America’s top diplomat on Friday said the US would take action if China declined to intervene in the military deployment of North Korea, a hermit state and Beijing ally the US has long accused of playing a destabilising role in East Asia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he has told his Chinese counterparts that Washington wants Beijing’s help in handling the North Korean “nuclear programme” and denuclearising the Korean peninsula. He said the US would bolster its defence alliances with Japan and South Korea if China refrained from intervening.
Directing his remarks at China during a fireside chat at the Aspen Security Forum in the US state of Colorado, Blinken said: “We believe that you have unique influence and we hope that you’ll use it to get better cooperation from North Korea.
“But if you can’t or if you won’t, then we’re going to have to continue to take steps that aren’t directed at China but that China probably won’t like because it goes to strengthening and shoring up not only our own defences but also those of South Korea and Japan and a deepening of the work that all three of us are doing together.”
Beijing has criticised Washington’s defence alliances in East Asia, viewing them as efforts to monitor or contain China’s military. Seoul and Tokyo resent Pyongyang’s military tests, which sometimes take place near their airspace.
North Korea has conducted “one missile launch after another”, Blinken said. On July 12, Pyongyang carried out a second flight test of its Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile.
China, North Korea’s Communist neighbour, has offered it fuel and food aid in the past and brokered international dialogue on the country’s militarisation.
Blinken’s comments followed the disappearance on Tuesday of Private Travis King, an American soldier who ran into North Korea during a civilian tour near the border with South Korea.
The secretary of state said he had no updates on King’s whereabouts but that “there are certainly concerns” he might be subjected to torture in North Korea.
The US is now working to anchor a declining Sino-American relationship, Blinken said on Friday. He, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy John Kerry have all visited China within the past two months.
“It was important for us to put some stability back into this relationship, to put a floor under it, to make sure that the competition we’re clearly in does not veer into conflict, and that starts with engagement,” the diplomat said.
Blinken said China could help stem production of the illegal drug fentanyl that reaches the US through Mexico, control global climate change, and allow for the release of American detainees.
“If we weren’t engaged, we would be rightfully tagged with being irresponsible,” he said.
But challenges persist, and Blinken said on Friday the US had started a formal investigation into reports of Chinese hacking into US government emails.
NK is not a nuclear threat unless someone decides to attack it. The biggest threat in the world is the US that starts a new war every few months because it can’t ever NOT be at war.
After Libya you have to be completely bonkers if you think the anyone is going to believe the US means well when it asks people to give up their nukes.
Exactly the same thing could be said about Russia and Ukraine.
I agree.
It is the other way around. They can cause a damage especially to SK and Japan, but the nuclear weapons won’t help them once they do as they just have limited number of them.
This news is, because they like to fly their rockets over other countries.
The rockets they launch that fly over Japan only do so while they are quite literally in space. Also, any long range test conducted by NK quite literally requires the missile to fly over Japan (while in space) if its end target is the ocean.
I think you miss the value of nuclear weapons as a defensive tool. Nuclear weapons completely prevent any foreign military attempt to invade your country because any invading army can be resoundingly obliterated. Even if you can eliminate the ability to launch them it doesn’t matter because they can easily be hidden and used inside a city against an invading army after they move in.
In terms of strategy there is literally nothing you can do to attack a country with nukes. Your invading army WILL get nuked. That’s the point. The fact they only have a small number is irrelevant to their defensive value.
Let’s be more serious: the threat is not one flag or another, it’s the whole system of power that is rooted in corruption and greed. US wage more wars than others states because they sit on top of the pyramid, in their position any other nation would do the same because they are all built on the same rotten principles
So your belief is that China is just a few years away from building a thousand bases all around the world and starting yearly wars for profit then?
I don’t agree with you. The military industrial complex in america is unique to america and unique throughout most of history, it is a force that drives the country to war for its own benefit over and over and over. Its own presidents warned of it growing and the need to stop it before it got too bad long ago. Private military industry would have to be equally large and equally as politically powerful in order for it to reoccur elsewhere. I don’t believe that is the case anywhere else in the world currently, although I am not clear on the state of Russia’s weapons industries and their pursuit of contracts so I’m willing to yield that they might become this in future if they were to grow in economic size.
I fundamentally don’t agree that just “being the richest” makes you start constant streams of wars for profit. These are caused by various interests being pursued that create a variety of political forces. The reason it occurs in america so much is the political power of the MIC.
Thousands bases all around the world are there because the local governments allowed it to begin with. Criminals don’t have a country they exists all over the world.
lmao “criminals” being anyone the US decides is against american interests
This is top tier nationalism. You’re trying to tell me Iraqis want the US bases there? What about Guantanamo? You think Cuba wants the US occupying a part of its country with an illegal blacksite it uses for torturing people? Pull the other one mate.
Why are you calling it nationalism and not nazism, stalinism or americanism? Because nationalism doesn’t have a flag it’s a nations thing. I can’t talk about Cuba because i don’t live there but in Europe as of today military bases are in place because all europeans governments are ok with these. Corruption doesn’t have a flag. USA bribes europe, if europe were stronger they would be the one bribing USA government to be his colony.
Because nationalism is the accurate term for it and nationalism is a disease.
Cuba isn’t “bribed” to have america occupying part of its sovereign land. They have been told to fuck off. They will not leave. Same in Iraq. Same in countless other countries. It has nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with americans simply doing what they want with their military because “just try and stop us”.
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I don’t think China would ever invade NK, it would not be popular with the Chinese people either as a massive part of modern Chinese history is their participation in the Korean war. The US are asking them to lean on them with trade sanctions, since China allows people to travel over the China/NK border without checks or border police there is a lot of dark trade that happens there.
You are talking as if China is a democracy. Since when what’s popular with Chinese people matters?
I mean we don’t even have to go far. We can just look at covid pandemic where covid lockdowns were literal lockdowns.
It produces democratic results and that’s why it remains popular with the people. Understanding Chinese history is important here as the “Mandate of Heaven” is an important component of Chinese politics, losing the Mandate of Heaven is very very bad and results in justification among the population for revolution.
They were literal lockdowns in my country and much of the rest of europe too. We just ended them earlier while China tried to continue them for a few months longer.
Did you read the article? It essentially says “tell your little brat (that you created and use to destabilize the region) to STFU or we will be forced to supply SK and Japan with weapons for defense, and we are sure you won’t like that”
Wasn’t is the USSR that created North Korea?
That would be popular American propaganda which has no historical basis in reality. The US carved South Korea out of a unified Korea.
And of course the Soviets had no say whatsoever in what happened to the part of Korea they were occupying at the end of WW2. It was just the Americans’ doing, and definitely not an agreement between both occupying parties to split the country in half.
I feel like you’re just denying that because North Korea hasn’t been anywhere near as prosperous as South Korea.