Trump must offer North Korea peaceful resolution

We may never know exactly how or why American university student Otto Warmbier ended up in a coma while in a North Korean prison, where he’d been sentenced to 15 years’ hard labour for allegedly trying to steal a political poster from a hotel wall. But, regardless of the circumstances, his death on Monday resulted from North Korea knowingly keeping him in a potentially lethal situation.
Warmbier lapsed into coma shortly after his sham trial and was imprisoned for more than a year before Pyongyang agreed to release him to United States authorities. The 22-year-old died six days after being brought home to his family.
As expected, there are growing calls in Congress for the Trump administration to adopt a harder line against Pyongyang and, once again, China is being urged to take action to resolve the situation with North Korea, with which it has a close working relationship. “Secondary sanctions” against Chinese firms doing business with the North have been mooted to try and force its hand.
But the North has shown utter indifference to the rest of the world’s laments and condemnations. Though heavily dependent on Chinese imports, it knows that Beijing also relies on it to serve as a buffer against the democratic, 
US-allied south of the peninsula. 
In one of his tough-guy moments earlier, President Donald Trump vowed that, if China wouldn’t help him corral Pyongyang’s nuclear 
programme in exchange for lighter treatment over a perceived trade deficit, the US would act unilaterally. With Warmbier’s death, it would seem that Trump’s moment of truth might have arrived.
There is a fundamental flaw in Trump’s logic, however. He 
apparently believes that, if China helped push North Korea to the brink of economic disaster through sanctions of its own, the North would stop building nuclear weapons and a missile powerful enough to reach the US mainland. Trump obviously hasn’t realised that China has sound reasons for “preserving” the North. Its collapse could pave the way for reunification with the South – and under Seoul’s control. There is also Pyongyang’s understandable perspective: It wants deterrent nuclear weapons to help guarantee its survival in the face of military invasion. 
Unless the world can convince Pyongyang that by ceasing its belligerence it would be welcome in the international community, then no amount of trade sanctions will have any effect, regardless of how severe or which nations take such action.
Trump refuses to recognise that Beijing would rather fight a trade war with the US than risk the loss of North Korea and the ceding of a reunited Korea to the American sphere of influence. Other solutions are needed, yet, for one, negotiating with the North appears out of the question as long as Kim Jong-un insists on having an intercontinental ballistic missile as a 
bargaining chip once talks begin. And the military option touted just as often is an enormous risk, with the North already capable of striking Seoul and probably Japan too.
President Trump, whose campaign platform shied away from further military adventures overseas, has this far been a tentative participant in the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. He must understand by now that Kim can match him for belligerence, and it’s only getting both of them 
deeper in trouble.