Secretary of State John Kerry and China’s top diplomat agreed Saturday that nuclear weapons must be removed from the Korean peninsula -- amid North Korean’s heighten rhetoric about missile testing and its nuclear programs.
The agreement came as Kerry visited Beijing in an attempt to get China to join the United States in negotiating with the isolate, totalitarian nation and stabilize the region.
The talks began with Kerry going to China's Great Hall of the People and telling President Xi Jinping that he looked forward to talking about the Korean situation. He later met Premier Li Keqiang and other top communist party figures.
Kerry's visit to Beijing comes a day after he participated in talks with South Korean officials in Seoul and warned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un not to test fire a missile.
"If Kim Jong Un decides to launch a missile, whether it's across the Sea of Japan or some other direction, he will be choosing willfully to ignore the entire international community," Kerry told reporters.
Kerry's trip marks his first foray to the Asia-Pacific as America's top diplomat, spearheading the effort to "pivot" U.S. power away from Europe and the Middle East and toward the world's most populous region and fulcrum of economic growth.
The immediate crisis: a North Korean test of a mid-range missile with a range of up to 2,500 miles that the U.S. believes could happen any day. The long-term problem: a nuclear program that may soon -- or already -- include the capability to deliver a warhead on a missile.
China is the only country with significant leverage over North Korea, a regime that like few in the world actually cherishes its isolation.
The Chinese have dramatically boosted trade ties with their neighbors and maintain close military relations some six decades after they fought side by side in the Korean War. They provide the North with most of its fuel and much of its food aid.
But Beijing, which values stability in its region above all else, clearly has different priorities than Washington.
China's greatest fear is the implosion of North Korea's impoverished state and the resulting chaos that could cause, including possibly millions of refugees fleeing across the border into China.
For that reason, China has in many ways looked past North Korea's bellicose rhetoric and activity, prioritizing the security of Kim's regime -- like his father's and grandfather's previously -- over nuclear proliferation concerns.
"China's main interest in North Korea is not denuclearization; it is ensuring that the North Korean government does not fall," Asia expert John Pomfret wrote in a recent opinion piece.
"While Beijing might be exasperated with the Kim dynasty's uncanny ability to wag China's dog, China will support Pyongyang because the alternative, a North Korean collapse, is worse," he wrote. "While many South Koreans fear the cost of unification with their brothers to the north, China opposes that even more stridently."
China also remains deeply wary of any American military buildup in its backyard, suspicious that the containment effort toward North Korea may be part of the long-term U.S. strategy to expand its influence in the region and even ring in fast-growing China with countries closer to Washington.
U.S. officials say they've gone to great lengths to explain to China that the American objective in North Korea -- at least in the short term -- is not regime change.
While the U.S. abhors the North's human rights record, its regular provocations and military links with other international pariahs such as Iran, it has stressed over years of conversations with Beijing that pushing for North Korean denuclearization could reinforce stability.
Obama administration officials on Friday scrambled to downplay the errant disclosure of a classified portion of an intelligence report finding that North Korea has advanced its nuclear knowledge to the point that it could arm a ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead.
The analysis, disclosed Thursday at a hearing on Capitol Hill, says the Pentagon's intelligence wing has "moderate confidence" that North Korea has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles but that the weapon was unreliable.
A U.S. official in Seoul said Friday it is "premature" to say North Korea has developed the expertise to make a nuclear weapon small enough to put on a ballistic missile.
"It is a very difficult task," the official told Fox News. "They haven't been able to put everything together."
The official also says there is no indication a North Korea missile launch is imminent, saying officials "have not seen activity" that would show that a launch will happen soon, or that the country is planning a large scale attack.
At the White House, spokesman Jay Carney reiterated that North Korea has not demonstrated the capability to deploy a nuclear-armed missile.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/201...na-on-north-korea-amid-missile-test-concerns/
