The Chinese could begin to play a valuable and prominent international role right now, one that would win their government friends and admirers and might even, over time, reduce the U.S. military presence in North Asia by eliminating one of the region’s most serious potential conflicts: Starting today, the Chinese could put an end to the grotesque farce that is the North Korean regime and, together with the United States, usher in the reunification of the Korean peninsula.

Should China’s leaders simply want the North Korean regime to stop launching missiles, after all, they don’t need to play around with sanctions. Nor do the Chinese have to respond to North Korea’s outrageous military threats with a show of air power, as the U.S. military has done. They could just cut off energy supplies or food deliveries to Pyongyang: They are the major supplier of both. And if they wanted real change in a regime that keeps tens of thousands of its people in concentration camps directly modeled on Stalin’s gulag, China could open its 800-mile border with North Korea. The resulting exodus would surely do for North Korea what the collapse of the Berlin Wall did for East Germany.