy team must accomplish a very delicate, perhaps impossible task: They must convince and commit Mr. Kim to denuclearization, while at the same time giving him ample assurance that he will retain a strong national defense and ample deterrence. It is possible that such a complex and sensitive formulation will be easier with the Chinese involved, but only possible.