Osnos explains:
Over the years, I’ve spoken to many of the American diplomats involved in negotiations with China and North Korea, and their consensus is clear: for all of North Korea’s instability, China still prefers the status quo to a post-Kim North Korea that could very well end up under the control of Seoul or Washington. So China and the U.S. remain far apart. “Our threat assessments are fundamentally misaligned,” a former American negotiator told me.
From China’s perspective, even if Kim is losing control of the situation, he has not lost it yet, and so China considers anything short of that to be alarmist. As long as North Korea is not threatening Beijing, this is a prisoners’ dilemma we will be facing on our own.
To appease China and hasten North Korea’s end, Beinart wants to America “to pledge formally that America will never station troops on what is now North Korean soil”:
Beijing keeps propping up Pyongyang. According to a February article in Foreign Policy by Fudan University’s Shen Dingli, there are three main reasons. The first is that China fears North Korea’s implosion could send tens or even hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing across the two countries’ 800-mile-long border. The second is that North Korea’s collapse might prompt the millions of ethnic Koreans living on the Chinese side of the border to try to secede and join their kinsmen in a reunified Korea. The third is that if America’s ally South Korea swallows its northern twin, China could suddenly find itself with the U.S. military on its southeastern border.
There’s little the Obama administration can do to allay Beijing’s first two fears. But it can do a lot to allay the third.
The Dish 