If China fails to intervene in North Korea, US will take action, says Antony Blinken
America’s top diplomat on Friday said the US would take action if China declined to intervene in the military deployment of North Korea, a hermit state and Beijing ally the US has long accused of playing a destabilising role in East Asia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he has told his Chinese counterparts that Washington wants Beijing’s help in handling the North Korean “nuclear programme” and denuclearising the Korean peninsula. He said the US would bolster its defence alliances with Japan and South Korea if China refrained from intervening.
Directing his remarks at China during a fireside chat at the Aspen Security Forum in the US state of Colorado, Blinken said: “We believe that you have unique influence and we hope that you’ll use it to get better cooperation from North Korea.
“But if you can’t or if you won’t, then we’re going to have to continue to take steps that aren’t directed at China but that China probably won’t like because it goes to strengthening and shoring up not only our own defences but also those of South Korea and Japan and a deepening of the work that all three of us are doing together.”
Beijing has criticised Washington’s defence alliances in East Asia, viewing them as efforts to monitor or contain China’s military. Seoul and Tokyo resent Pyongyang’s military tests, which sometimes take place near their airspace.
North Korea has conducted “one missile launch after another”, Blinken said. On July 12, Pyongyang carried out a second flight test of its Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile.
China, North Korea’s Communist neighbour, has offered it fuel and food aid in the past and brokered international dialogue on the country’s militarisation.
Blinken’s comments followed the disappearance on Tuesday of Private Travis King, an American soldier who ran into North Korea during a civilian tour near the border with South Korea.
The secretary of state said he had no updates on King’s whereabouts but that “there are certainly concerns” he might be subjected to torture in North Korea.
The US is now working to anchor a declining Sino-American relationship, Blinken said on Friday. He, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and President Joe Biden’s special climate envoy John Kerry have all visited China within the past two months.
“It was important for us to put some stability back into this relationship, to put a floor under it, to make sure that the competition we’re clearly in does not veer into conflict, and that starts with engagement,” the diplomat said.
Blinken said China could help stem production of the illegal drug fentanyl that reaches the US through Mexico, control global climate change, and allow for the release of American detainees.
“If we weren’t engaged, we would be rightfully tagged with being irresponsible,” he said.
But challenges persist, and Blinken said on Friday the US had started a formal investigation into reports of Chinese hacking into US government emails.
That's a criticism?
Constructive criticism maybe 😉
But criticizing a military alliance by pointing out that it hems in a potential adversary is like criticizing water by pointing out that it's wet.
I'm more curious about this stuff with US soldier Travis King. He ran into North Korea while visiting the border from South Korea? The US claims they are worried he is being tortured, but I'd be more worried about what he's voluntarily giving over to NK.
He's a low-ranking soldier right? Would he have much intel of value to tell NK about?
He can tell them where they can buy a Mustang at an outrageous interest rate
Who knows? That's partly why I'm interested.
Nuclear weapons are an existential threat and we ought to worry about their proliferation but at the same time they prevent belligerents from attacking each other and creating the conditions for MAD. However, it's a bit rich for nucelar armed states to forbid other states from the development of these weapons, especially America, who are the only state to use them in war.
Don't worry, lads. When the US says "intervene", they really meant to say "We will add more restrictions/sanctions regarding trading stuff with our fellow broskis. That'll show em."
Oh god I hope not. I am sick of war. But the MIC needs its fucking wars so it can be profitable.
Really? US is essentially asking China to curb NK nuclear threats (which they essentially helped them to achieve that capability) or US will be forced to boost SK and Japan defenses.
NK is all bark and no bite. They are rational enough to know that actually using nuclear weapons would mean the end of their regime. The threaten to use for leverage, that's all
Yet they are not rational enough to fire rockets flying over Japan every other week. The thing with them is that until it explodes it is only a guess what the payload is. The thing that stops them from reacting is that they calculate trajectory and see that it goes into the sea. This is very risky, because a mistake could start a hot war, even if the payload weren't explosives.
They bite well enough when they have the chance. For example, the Lazarus Group, a North Korean hacking team, stole ~$600 million in a single cryptocurrency hesit. In total they've probably stolen over $2 billion, and that's no doubt continuing to grow.
They've developed weapons-grade hacking technology that they readily employ, it wouldn't be a good idea for them to have weapons-grade nuclear technology.
Their threats are aimed at their own citizens. It's all political theater. Look at all the horrible things that the evil Americans want to do to our people, but through our strong military and nuclear threats we are able to hold them off and protect your lives! It's how the Kim Jong regime holds onto power. As long as they're protecting their citizens from us, their citizens are much less likely to overthrow their dictators. Putin uses a lot of the same tactics against his own people.
There's citizens have no information from the outside world, so when North Korea launches nuclear missiles over Japan and South Korea, who do you think picks it up on radar? Hint it's not the North Koreans
That's literally all I've heard in the USA my entire life.
"We're protecting you from:
Soviet CommunistsArab TerroristsIllegal AliensCommunist ChinaISISPutin's Russia"I guess when your country can't go 2 years without starting a war somewhere, you get used to it. -
NK is not a nuclear threat unless someone decides to attack it. The biggest threat in the world is the US that starts a new war every few months because it can't ever NOT be at war.
After Libya you have to be completely bonkers if you think the anyone is going to believe the US means well when it asks people to give up their nukes.
Exactly the same thing could be said about Russia and Ukraine.
I agree.
Let's be more serious: the threat is not one flag or another, it's the whole system of power that is rooted in corruption and greed. US wage more wars than others states because they sit on top of the pyramid, in their position any other nation would do the same because they are all built on the same rotten principles
So your belief is that China is just a few years away from building a thousand bases all around the world and starting yearly wars for profit then?
I don't agree with you. The military industrial complex in america is unique to america and unique throughout most of history, it is a force that drives the country to war for its own benefit over and over and over. Its own presidents warned of it growing and the need to stop it before it got too bad long ago. Private military industry would have to be equally large and equally as politically powerful in order for it to reoccur elsewhere. I don't believe that is the case anywhere else in the world currently, although I am not clear on the state of Russia's weapons industries and their pursuit of contracts so I'm willing to yield that they might become this in future if they were to grow in economic size.
I fundamentally don't agree that just "being the richest" makes you start constant streams of wars for profit. These are caused by various interests being pursued that create a variety of political forces. The reason it occurs in america so much is the political power of the MIC.
Thousands bases all around the world are there because the local governments allowed it to begin with. Criminals don't have a country they exists all over the world.
lmao "criminals" being anyone the US decides is against american interests
This is top tier nationalism. You're trying to tell me Iraqis want the US bases there? What about Guantanamo? You think Cuba wants the US occupying a part of its country with an illegal blacksite it uses for torturing people? Pull the other one mate.
Why are you calling it nationalism and not nazism, stalinism or americanism? Because nationalism doesn't have a flag it's a nations thing. I can't talk about Cuba because i don't live there but in Europe as of today military bases are in place because all europeans governments are ok with these. Corruption doesn't have a flag. USA bribes europe, if europe were stronger they would be the one bribing USA government to be his colony.
Because nationalism is the accurate term for it and nationalism is a disease.
Cuba isn't "bribed" to have america occupying part of its sovereign land. They have been told to fuck off. They will not leave. Same in Iraq. Same in countless other countries. It has nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with americans simply doing what they want with their military because "just try and stop us".
It is the other way around. They can cause a damage especially to SK and Japan, but the nuclear weapons won't help them once they do as they just have limited number of them.
This news is, because they like to fly their rockets over other countries.
I think you miss the value of nuclear weapons as a defensive tool. Nuclear weapons completely prevent any foreign military attempt to invade your country because any invading army can be resoundingly obliterated. Even if you can eliminate the ability to launch them it doesn't matter because they can easily be hidden and used inside a city against an invading army after they move in.
In terms of strategy there is literally nothing you can do to attack a country with nukes. Your invading army WILL get nuked. That's the point. The fact they only have a small number is irrelevant to their defensive value.
States and governments are a threat to humanity
Maybe nato should drop a giant lawn dart inside of a 30m radius target near a major military base every few days. Just keep doing that until they get the point that we all are putting up with them and they aren’t a real threat.
Wasn't this meeting supposed to be about calming tensions between China and the United States (after months of the Biden administration acting plainly hostile and spreading laughable stories of Chinese spy weather balloons - and then quietly backtracking afterwards) ???
They go to a meeting to calm tensions and then America's top diplomat gives an ultimatum to his Chinese counterpart saying that unless China intervenes against its oldest ally, the United States will dump even more arms into the hands of its vassals next door?
Smooth diplomacy there america. No wonder everything is going to ratshit.
Tony Blinken is emblematic of the pitiful condition of the State Department today. A large but ineffective diplomatic bureaucracy that has long since stopped believing in the virtues of diplomacy. One that accepts (if not embraces) its inferiority and gladly submits to to the all-powerful Pentagon. And an institution that views granting concessions to those labelled its enemies, or even empathising with them, to be unthinkable.
Eric Hobsbawm described Europe as stumbling into the First World War for the simple reason that the mechanics of great power competition left none able to contemplate backing down from an escalating confrontation (even when it sparked from a relatively banal royal assassination) even when doing so was necessary to prevent an apocalypse. It is people like Blinken who would have us stumble into a nuclear apocalypse.
I'm not a religious person, but this shit makes me pray for more competent diplomats than Blinken.
They will do that anyway. Plus new military bases in the Philippines. But dprk super evil for building defense capabilities within its borders, ok. But all that and also the intense militarization of Japan, for example, can be seen as a direct result of the desire to have functioning self defense. If you cannot see that, look at the past and research what Japan did in Korea, its not pretty, really, really, really not pretty.
Ye, and there certainly are concerns that they clone him and mix his DNA with killer dolphins to create an unstoppable super soldier. How come thousands defect from dprk and no one cares, and those people get TV shows and whatnot (used for propaganda), but if one guy does the opposite even the highest US officials cannot resist conspiracy theories?
Literal bullyspeak. If you forgive me the anthomorpization, that's the language someone uses when beating his wife and then looks for reasonable ways to stop the escalation of the abuse.
And that leads me to also not give any value to statement such as
While that is true, everything points to the conclusion that from the side of the US the desire to escalate things is far greater than finding solutions for any problems. Like, who benefits from all the now all so en vogue China-blame regarding the fentanyl crisis, how many lives does it save? China has tried to control (regulate) that substance since 2019. Imagine how many deaths could have been avoided if there had been better relations and cooperation between those countries.
Meanwhile, the US openly suggests that it's bad that poppy production in Afghanistan has stopped.
I have no idea what the context of that quote relates to, but poppies are used in things other than heroin too (medical uses)