Beijing Must Change Pyongyang’s Regime, Not Just Its Behavior

President Trump yesterday employed powerful economic warfare weapons against North Korea in the hope of avoiding the need to use the kinetic kind.  Taken together, they seem likely to increase dramatically prospects for an outcome that years of pleas, negotiations, UN sanctions and outright appeasement have failed to do –  namely, inducing China actually to change the behavior of a North Korean regime best understood as its “sock puppet.”

In fact, Beijing responded immediately to Mr. Trump’s sanctions on foreign banks doing business with North Korea, lest its own financial institutions be cut off from U.S.-dominated markets and institutions.  The North’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, has panicked, threatening to detonate a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere over the Pacific.

The time has come for China to change more than its ally’s malevolent behavior. Now, it must change the regime in North Korea.