China is messing with Bush, and Bush doesn't know it

By now, you are all probably getting sick of me blogging about this.  But if I have to preach it until I am an old man, I will.  When you let China control our fate with North Korea, you are simply giving Kim Jong IL's authoritarian regime more time to develop nuclear weapons, and you are also increasing China's ability to divert U.S. attention away from their effort to annex Taiwan.  The only way to end the standoff on the Korean Peninsula so that it serves the United States' interest and not China's interest is by opening up bilateral talks with North Korea.

Don't believe me yet?  As I have been predicting for the last month, China is trying to stall any effort to solve the standoff with North Korea.  Yesterday China issued a statement opposing a UN resolution by Japan, which was backed by the U.S., that would impose sanctions on North Korea:

"China believes this draft resolution represents an overreaction, andif adopted, it will cause a further escalation of the problem," foreignministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular briefing.

Let me say that I do not support sanctions against North Kora -- but that is not the issue.  The issue has to do with the fact that China is using every roadblock possible to delay a conclusion to the conflict on the Korean Peninsula.  Standing in the way of Japan and the United States, whether by opposing strong action at the UN or by convincing the U.S. not to engage in direct talks with North Korea, is the Chinese game plan.  They have spent the week smearing the Japanese government for being angry that the madman from North Korea launched a missile that landed right off their coast -- talk about irrational!  China added to their delaying tactics by meeting with the North Koreans yesterday and then announcing that they had made no progress.

If Clinton were in power, he would have figured out five years ago that it is a dumb foreign policy strategy to allow China, our number one economic competitor in East Asia, to have so much of a say in U.S. national security.  Why does hardly any Democrat, with the exception of a former few Clinton officials, expose Bush for mortgaging our East Asia sphere of influence to China?  If any liberal president invoked the East Asia policy we are invoking now, Republicans would accuse the Democrats of appeasement.  It would be all over talk radio.  We need to stop letting China and Russia gain the upper hand in our nonproliferation effort on the Korean Peninsula, and instead engage proactively in bilateral discussions with the Koreans.

There!  Now you all have put up with yet another one of my rants about North Korea!  Sorry.  But after studying post-Cold War U.S.-Korean relations at the University of Washington in 2005, it is difficult to just stand on the sidelines while the Democrats fail to question Bush's open-ended policy.

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Other blogs writing about this issue: Global Paradigms, China Confidential, Shooting the Messenger, Martha Speaks, Hot Air, A Discerning Texan, A Call to Action, Impolitical, Geoffosphere, Grouchy's Liberaltopia.