Gates prods China on NKorea, military ties to US

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates challenged China to deal realistically with the short-term question of how to respond to an antagonistic North Korea and the longer-term issue of whether Beijing's expanding military can establish more durable ties with the U.S.

Asian nations cannot stand by in the face of North Korea's alleged sinking of a South Korean warship, Gates said during an international security summit Saturday that was dominated by questions about the North.

"To do nothing would set the wrong precedent," Gates said.

The latest crisis with North Korea points out the limited options to deter further attacks or dismantle its nascent nuclear weapons program. The United States and China were part of a diplomatic effort to buy out the North's nuclear program that fell apart two years ago.

In an interview Saturday with the BBC, Gates mused that North Korea seems immune to many of the traditional levers of international pressure, such as ostracization.

"How do you gain purchase with a regime that doesn't seem to care what happens to it?" Gates said.

"As long as the regime doesn't care what the outside world thinks of it, as long as it doesn't care about the well-being of its people, there's not a lot you can do about it, to be quite frank, unless you're willing at some point to use military force. And nobody wants to do that."

The U.S. and South Korea want China to back a new international condemnation or punishment of the North.

At the Shangri-La Dialogue conference in Singapore, Gates joined South Korea in trying to marshal world support for the conclusion that North Korea was to blame for the sinking and should be held to account. South Korean officials handed out glossy pamphlets containing the results of an international investigation that found North Korea blew the warship Cheonan apart with a torpedo.

China, the North's closest ally, has not assigned blame for the sinking in March that killed 46 South Korean sailors.