China may have good reasons to prefer the status quo on the Korean Peninsula. But, by continuing to indulge the North Korean leadership’s nuclear ambitions, China’s leaders risk finding themselves surrounded by unfriendly nuclear-armed states or with a nasty war on their border – or perhaps both.
WASHINGTON, DC – As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first summit with US President Donald Trump takes place at Trump’s luxurious Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, at least part of the discussion will invariably focus on one of the world’s most impoverished places: North Korea. Despite more than two decades of on-again, off-again negotiations, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is pushing the world toward a strategic watershed much like the one that the West faced 60 years ago, when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off against each other in Europe.
WASHINGTON, DC – As Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first summit with US President Donald Trump takes place at Trump’s luxurious Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, at least part of the discussion will invariably focus on one of the world’s most impoverished places: North Korea. Despite more than two decades of on-again, off-again negotiations, North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is pushing the world toward a strategic watershed much like the one that the West faced 60 years ago, when the United States and the Soviet Union faced off against each other in Europe.