Linking Iran and North Korea through Chinese influence

By Dave Anderson:

The United States and China are the two major external powers with vested interests on the Korean peninsula.  However, those vested interests only have a small intersecting set of commonality of managing the decline of North Korea.  Complete chaos is in no one's interests. These areas of commonality are limited, and other forces are also at play.  Let me quote a portion of the Nelson Report:

With the US already using maximum leverage on China to keep it on board for the UN/Iran nuclear standoff, how far China will be willing to accommodate the US and S. Korea on N. Korea, a country of genuine strategic concern to Beijing, is the cause of pessimism amongst most analysts.

The US has little leverage to use on China besides a naked appeal to Chinese self-interest in not having a bloody war on their eastern border, potential nuclear fall-out issues, large scale refugee flows, restrictions on Yellow Sea maritime trade patterns due to submarine and mining activity, and eventually a US ally sitting on the opposite bank of the Yalu River. 

Countering this appeal is the argument that the current situation in Iran has already exhausted the political capital of the Chinese elites who favor "responsible" engagement with the world or at least an acceptance of an American sphere of interest in the Middle East which China can not effectively challenge (yet) and that these consequences are either low probability events or acceptable even if they occur.  

The Korean crisis is slowly escalating.  South Korea's president has dramatically curtailed trade and has ordered a series of military readiness exercises.  North Korean merchant and fishing ships will be intercepted and boarded if they are in South Korean claimed waters.  Most importantly, he is calling for regime change in the language of humanitarianism.  Regime preservation is a massive motivating factor for the North Korean leadership and elites, so this is a massive red flag and escalation of rhetoric.  The Nelson Report (via the Agonist) has the relevant passage:

Nothing has changed over the last sixty years. It is a country still holding onto an empty ambition of forcefully reuniting the Korean Peninsula under the banner of communism. It is a country that still believes in making threats and committing terrorist activities. North Korea's goal is to instigate division and conflict.

For what reason and for whom is it doing what it does?
As compatriots, I am truly ashamed.
It is now time for the North Korean regime to change.
Today, no country can maintain peace and make economic development on its own. It is imperative to conduct exchanges and cooperate with the world and to join the path that everyone else is taking. It is time to look at reality and make that courageous decision. It is time for the North Korean regime to start thinking about what is truly good for the regime itself and its people.

The rhetoric of regime change, humanitarian or otherwise is a massive escalation. North Korea has a history of successfully over-reacting and over-escalating as a deterrent against sanctions and punishments short of war. Given the tensions on the Korean peninsula, mutual over-reactions or a tit for tat retaliation cycle could lead to a very violent and bloody incident short of full-scale war or full-scale war.  That is not in the interests of the United States, South Korea, Japan or China.

With this rhetorical escalation potentially leading to military escalation, China's ability and willingness to pressure North Korea is one of the keys to preventing large scale military actions from occurring.  However this creates a linkage between Iran and North Korea where a secondary Chinese interest in Iran but a primary US interest in the Iranian nuclear program may be traded off in favor of peacefully resolving the slowly boiling Korean crisis.