Is this really the basis of arguing that "letting" China deal with North Korea is tantamount to an American defeat?
China would demand a high price: total removal of American forces in South Korea and a tacit acknowledgment that China is the uncontested hegemon of the region. Such a “grand bargain would effectively transfer America’s dominance to China,” Hoover Institution scholar Michael Auslin writes in the Los Angeles Times. “No matter how the White House spun such a deal, world leaders would infer that the U.S. had gone hat in hand to China.”
No doubt, a deal on those terms would be really bad for our influence. I'm against such a deal.
Yet we don't have to go along with that. China can want Secretary of Defense Mattis to dance on a table in a bear costume, but that doesn't mean we should accept that demand.
So why does China wanting America to withdraw from South Korea mean we must comply?
Isn't the obvious rejoinder that we will help South Korea and Japan (and in sotto voce, Taiwan) field nuclear missiles?
And how is America getting China to compel North Korea to halt nuclear work a sign of China's strength but China's inability to get North Korea to comply with China's wishes to halt nuclear work an embarrassment for China?
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un seems to enjoy overshadowing Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meticulously choreographed appearances in the global spotlight.
Seriously, nobody thinks America has influence in North Korea. Exactly nobody is going to think that China dealing with North Korea means we have gone hat in hand to China or that we have transferred dominance to China.
Get a grip, people. Getting China to do what we want would be a good thing. And if the price of doing that is a regime in North Korea that China actually dominates (as long as the Chinese army doesn't deploy to the DMZ) and a trade deal tilted to China as a reward, we should happily pay it.
Indeed, our diplomatic effort to pressure China into dealing with North Korea, using a total blockade, a coup, decapitation strike, or an invasion from the ill-defended north, should hammer the notion that China's refusal to deal with their own client state stems from an inability to act despite boasts of their new military prowess.
I think we could win a war against North Korea with far less than the millions of dead that a worst case scenario holds, but it doesn't mean I'd be happy to risk a war that could lean to that side of the models if there is an alternative that keeps North Korea from getting in the Nukes R Us business with Iran camped outside waiting for the doors to open.
