Charles Burton, an associate professor of Political Science at Brock, wrote a piece recently published in The Conversation about China’s position amidst global tensions after recent Canada-U.S. meetings about North Korea.

Burton writes:

This week’s foreign ministers’ meeting on security and stability on the Korean Peninsula in Vancouver may have done global tensions more harm than good. If so, China will wait patiently to collect its geo-political winnings.

And for Canada, the main legacy of the forum may be increasingly thorny relations with the world’s emerging superpower.

When the Vancouver conference concluded earlier this week, the takeaway was Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson imploring all United Nations members — including the absent Russia and China — to fully implement the UN Security Council’s latest stringent sanctions designed to squeeze the North Korean economy with “maximum pressure.”

As Tillerson emphasized: “The purpose of the maximum pressure campaign is intended to cause North Korea to engage as a credible negotiating partner in addressing a pathway to a denuclearization of the peninsula.”

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