During the last two months, the crisis on the Korean Peninsula has quickly escalated as North Korea has ramped up its nuclear and ballistic missile testing. In response, the UN Security Council agreed on September 11^th to implement the “toughest-ever” sanctions regime against North Korea. The goal of these sanctions, to quote Joseph DeThomas, is “to slow [its] proliferation programs and steer Pyongyang toward a negotiated reversal of those programs.” Despite this optimistic rhetoric, whether or not this sanctions regime will prove effective in the long run is a large question mark.

To ensure the effectiveness of the new sanctions, the American government seems to have turned its attention to North Korea’s biggest trade partner: China. The U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin intimated that if China fails to comply fully with the primary sanctions against North Korea, he would seek “secondary sanctions”  – sanctions targeting at Chinese state-owned business or other large firms, cutting off Beijing’s access to the U.S. financial system. This hostility toward China is shared by many, and is marked by its lack of necessity. Sanctioning China would only be helpful if it served a purpose, that there was a realistic expectation that doing so would induce China to crack down on North Korea. However, it is far from clear that China would be able to do so, even if they wanted to.

The truth is that North Korea is deeply sceptical of the intentions of its Chinese ally, and in recent years, that scepticism has developed into borderline hostility. Consider this. Since the succession of Kim Jong-Un, the dictator has never visited China as his father and grandfather did. On September 22^nd, North Korea’s central news agency published a commentary that directly criticized China’s state media People’s Daily for its negative view on the peninsula’s nuclearization. Perhaps the most stunning evidence of a Sino-North Korean chill is that President Xi’s new envoy for North Korean nuclear negotiations, Kong Xuanyou, is unable to travel to Pyongyang to do his job because the North Korean’s won’t let him.

Despite the deterioration of the Sino-North Korean relationship, it is virtually impossible for China to embrace a full trade embargo against North Korea. From a national security standpoint, there is only one thing that China fears more than a nuclear North Korea, and that is the collapse of the North Korean regime. If the Kim Jong-Un regime were to fall, millions of north Korean refugees would pour across China’s southern border, destabilizing the region and placing an enormous financial burden on Beijing. It would also mean that the nuclear weapons that Pyongyang already has would be up for grabs, right in China’s back yard. China’s nightmare scenario though, is that a collapse of the North Korean regime would bring about Korean unification on South Korean terms. This would bring one of America’s strongest military alliances right to China’s doorstep, a scenario that Beijing will seek to avoid at all costs.

Thus, China can only afford to go so far in sanctioning North Korea. On the one hand, there is a genuine desire to pressure Pyongyang to abandon their nuclear weapons program, but China cannot afford to push them to the breaking point that causes the regime to collapse. And that is precisely what Trump is asking China to do.

In this context, it is irrational and premature to advocate secondary sanctions on China. Furthermore, there is no telling how much harm secondary sanctions could bring to the United States. China would likely retaliate in some fashion to U.S. sanctions, and it is hard to guess how severe they might be. As of August 2017, the U.S. trade balance with China had already amounted to a staggering -$239 billion. Such economic dependence on China is strengthened by the fact that many of the critical goods for national security, such as rare-earth elements, are almost exclusively imported from China. It would be nothing short of a disastrous scenario if, while North Korea entrenches its position as a nuclear armed state, the United States and China are sacrificing their economies through bitter infighting. Initiating secondary sanctions simply misses the point of sanctions.

Speaking from a pragmatic perspective, enforcing sanctions on China would be virtually impossible. As Alex Capri recently highlighted, Beijing would be unlikely to provide accurate documents regarding the targeted companies, and even if they were to go through, the targeted companies could still conduct their business by establishing shell companies. Rather than spending resources on such impractical secondary sanctions, it is more relevant to focus on the primary task at hand, which is freezing the progress of North Korea’s nuclear program. At this crucial moment, the United States and China cannot afford be distracted by another unhelpful drama.

Washington should pay heed to the fact that China’s North Korean policy is already being reevaluated, rather than issuing unhelpful threats of secondary sanctions. This is evident from China’s support to the most recent round of sanctions at the UN. Notably, North Korea’s test of a hydrogen bomb occurred on the same day that President Xi Jinping presided over the opening of the BRICS summit. This is widely perceived as having been intended to humiliate China, and the insult was ill received. According to Chinese scholar Shen Zhihua, Beijing China should “abandon the stale myths of fraternity that have propped up its support for North Korea … We must see clearly that China and North Korea are no longer brothers in arms, and in the short term there’s no possibility of an improvement in Chinese-North Korean relations.”

China’s increasing impatience with Kim Jong-Un is an opening for the United States to secure China’s cooperation in resolving the crisis on the Korean peninsula. This is the time for the two countries to consider their shared interests, exploring the middle ground on which both of them can stand. This approach holds far more promise than threatening secondary sanctions that are likely to worsen an already tense and rapidly deteriorating situation.