“Basically, the U.S. wants China to do what the U.S. wants it to do,” said Rodger Baker, vice president for strategic intelligence at Stratfor, a geopolitical risk analysis company. “We want to make sure that the world stays as the United States would like to see the world. Which means making China subservient to us in some cases. In the case of North Korea, the Chinese see it as the United States pushing its policy on China and not allowing the Chinese to make their own policy, while removing from China one of the tools that it has decided it needs for its own interests.”

In this case, that tool would be a divided Korea, with a North Korea that is beholden to and wholly dependent on China serving as a buffer against American encroachment in China’s backyard.

But the conundrum extends far beyond last week’s double Korean-peninsula whammy, which involved not only North Korea’s deadly shelling of a South Korean military installation, but also the disclosure of a just-completed centrifuge plant that could one day enable North Korea to enrich uranium into nuclear fuel and add to its arsenal of 8 to 12 nuclear weapons. All of that led to the broad effort from the Obama administration to enlist China to rein in Pyongyang.

So far, China is not biting, and will not bite, on either North Korea or the host of other issues, some experts say, until the United States changes not only its tactics, but the entire way that American governments view Beijing.