Can China and US cooperate to calm a bellicose Kim Jong Un?

Nikki Haley, in her defiant primary-night pledge to keep challenging Donald Trump despite her loss in New Hampshire, warned of a “world on fire – with a war in Europe and the Middle East, and a huge and growing threat from China.”

But another foreign trouble spot is now preoccupying Washington: the rogue nuclear state of North Korea.

A series of recent bellicose signals from North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has left policymakers pondering a question that has long seemed unthinkable: Behind the bluster, might Mr. Kim actually be gearing up to use his nuclear weapons?

The United States and its Asian allies have been betting on military deterrence to stay his hand. Yet diplomatic and political pressure could prove equally important.

And that’s confronting the West with an uncomfortable truth of 21st-century geopolitics: The nation best positioned to exert a restraining hand on Mr. Kim is the one that Ms. Haley termed a growing threat.

It is China.

The immediate challenge, however, is to decipher what’s going on in North Korea, a task that has taken on increasing urgency in recent days.

International concern over Mr. Kim’s nuclear program is nothing new, although the pace and sophistication of North Korea’s military tests and missile firings are on the rise.

Even more worrying to North Korea policy experts, however, are signs of a major political and diplomatic shift by Mr. Kim.

He has strengthened ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The two leaders met last September, paving the way for what appears to be an expanding military partnership. North Korea has reportedly sent Mr. Putin around a million artillery shells to use against Ukraine, and Mr. Kim is expecting Russian satellite and guidance technology to bolster his weapons development program.

Last week, Mr. Putin accepted an invitation to visit North Korea “at an early date.”

Kim’s dramatic shift

The political shift inside North Korea has been even more dramatic.

Late last year, Mr. Kim used a speech to his rubber-stamp legislature to abandon a core doctrine dating back to his grandfather’s rule during the Korean War of 1950-1953: the goal of eventually reunifying the Korean Peninsula.

He now wants North Korea’s Constitution to be amended to define South Korea as Pyongyang’s most hostile foreign adversary and to provide for “completely occupying, subjugating, and reclaiming” South Korea in the event of war.

That war would be inevitable, he warned in his December speech, if Seoul “violates even one thousandth of a millimeter” of their long-disputed maritime border.

In a symbolic exclamation point this week, the North Koreans appear to have demolished a monument symbolizing reconciliation with the South, the Arch of Reunification, erected in 2000 on the southern edge of the capital during an earlier period of détente.

None of this necessarily means Mr. Kim intends to go to war. He has in the past used warlike rhetoric and weapons tests to attract international attention, not least from the U.S., in his bid to normalize ties and end sanctions.

He may even be positioning himself for the possible return of Mr. Trump, with whom he embarked on a failed effort to trade normalization for eventual denuclearization.

But two of America’s most respected Korea experts – policy and intelligence analyst Robert Carlin and nuclear specialist Siegfried Hecker – weighed in this month to argue that today’s circumstances are very different.

On the 38 North website, which specializes in North Korean affairs, they said Mr. Kim had been stung by the failure of his summits with Mr. Trump and had jettisoned the idea of rapprochement with America.

Calling the situation more dangerous than at any time since the Korean War, they wrote “we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”

So far, the Biden administration seems worried but not alarmed. “We’re watching very, very closely,” U.S. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters this week. But he added, “we remain confident that the defensive posture we’re maintaining on the peninsula is appropriate to the risk.”

China’s leverage

Still, U.S. officials are aware of the 38 North article, amplified across the world’s news media.

Which is why America’s main Asian rival – China – may loom large in efforts to prepare for the possibility that Mr. Carlin and Mr. Hecker are right.

Since the Korean War, Beijing has been North Korea’s closest ally. Chinese leader Xi Jinping isn’t about to abandon that relationship, especially when Mr. Kim has been hedging his diplomatic options by drawing closer to Russia.

But China has leverage: North Korea’s economy would collapse without Chinese support.

It has strategic interests, too. The last thing Beijing wants, as it expands its superpower influence in the region, is a war on its eastern border.

As U.S.-China relations begin to thaw slightly in the wake of President Biden’s meeting with Mr. Xi last year, the stage seems set for a test of their ability to work together.

Mr. Biden has long stressed the need for a managed rivalry, with scope for cooperation on challenges of shared interest. The prime example cited by U.S. officials until now has been climate change.

Now, there could be another: keeping North Korea’s words of war from becoming acts of war.