There have been some calls to get China more involved in the North Korea crisis. President Trump has also stupidly believed the Chinese would lift a finger to help disarm Kim Jung Un’s regime.

The truth is, the Chinese are useless in this situation. Yeah, they’ll sign onto sanctions because that’s easy, knowing they’ll have no effect on denuclearizing the peninsula. Will they exert any direct pressure for the DPRK to give up it’s nukes though? Of course not. They like the Kim regime. It gives them an buffer between the thriving, Democratic South Korea and that can’t have that dangerous pariah of a country on their border. North Korea is much preferrable, clearly.

Given that, we’ve now reached a point where the US may need to go in and disarm the Norks with a first strike before they perfect their ICBM technology. So China is going to at least sit back and allow us to do what is necessary, right? Nah.

Per the Washington Post, the Chinese state-run newspaper “The Global Times” (which actually speaks for the communists but they try to pretend it’s a free publication because that’s what communists do) reported that the Chinese will not come to the aid of North Korea if they strike first.

“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral,”

Sounds like good news. It’s nice to know that if North Korea launches nukes at us the Chinese will be gracious enough to not protect them. That took real guts.

They then continue with this warning.

“If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.”

In other words, if we attempt to stop the DPRK from obtaining viable, nuclear tipped ICBMs by striking first, China claims they will enter the war to “prevent” us from doing so. If that’s true, the situation just got a whole lot more complicated and worse.

Everyone knows that once Kim Jung Un has perfected his nuclear weapons and delivery systems, there’s no diplomacy that will lead to him relinquishing them. Hence, Susan Rice’s ridiculous diatribe yesterday about how we should just tolerate a nuclear North Korea having missiles that can reach US soil and level Seoul.

What China is doing is attempting to lock in the status quo. They get to keep their buffer (because having a Democratic Korea on their border would just be awful), North Korea gets their ICBMs, and the rest of the world comes up seven at the craps table.

The Washington Post continues with this passage from the reporter, which I thought was a bit odd.

China has become deeply frustrated with the regime in Pyongyang, and genuinely wants to see a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. But it has always refused to do anything that might destabilize or topple a regime which has long been both ally and buffer state. That’s because Beijing does not want to see a unified Korean state allied to the United States right up against its border: indeed, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers died during the 1950-53 Korean War to prevent that happening.

They are so deeply frustrated that they’ve done almost nothing to force change? Makes sense.

Yes, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers died under the leadership of genocidal maniac Mao Zedong some 65 years ago to prevent unification in North Korea. You’d of hoped the Chinese had gotten over their Napoleon complex by now and realized that a nuclear North Korea is more of a threat to them (and the world) than a democracy on their border. Apparently, they haven’t and are content to allow millions of people to starve to death at the hands of a tyrant with nuclear ICBMs instead.

All of this puts the US in a very bad position. If we believe the Chinese are serious with this threat, it means we have to wait for North Korea to strike first, hope our missile defenses work, and then the Chinese will stand back. What this is also means is that the Chinese are blessing and enabling the procurement of nuclear ICBMs to the DPRK.

If you are against a first strike under any conditions, this should still concern you. The Chinese attempting to publicly take that option off the table and pledge protection to Kim Jung Un will only serve to embolden him. If he believes we can not strike him first, he has no deterrent to cease his actions and behavior. Even in the face of a North Korean nuclear strike, the Chinese only say they will “remain neutral.” Think about that for a second.

Thanks for the help guys.