Don’t let Pyongyang exploit mistrust between China and US, ex-US official says

Beijing should work with Washington to prevent Pyongyang from exploiting mistrust between the United States and China to further North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, a former senior US official said.

Daniel Russel, who stepped down in March as US assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said in an interview that negotiations on halting and scaling back Pyongyang’s nuclear ambition – not nuclear brinkmanship – are the only way to allow North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to get what he wants – security.

“We’re going to see more missile tests and nuclear tests [conducted by North Korea] unless we are working together…with the support of neighbours and [the] international community, to convince Kim that his strategy is simply not going to work,” Russel told the South China Morning Post.

Describing the effort to rein in North Korea’s accelerating nuclear threat as a “psychological battle”, Russel, a senior fellow at the Asia Society in New York who still is an officer in the US foreign service, said prospects for negotiating a breakthrough agreement on denuclearisation with the Kim regime were admittedly “poor”.

However, “as long as the US and China, as well as South Korea, remain united, we should be able to prevail”, he said. “But if we get separated, [and] then North Korea is able to exploit the differences between us, then we’re going to face a real problem.”