The Trump administration has said that its goal is to isolate North Korea, in the hope that pressure through sanctions will compel it to renounce its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and seek dialogue with the United States. But China, North Korea’s largest trading partner and chief political benefactor, dismisses that idea. Beijing believes that for Washington to convince Kim Jong Un to come to the negotiating table, it must assure him that regime change is off the table. On several occasions, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said precisely that, but contradictory messaging from the White House has sent conflicting signals to North Korea—and China—about America’s intentions.

In a recent meeting with a group of U.S. reporters in Beijing, Tong Zhao, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy said that, if backed into a corner, the North Korean regime isn’t going to back down. “It is more likely to enhance its military threats because for North Korea this is basically a game of risk-taking between Pyongyang and Washington,” he said.

North Korea has a long history of provocation in the face of what it regards as threats from the United States and South Korea. It has warned of a “merciless strike” in retaliation against their joint military exercises, and said it would accelerate its nuclear-weapons program in response to the deployment in South Korea of the Terminal High Altitude Thermal Defense System, a U.S. anti-missile defense network. It has also warned that it would strike the U.S. territory of Guam after Trump vowed to bring “fire and fury” against North Korea if it threatened America or its allies. But within these threats, Chinese analysts said, lies a fundamental disagreement between the United States and China over the nature of the threat posed by North Korea.

Chinese experts believe North Korea’s leaders pursue nuclear weapons because they feel genuinely threatened by the United States and South Korea. In a Brookings Institution strategy paper published in May 2017, Fu Ying, a retired diplomat who represented China in multilateral talks on North Korea’s nuclear weapons, wrote that in the early 1990s, Pyongyang felt especially vulnerable following the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main diplomatic and financial benefactor during the Cold War. Around the same time, China opened diplomatic relations with South Korea, the North’s nemesis, while the United States and the South continued their military exercises, which the North viewed as a provocation. Feeling isolated, North Korea began its pursuit of nuclear weapons in earnest.

The view from Washington is quite different. Government officials and experts alike believe North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear weapons has aggressive and offensive objectives. Pyongyang, they believe, will use its nuclear weapons to push U.S. forces out of South Korea and then force reunification of the Korean Peninsula on its terms. Trump administration officials said that North Korea must first commit to giving up its existing nuclear weapons (experts estimate the country has enough fissile material to build 20 such weapons). That position is a nonstarter in Pyongyang, and Beijing is sympathetic to its view.