Last week, Air China suspended flights to North Korea-- indefinitely. A few days later China shut down the main road into the country, using "maintenance" on the Friendship Bridge over the Yalu River as the excuse. That bridge carries 80% of the tare between the two countries. And 30,000 North Korean workers have been ordered to return to North Korea.
Relations between China and North Korea have become strained because of Beijing’s implementation of sanctions against North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes.Pyongyang has begun to pull back thousands of its nationals working in China, well ahead of Beijing’s deadline to close all North Korean businesses or joint venture by January 8 next year.
Trump is claiming credit, while pressing China for more. Is this actually a success for Trump in the foreign policy arena? Over the weekend The Atlantic's Uri Friedman looked at the dangers inherent in Trump's reckless and unorthodox foreign policy. He wrote that "By issuing “diplomatic pronouncements” on Twitter and pronouncing actual diplomats irrelevant, Hillary Clinton says, Trump poses 'a clear and present danger to our country and to the world.' Trump, the Republican Senator Bob Corker warns, acts 'like he’s on a reality show' and 'doesn’t realize that we could be heading towards World War III with the kinds of comments that he’s making' about foreign policy, which should be left 'to the professionals.' 'We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear-weapons strike [against North Korea] that is wildly out of step with U.S. national-security interests,' Corker’s Democratic colleague Chris Murphy recently cautioned during a Senate hearing. In the same hearing, a former Defense Department official testified that he 'would be very worried about a miscalculation based on the continuing use of [Trump’s] Twitter account with regard to North Korea.' Trump, Murphy told me not long ago, 'has shown an enthusiasm for military force against North Korea in his Twitter account that is extraordinary.' But if danger is crudely measured by how many people die in military conflicts as the result of a president’s policies, the dangers posed by Trump’s atypical behavior remain hypothetical at the moment. Leaving aside his genuinely unprecedented moves in trade and diplomacy, the wars that Trump is currently commanding were initiated by his predecessors. He has not (yet) started new conflicts with foes like Iran or North Korea or radically transformed existing ones. When it comes to the real use of military force, rather than the tweeted kind, Trump has acted rather like a 'normal' U.S. president-- only more so, as he’s escalated some conflicts he inherited. And yet it’s his abnormal actions, which so far haven’t killed anyone, that seem to scare his detractors most."
This intense focus on the discontinuities in Trump’s handling of foreign policy has eclipsed debate over the continuities; ruptures in style often obscure the enduring substance of problematic policies. When, for instance, four U.S. special-operations soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger, the political circus surrounding Trump’s calls to the soldiers’ families sucked up most of the attention-- not the wisdom of continuing the Obama-era policy of sustaining so many low-grade, far-flung counterterrorism campaigns that Congress can’t keep track of them all....If Trump’s aggressive dealings with Kim Jong Un are making war between two nuclear-weapons states significantly more likely, it’s hard to overstate the risks of that approach; millions could die in such a conflict. But in evaluating the Trump administration’s policy on North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program, it’s also important to keep the aggression in perspective. While it’s astounding and unsettling to see the president of the United States call North Korea’s leader “short and fat,” no one died in the making of that tweet. Thae Yong Ho, one of the highest-ranking officials ever to defect from North Korea, recently told me that he thinks past American presidents were too “gentle” with North Korean leaders and Trump’s unpredictable tactics are actually keeping North Korea’s provocations in check. Han Sung Joo, a former South Korean foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, told me that Trump’s tough rhetoric, which he interpreted as the president “expressing his views at the moment” rather than the “result of serious strategic thinking,” has succeeded in pressuring China to do “a little more” to isolate North Korea.The Trump administration “has handled things in a ... measured and firm way that will prevent North Korea from miscalculating,” Han argued. “I do not know if it is wise to push North Korea to the extent they feel they have to react in a non-peaceful way. But North Korea has shown some degree of restraint as far as deeds are concerned, although their rhetoric has also been quite blustery.”“The most important thing is not to make the situation worse,” he continued. “We can’t expect to resolve the problem in a short period of time. But we have to patiently work on it while all the time maintaining deterrence and defense capabilities, and that the United States [under Trump] has done.” “So far,” Han noted, “the present U.S. administration hasn’t really made any major mistakes.”
If that's the case, it's certainly despite Trump, not because of him. Remember, the Trump Organization doesn't own any golf courses or money laundering facilities disguised as resorts or office complexes in North Korea.
