EDITORIAL: Chinese checkers

OPINION:

President Trump still wants to call Xi Jinping a friend, but relations between Washington and Beijing have slipped in slow motion from tension to crisis. Mr. Xi got a brief holiday at Mar a Lago with several rounds of golf out of his summit with Mr. Trump, giving not much in return.

The high stakes game has been obscured by dramatic domestic news and the war of words between Mr. Trump and the media. The issues dividing the United States and China thrive at every level, political, economic and military.

The crisis deepened when North Korea dispatched two missiles whistling over Japan to a splashdown in the Pacific, the first one last month and the second this month. Given North Korea’s difficulty in solving navigational problems, the threat of an accident grows. The United States is committed to responding to an attack on Japan by treaty, the keystone of its security system.

Washington looks to Beijing to force the rocket man in Pyongyang to discontinue the search for weapons of mass destruction, and his colorful threats to incinerate America. Theoretically, China could do that with its dominance of the tiny and vulnerable North Korean economy. Last year China bought two-thirds of North Korea’s exports, worth $2.6 billion.

Although China voted this month with the United Nations Security Council to further sanction North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, it’s not at all certain that Beijing will join the enforcement of the U.N. restrictions, although it did follow the Security Council vote with an announcement that it was cutting shipments of oil to Pyongyang immediately.

But the senior political and military leadership in Beijing, perhaps including Mr. Xi himself, is not happy with getting tough on Kim Jong-un. They are committed to maintaining close ties between China and North Korea. China fears putting pressure on the Pyongyang government lest it collapse, inevitably leading to reunification with South Korea, and an alliance with the United States.

A disruption of trade ties with China, as a consequence of pushing China, would inevitably harm the American economy. Of a total trade of more than $3.6 trillion, America’s $500 billion in Chinese trade accounts for almost half of its worldwide $737 trade deficit.

China has declined Washington’s offer to take a more conciliatory view of other trade issues — the imbalance, intellectual property rights, processed food imports, among others — if they are linked to forcing the North Koreans to behave themselves.

It’s all very complicated. China has been exporting capital to the United States since the year 2000 with below-cost prices on thousands of household products, wiping out 5 million American manufacturing jobs. China now holds $1.09 trillion worth of U.S. government bonds. This has not so far given China undue economic influence over the United States. This reflects the sage wisdom of British economist John Maynard Keynes, that “if you owe your bank a hundred pounds [sterling], you have a problem. But if you owe a million, the bank has the problem.”

Mr. Trump’s $700-billion renovation of the U.S. military is getting underway as Beijing continues aggression in the Japan Sea, where it has taken over islands returned to Japan at the end of American occupation, building naval and air bases on coral strands a thousand miles south of continental China. These lie athwart one of the world’s major sea lanes, and China has opened old sores on the Himalayan border with India to support base-building in Pakistan at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, where it proposes to begin a pipeline across the country to western China.

All should be a caution for Mr. Trump not to count too much on friendly words. When Queen Victoria asked Lord Palmerston, her prime minister, who, exactly, were England’s permanent friends, he replied: “Nations have no permanent friends. Nations have permanent interests.”