North Korea’s July 4 launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile has highlighted once again both the extent to which Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program and aggressive behavior is destabilizing the Asia Pacific region and the relative impotence of efforts to date designed to respond. Although North Korean nuclear weapons seem primarily designed to ensure regime survival,
Donald Trump’s national security documents frame China as the United States’ greatest long-term threat. This declaration caps a historic shift in America’s strategic disposition toward China. From the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1979, until roughly 2016, when it became clear Chinese Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping would double down on Leninism, Washington
The rise of modern China is arguably the greatest and most consequential story of our time. And as Frank Dikotter highlights in his new book, China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower, it is a tale of greed, violence, and inequality. The great historian of the Mao era has now moved to our own time, and he comes to the present day with a warning. By banking on the Chinese Communist Party somehow liberalizing, the West has made one of the gravest miscalculations in modern history. One would have to go back to the policy of appeasement in the 1930s to find something similar and even then, it must be noted Communist China today is vastly more powerful economically and technologically than either Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. As Dikotter ably documents, the largest police state in world history, increasingly bellicose, stands on the bones of its people. And we can no longer afford to pretend otherwise.
On March 25, the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un arrived in Beijing in an armored train for talks with Chinese Communist Party Secretary Xi Jinping, the first known time he traveled outside his country since his father and predecessor died in December 2011. The visit was a bombshell: Relations between Beijing and Pyongyang had soured in recent years as the Chinese became more