标签： Asia

BEIJING — In a high-stakes diplomatic move that underscores shifting power dynamics in Northeast Asia, Chinese leader Xi Jinping will embark on a two-day state visit to North Korea next week, officials from both nations confirmed Friday. This trip will mark Xi’s first visit to the isolated nuclear-armed country in almost seven years, coming as Beijing seeks to reinforce its long-standing close ties with Pyongyang amid Pyongyang’s growing alignment with Moscow.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has over the past several years deepened partnerships with countries opposed to U.S. influence, most notably expanding military cooperation with Russia to supply conventional arms and troops for Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine. But over the past 12 months, Kim has also prioritized repairing and strengthening economic and diplomatic relations with China — North Korea’s largest trading partner and primary source of international aid.

As North Korea draws closer to Russia, Xi’s upcoming trip is a deliberate effort by Beijing to reaffirm its historic influence over Pyongyang and protect its core strategic interests in the Northeast Asian region, explained William Yang, an Asia analyst with the International Crisis Group.

Official statements from Chinese and North Korean state media confirm the visit will run from Monday through Tuesday. Xi’s most recent trip to North Korea took place back in June 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic prompted Xi to sharply curtail his international travel; his last overseas engagement before this was a November 2024 trip to South Korea for the APEC summit, where he met with U.S. President Donald Trump.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson framed the visit as a step forward for bilateral relations and regional stability. “The traditional friendly and cooperative relations between China and the DPRK have continued to develop in a sound and stable manner, bringing tangible benefits to both countries and their peoples,” said spokesperson Mao Ning, using the official abbreviation for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

The announcement comes just weeks after Xi hosted both U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin for back-to-back high-level meetings in Beijing, and one day after North Korea publicly unveiled a new facility widely believed to be a uranium enrichment plant for nuclear weapons production — a claim Pyongyang has not officially confirmed. During an inspection of the site, Kim laid out plans to rapidly expand North Korea’s nuclear arsenal at an exponential rate.

Regional security experts say the deliberate timing of the facility’s unveiling is no coincidence: Kim aims to lock in North Korea’s status as a recognized nuclear weapons state ahead of Xi’s visit. Kim’s long-term goal is to secure international acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear program in order to pressure the global community to lift harsh U.N. economic sanctions imposed in response to Pyongyang’s banned nuclear and missile development programs. Analysts note Kim ultimately intends to enter arms reduction talks with the U.S. only after securing recognition as a nuclear state, with the goal of winning concessions in exchange for partial nuclear concessions.

Kim has prioritized expanding his country’s nuclear stockpile and delivery systems since high-stakes denuclearization talks with then-U.S. President Trump collapsed in 2019. Trump has repeatedly stated he is open to restoring diplomatic talks with Kim, but Pyongyang has refused to negotiate until Washington drops its demand for full denuclearization as a precondition for any dialogue.

Diplomatic observers around the world will be closely watching the visit to see what position China takes publicly on the long-standing international demand for North Korean denuclearization.

The most recent high-level encounter between the two leaders came back in September, when Kim traveled to Beijing to participate in a major Chinese military parade alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin and other foreign heads of state. At that meeting, Xi and Kim pledged ongoing mutual support and expanded bilateral cooperation.

Both Russia and China, which hold permanent veto power on the U.N. Security Council, have repeatedly blocked efforts by the U.S. and other Western nations to strengthen international sanctions on North Korea over its banned weapons tests. Just last month during Putin’s Beijing visit, the two leaders released a joint statement opposing what they called “foreign policy isolation, economic sanctions, military pressure and other methods of creating threats to the security” of North Korea, per Kremlin readouts.

Kim has in recent years pursued a more assertive foreign policy aligned with the narrative of a multipolar world opposing U.S. hegemony, prioritizing closer ties with nations that stand in confrontation with Washington. This upcoming visit offers China a critical opportunity to re-center its relationship with Pyongyang at a moment when North Korea is increasingly turning to Russia for military and diplomatic support.

In a rare display of bipartisan pushback against the White House’s Middle East military policy, the U.S. House of Representatives approved legislation Wednesday by a narrow 215-208 vote that would restrict President Donald Trump’s ability to continue unauthorized military action against Iran, requiring explicit congressional approval for any sustained hostilities. Four House Republicans broke with their party to support the bill, among them Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie, who will leave Congress in January following his primary defeat last month. Massie lost his race to a pro-Israel-backed candidate in what became the most expensive Republican House primary in U.S. history, a contest shaped heavily by lobbying groups focused on U.S.-Israel relations. Notably, more than a dozen Republican members did not cast a vote Wednesday, absent from the chamber during the roll call. This successful House vote marks a meaningful bipartisan rebuke of Trump’s joint military campaign with Israel against Iran, an effort that has consistently ranked low in public approval among U.S. voters. The legislation will now move to the U.S. Senate, where odds of passage are considered favorable, as the upper chamber previously advanced an identical war powers resolution in earlier procedural steps. As with a similar congressional challenge during Trump’s first term in 2019, when lawmakers passed a War Powers Act resolution demanding he seek congressional approval for U.S. participation in the Saudi-led war in Yemen, political observers widely expect Trump to issue a veto once the bill reaches his desk. In the 2019 case, congressional supporters of the resolution failed to gather the two-thirds majority required to override a presidential veto, a dynamic that is expected to repeat this cycle. In a statement released after the vote, House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks argued that Trump’s military campaign against Iran has fallen far short of the administration’s stated policy goals, saying it has actually moved a diplomatic resolution of Iran’s nuclear program further out of reach. “The war has undermined the credibility of U.S. negotiations and allowed Iran to demonstrate its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz,” Meeks said. “Meanwhile, Americans are paying 50 percent more at the gas pump since the war began and footing the bill for billions per week in costs for a war they overwhelmingly oppose.” Jamal Abdi, president of the National Iranian American Council, framed the House vote as an unambiguous message from the majority of the nation’s elected lawmakers to the White House. “President Trump needs to stop dithering and bring this disastrous war to a close before more harm is done,” Abdi said. “Otherwise, more harm to the nation and more political blowback will follow.” As the chamber weighs in on Iran, House lawmakers are set to consider a separate, more far-reaching war powers resolution Thursday that targets U.S. backing for Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon. Introduced by Michigan Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, the measure would end U.S. participation in what Tlaib calls “the genocidal war on Lebanon,” noting that Washington provides critical logistical, intelligence, and weapons sales support to the Israeli military. In a statement defending her resolution, Tlaib documented the heavy civilian toll of the conflict, writing: “Since early March, Israel’s military has murdered more than 3,500 people in Lebanon, including 128 paramedics and healthcare workers. The Israeli military has focused on bombing ambulances, medical facilities, and homes – forcibly displacing 20 percent of the population. These are all war crimes.” Concurrent with Tlaib’s resolution vote, the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee will hold a markup Thursday of next year’s U.S. defense budget, where a controversial proposal to integrate U.S. and Israeli weapons development, defense technology, and military research programs has drawn intense criticism from progressive and foreign policy watchdog groups. Last week, A New Policy—a think tank founded by two former Biden administration officials who resigned in protest of U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza—issued a statement strongly opposing Section 224 of the budget, the provision that would enact the integration. The think tank argued the provision carries significant risks: “This approach exposes sensitive U.S. capabilities to counterintelligence risk, normalizes technologies developed in contexts of occupation and civilian harm, disadvantages U.S. defense companies’ ability to compete with Israeli competitors, deepens U.S. legal and reputational exposure without clear strategic necessity, and aims to hide continuing U.S. military support to Israel from Congressional and public transparency.” Despite the back-to-back passage of war powers resolutions in the House, political analysts consider it unlikely that Republican members, who are eager to avoid antagonizing Trump, will adjust their approach to long-term U.S. military support for Israel. The decades-long bipartisan consensus in Washington has long held that Israel advances core U.S. strategic interests in the Middle East—a position former President Joe Biden once summed up by saying that if Israel did not exist, the U.S. would need to create it. The current legislative fight centers on the 1973 War Powers Act, a federal law that allows any sitting lawmaker to introduce a resolution withdrawing U.S. armed forces from an unauthorized military conflict. Under the U.S. Constitution, the legislative branch holds the power to declare war and control federal spending, a check intended to prevent the executive branch from unilaterally committing the nation to prolonged conflict. “There are some things about the Constitution [that] are not clear [but] this point is crystal, crystal clear,” constitutional scholar Chris Edelson of the University of Massachusetts Amherst previously told Middle East Eye. Edelson added that the 1973 War Powers Act itself is flawed, however, noting its ambiguous wording makes it difficult to enforce as a check on executive authority, even though the constitutional requirement for congressional approval is clear. In the decades following the 9/11 attacks, the open-ended framework of the global war on terror has allowed successive White House administrations to expand executive power over military decision-making, with the U.S. launching hundreds of air strikes in nations ranging from Somalia to Pakistan without a formal congressional declaration of war. The 1973 law does grant the president 60 days of unilateral military action, after which the commander-in-chief must end hostilities, secure congressional authorization, or request a 30-day extension. The Trump administration has drawn sharp pushback for its legal interpretation of the law amid the current conflict with Iran. On April 30, roughly three weeks after Pakistan brokered a temporary ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, a senior Trump administration official told Reuters that “for War Powers Resolution purposes, the hostilities that began on Saturday, February 28, have terminated.” That claim aligned with comments Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made during a Senate hearing, where he argued that the 60-day presidential war window automatically pauses when a ceasefire is in effect. That interpretation was immediately rejected by Democrats and a handful of congressional Republicans, who argue the administration is abusing the text of the War Powers Act to avoid accountability. In just the last week alone, the U.S. has launched three separate waves of air strikes on Iranian targets, military actions that prompted retaliatory attacks by Iran against U.S. regional partners. That escalation culminated in an attack Wednesday on Kuwait that destroyed an airport terminal, killed an Indian national, and injured more than 60 other people.

In a high-profile development in the U.S. Department of Justice’s ongoing crackdown on undeclared foreign influence operations, American journalist Thomas Pauken II — who has resided in China and held positions with multiple Chinese state-run media outlets since 2010 — entered a guilty plea on Thursday to charges of acting as an undisclosed illegal agent for the Chinese government.

Pauken, who publishes under the pen name Tom McGregor to distinguish himself from his father, a former chair of the Texas Republican Party who ran for governor in the 2000s, is scheduled for sentencing on September 1 at a federal U.S. District Court. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of 10 years behind bars.

This guilty plea marks the most recent entry in a series of federal prosecutions targeting individuals accused of working on behalf of the Chinese government without meeting the legal requirement to disclose their foreign ties to U.S. authorities. Earlier this year, in May, former Arcadia, California mayor Eileen Wang reached a plea deal to admit guilt on identical charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent. Prosecutors allege Wang carried out directives from Chinese officials, including circulating pro-Beijing content to shape U.S. public opinion.

Another high-profile case involving similar accusations involves Linda Sun, a former senior aide to multiple New York governors. Sun faces charges including failure to register as a foreign agent, conspiracy to launder money with her husband, and facilitating illegal visa fraud for Chinese nationals seeking entry to the U.S. She has pleaded not guilty to all counts. A criminal trial against her concluded in December with a mistrial after the federal jury deadlocked and could not reach a unanimous verdict.

Court documents and the investigative affidavit outline the timeline of Pauken’s alleged activities. He was first taken into custody in February, following a trip to Washington D.C. after traveling from China. According to the affidavit, Pauken arranged a meeting with an individual who had previously pursued a position in the Trump White House. During the meeting, he provided the individual with a SIM card and offered a $10,000 payout in exchange for producing policy reports that would ultimately be delivered to Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Investigators allege Pauken positioned himself as an intermediary between Chinese intelligence operatives and U.S.-based contacts who could supply sensitive, and potentially classified, information to Beijing. As of Thursday evening, Pauken’s legal team had not issued any public statement and did not respond to requests for comment on the guilty plea.

Court records show Pauken’s collaboration with Chinese agents dates back to at least 2019. He worked closely with an individual he identified as “Cathy,” whom he acknowledged he believed was affiliated with China’s national security apparatus. Between 2019 and 2025, Pauken received more than $100,000 in payments for the reports he delivered to Cathy, in addition to having all of his U.S. travel expenses fully covered by his Chinese contacts. Cathy explicitly told Pauken that the reports he produced would be read directly by President Xi, the affidavit states.

Pauken was first questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents when he reentered the United States in January 2025. During interviews with CBP and FBI investigators, Pauken admitted he planned to provide the Trump administration job applicant with a Samsung smartphone and a laptop computer. He told agents he was “80% sure” that if the contact was hired for a role in the new administration, they would pass classified U.S. government information to Beijing, according to the affidavit.

After that January interview, federal agents allowed Pauken to proceed with his planned meeting, instructing him to continue the operation as part of the undercover investigation. The contact who met with Pauken later told investigators that while Pauken initially requested only publicly available open-source information, he regularly noted that his Chinese clients sought access to far more sensitive, classified data. The contact also confirmed they never had any intention of cooperating with Pauken’s proposal.

A year after the first encounter, Pauken traveled back to the U.S. to reconnect with the contact, framing the outreach around a potential commercial oil and gas partnership. The pair met at a Washington D.C. restaurant on February 23, then held a second meeting two days later at a local hotel — a meeting that was closely monitored by FBI agents.

During the second meeting, Pauken provided the contact with the pre-arranged SIM card and reiterated the $10,000 offer for weekly reports that would “influence policy and be read by Xi Jinping,” the affidavit records.

U.S. government database checks confirm that Pauken never completed the required registration under the federal Foreign Agents Registration Act, nor did he notify the U.S. Attorney General that he was acting on behalf of the Chinese government, a legal requirement for all foreign agents operating in the U.S.

The Department of Justice also revealed additional allegations against Pauken: he also sold custom intelligence reports to a group of Chinese individuals based in Wuhan, central China. The group sought non-public information about U.S. technology sector developments and internal Justice Department operations, and asked Pauken to recruit a U.S.-based expert to assist them in carrying out cyberespionage operations against American targets.