The United States is trying to enlist Beijing's support for military
action against Syria by arguing that it would help deter North Korea
from using chemical weapons and threatening security in China's
neighborhood, a U.S. official said Tuesday.
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy James Miller, who was in Beijing
to meet with Chinese officials, said a retaliatory strike against the
Syrian government would uphold the international norm that chemical
weapons must not be used.
Miller said he emphasized to his Chinese counterpart that lowering the
threshold for chemical weapons use could put U.S. troops at risk and
threaten China's security and that of the entire globe.
"I emphasized the massive chemical weapons arsenal that North Korea has
and that we didn't want to live in a world in which North Korea felt
that the threshold for chemical weapons usage had been lowered," Miller
told reporters at a briefing following his talks Monday with Wang
Guanzhong, the Chinese army's deputy chief of staff.
It was strongly in China's interest that there be a "strong response to
Assad's clear and massive use of chemical weapons," Miller said he told
Wang.
China has joined with Russia in blocking action against Syria at the
United Nations Security Council and strongly opposes strikes on Syria by
the U.S. or its allies in response to an Aug. 21 chemical attack near
Damascus that the U.S. says killed more than 1,400 people. Beijing has
called for political talks to end the violence that has killed an
estimated 100,000 people and displaced 2 million more.
While China remains North Korea's most important ally, it has repeatedly
expressed concerns about the regime's threat to regional stability and
has sought to coax Pyongyang back to six-nation nuclear disarmament
talks — so far unsuccessfully. Beijing joined the international
community in tightening sanctions against the North over a banned
missile launch and nuclear test that again raised the specter of armed
conflict on the Korean Peninsula just across the Yellow Sea from China.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel warned recently that North Korea
possesses a massive stockpile of chemical weapons that threatens South
Korea and the 28,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
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