China has realized it has limited time to rein in North Korea's nuclear program through negotiations and is open to further sanctions against Pyongyang, a senior U.S. State Department official said on Friday.
Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary for east Asian and Pacific affairs told a news briefing in Beijing that China understood that the U.S. viewed the North Korea situation as an urgent "time-limited problem set".
"So they know now that they don't have, I think, as much time to try to bring the North Koreans to the table to get their calculus changed and get them to the negotiating table," she said. "And I think that has lent some urgency to their measures."
Pyongyang has conducted dozens of missile tests, the most recent last Sunday, and tested two nuclear bombs since the start of 2016, in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. It says the program is necessary to counter U.S. aggression.
Iraq got suckered into being a US proxy against Iran before and it didn't work out too well.