North Korea

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, with North Korea test firing ballistic missiles last week, you might ask: Where is the United Nations?

There are a series of international sanctions aimed at North Korea's nuclear program. These sanctions are in accordance with the U.N. Security Council's regulations passed in the wake of previous North Korea nuclear tests and ballistic missile tests. There is a U.N. Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea that is charged with monitoring these sanctions on North Korea.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that an expert panel working on a report for this U.N. committee has faced roadblocks from Chinese representatives, supported by Russia in some circumstances.

China and Russia supported these sanctions, but now they appear to be running interference for North Korea so North Korea can continue to violate the reason these sanctions were put on.

The expert panel is supposed to report the facts. And then by reporting the facts, they aren't representing national governments and shouldn't be representing national governments.

It is blatantly clear that the Chinese representative is doing the bidding for the Chinese Communist Party. The footnotes with dissenting comments are anonymous, but there is no doubt where they came from. In other words, China.

In one case, it is as petty as insisting that a reference to a company with ``Taiwan'' in its name should include an assertion that Taiwan is a province of China. That is something you hear from China all the time. Everyone knows China is obsessed with making others pretend that Taiwan is not an independent country.

That leaves no doubt where these objections are coming from. You can draw a very straight line back to General Secretary Xi. The bigger problem is that other objections seem designed to minimize and paper over the violations of these sanctions by North Korea. That is as good as confirmed by suspicions that China has been helping North Korea evade the sanctions that China supported in the first place and still claims to support.

General Secretary Xi probably thinks that letting North Korea run wild with its nuclear weapons program would cause problems for the West. And we all know that the West is very concerned about North Korea's developing of nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver.

General Secretary Xi is very shortsighted when he takes that view that he wants to cause problems for the West by helping North Korea, because it can't be in China's interest to have a nuclear-armed and unstable regime as a next-door neighbor, which North Korea is a nuclear-armed and a nonstable regime.

General Secretary Xi's strategy of sowing chaos is playing with fire. That is why all of this activity going on in the U.N. and China trying to cover up the violations of the sanctions is dangerous not just for the U.S. interests, but it is very dangerous for China and the world.

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