“Unlike in the past, we may have made NK back down without getting paid. Whether this would signal a true reversal of momentum remains to be seen. China would try hard to engineer a kind of temporary freeze and sell it as a success, demanding everybody to back down.”
_____________
I was saying this yesterday or the day before. When China announced that it would not support N. Korea if it started a war the jig was up. It means that N. Korea can no longer extort money for threatening its neighbors.
This is a huge win for Trump’s foreign policy team. He has completely changed the nature of the game. He isn’t “kicking the can down the road” He picked up the can and said, “I’m not gonna play.”