An incisive critique of U.S.–China diplomacy over North Korea sanctions, exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s habitual strategic deception and the Obama administration’s persistent acquiescence, which ultimately undermined regional security and empowered authoritarian maneuvering.

2016-02-28

The United States jointly announced that it had somehow persuaded China and succeeded in securing what was described as the strongest sanctions resolution ever against North Korea.
But does anyone truly believe that they will continue to honor those promises?

Along the China–North Korea border, it was already being stated—at the very moment the U.S.–China announcement was released—that by May, trade between China and North Korea would return to its original level.

Fully aware of the Western habit of having to say something—anything—in front of the media for the sake of popularity, the Chinese Communist Party offers convenient, stopgap statements, sells them as favors, and then extracts from its own “plausible lies” only those concrete and reliable commitments that serve its own interests.
The Obama administration appears to be so thoroughly ensnared by China that it fails even to recognize this as China’s standard operating procedure.

In this particular case, China obtained an unexpected and highly desirable outcome: the postponement of the deployment of the high-altitude defense missile system (THAAD) by U.S. forces in South Korea.

Given this, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the nuclear test conducted by North Korea was, in reality, a joint operation by China and North Korea.

Such is the case that one-party communist dictatorships excel precisely in malicious and cunning schemes of political intrigue.

Yet the Asahi Shimbun and other media outlets, along with the so-called cultural elites who echoed them, long persisted in the delusion that such a regime was somehow adept at diplomacy.

In the past, this indulgence was justified by relations with the Soviet Union; today, it is rationalized by the pursuit of profit from a nation of 1.3 billion people.

They continue to curry favor with what can hardly be described as anything other than the world’s largest human-rights–suppressing state—a country for which it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it does nothing but declare white to be black and black to be white.

We have been shown, to an almost unbearable extent, the spectacle of the Obama administration persisting in such appeasement.

Hillary Clinton, who belonged to that same circle, went so far as to place Japan on the same level as China and South Korea—countries that have persistently pursued currency-devaluation policies as matters of state—and publicly denounced Japan.

I was the first person in the world to make clear that it was the Asahi Shimbun that brought about the Japan-style long-term deflation now despised across the globe.

Yet Hillary was unaware even of the historical fact—indeed, the simple fact—that Japan’s elites, raised on the Asahi Shimbun, tolerated a strong yen and thereby created deflation, the economic phenomenon that must be avoided above all else.

If someone like that were to become President of the United States, then perhaps Trump—if only for being more entertaining—would be the lesser evil.