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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