The Wall Street Journal:
China’s leaders are again standing by North Korea after its nuclear test by blocking serious United Nations sanctions and refusing to cut off the flow of fuel, food and arms to Pyongyang. But this time Beijing may pay a strategic price for shielding its unsavory friends, as South Korea moves closer to deploying the U.S.-built Thaad defense system to protect itself from ballistic-missile attacks.
After publicly avoiding the topic for more than a year, President Park Geun-hye raised it last week in a national address. “Taking the North’s nuclear and missile threats into consideration,” she said, “I will review the issue of deploying Thaad here based on security and national interests. That is the bottom line.” It’s also good news for anyone within missile range of Kim Jong Un, which now includes the South Koreans, Japanese, and perhaps also Americans in Hawaii, Alaska and the U.S. West Coast.
Thaad, or Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, can scan across 1,000 kilometers and intercept missiles up to 200 kilometers away, making it far more capable than the Patriot and Aegis systems currently deployed around Korea. It also can integrate with U.S. and Japanese systems elsewhere in the Pacific, creating a layered network to track threats more accurately and target them at multiple points in their flight path.
As for Beijing, it sees any advance in U.S. and allied military capabilities as an obstacle to its ambition to dominate Asia, and has sought to draw Seoul—which does more trade with China than with the U.S. and Japan combined—into its own camp. South Korea would “sacrifice its fast-growing relations with China” by integrating into U.S.-led regional missile defenses, the official Xinhua news agency warned last year. China’s defense minister and other senior officials reinforced the message on visits to Seoul, but their hosts publicly told them to back off.
In recent years Chinese leaders have sometimes signaled annoyance with Pyonyang, calling its nuclear program “selfish” and avoiding high-level summits with Kim Jong Un. But Beijing refuses to punish his increasingly aggressive behavior, so the threat he poses grows.
Increasing numbers of South Koreans wonder if they need their own nuclear deterrent, which Ms. Park also addressed last week. “There are certainly reasons for making such arguments,” she said, but “that would be breaking our promise with the international community.” The South Korean consensus against going nuclear, like that of Japan, may not last. And without stronger missile defenses it certainly won’t…
