North's Kim Jong-un gets big brother China's back, sending message to Trump

Kim Jong Un just sent a powerful message to US President Donald Trump ahead of planned talks: China is back on North Korea’s side. The North Korean leader and his wife received a warm welcome in his first trip abroad since taking power in 2011, holding talks with President Xi Jinping and meeting a host of dignitaries. Xi told Kim that China has made a “strategic choice” to have friendly ties with North Korea, and they will “remain unchanged under any circumstances.

”The surprise, highly secretive four-day trip ends a period of frosty ties between the longtime allies as China backed increasingly tough economic sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs. Xi avoided meeting Kim during his first five years in power, and the countries traded barbs at each other through state-run media.

The shift ensures that China’s interests are protected during Kim’s planned summit with Trump, and also gives North Korea an insurance policy if talks collapse. While the White House said the Kim-Xi summit showed that its pressure campaign was working, closer China ties would help North Korea undermine sanctions and raise the cost of any U.S. military action even further.

‘Very Concerned’ “If you are the Trump White House right now, you’ve got to be very concerned,” said John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at Harvard Kennedy School. “As much as the official White House line says that maximum pressure is what brought about yet another diplomatic summit, the reality is you move away from the primary focus on maximum pressure to one huge massive pressure release valve.”

North Korea’s official media made no mention of denuclearization or Kim’s planned meeting with Trump, instead focusing on the lavish greeting he received in Beijing. China’s readout said Kim was willing to meet Trump and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and said that he could give up his nuclear weapons if both countries take “progressive and synchronous measures for the realization of peace.”

That’s where any talks risk breaking down. Trump last week fired H.R. McMaster as national security adviser and replaced him with John Bolton, a former envoy to the United Nations who last month wrote a commentary titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.”

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While Bolton has said that he’ll start with a fresh slate in his new role, earlier this month he said Trump should demand that North Korea immediately agree to pack up its nuclear program and have it shipped to the U.S. -- similar to what happened in Libya. If Kim refused, he added, it could be a “very short meeting.”

“These military options are back on the table, so North Korea needs a stronger China in the whole negotiating process,” said Bernt Berger, senior fellow on Asia at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin.

At the same time, China didn’t want to be left out of the loop. While China opposes North Korea’s nuclear weapons, it also wants to prevent a collapse of Kim’s regime or war on the Korean Peninsula. Any instability -- or alternatively, a deal that leads to a U.S.-aligned unified Korea -- potentially could put American troops on its border.

“Beijing feels very nervous about a possible fundamental shake-up in Northeast Asia if Kim and Trump can successfully resolve the nuclear issue,” said Zhang Baohui, director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “The Chinese may have thrown the olive branch to Kim to keep him on its side.”