The Associated Press has a new article out essentially giving China the credit for bringing North Korea in line instead of Trump for bringing China in line.  Here is its headline, subhed, and story lede:

CHINA APPLIES ITS OWN MAXIMUM PRESSURE POLICY ON PYONGYANG

As the U.S.-North Korea summit looms, President Donald Trump's maximum pressure policy on North Korea may be working – thanks to China. 

Beijing appears to have gone well beyond U.N. sanctions on its unruly neighbor, reducing its total imports from North Korea in the first two months this year by 78.5 and 86.1 percent in value – a decline that began in late 2017, according to the latest trade data from China. Its exports to the North also dropped by 33 percent to 34 percent both months.

The figures suggest that instead of being sidelined while North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made his surprising diplomatic overtures to Seoul and Washington, China's sustained game of hardball on trade with Pyongyang going back at least five months may have been the decisive factor in forcing Kim's hand.

Trade with China is absolutely crucial to North Korea's survival.

Let's see if we can figure this out.  For at least 25 years, through Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, North Korea was building up its nuclear arsenal with a tremendous amount of help from China.  Then, all of a sudden, after around eight months of tremendous pressure from Trump, China starts to put tremendous pressure on North Korea by cutting off trade with it.  Can anyone spot the new variable?  (Hint: His initials are DJT.)

A poor man suffering from indigestion.  Colored lithograph by C.J. Traviès.
Wellcome Library no. 16495i, photo number: V001175.

I wonder if the AP writers have any curiosity as to why China waited until after Trump was so verbally threatening to finally put pressure on North Korea. 

It's just such a short time ago that almost all the news media along with other Democrats believed that Trump's harsh language would lead to war.  My, how things change!

The reporting the last fifteen months is similar to the reporting on President Reagan when he was being tough on the Soviet Union.  We were repeatedly told Reagan was going to cause World War III, but instead, he broke up the Soviet empire and brought down the Berlin wall and gave us the "peace dividend" so people like Clinton could weaken the military. 

A lot of people gave the USSR's last leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, credit for breaking up the Soviet Union instead of Reagan.  Revisionists are everywhere.  That is like giving Japan credit for ending World War II instead of Truman and the bombs. 

It is a shame so many learn so little from recent history, 

Iran was collapsing under the weight of financial sanctions, so what was Obama's, secretary of state John Kerry's, and Europeans' solution?  Of course, it was to lift Iran up so it could amass more weapons and threaten the world and the United States.  Trump is going to have to fix this just as he's fixing North Korea. 

In Syria, Obama drew the fictional red line and then did a pretend agreement with Syrian president Bashar Assad, where everyone pretended the chemical weapons were gone.  Instead of weakening Assad, Obama actually strengthened Assad, who, along with Russia and Iran, is now a much greater threat to the people of the region.  This problem will have to be solved by Trump as well, but he will probably be blamed instead of Obama and Kerry. 

How many examples have to happen before people learn that the world is safer from tyrants when we are tougher on them and not through appeasement and concessions?  Leading from behind is never the correct policy. 

Something we can be certain of is that AP writers along with most of the media will not give Trump credit for anything.  Facts haven't mattered for a long time, and that wouldn't fit the Democrat agenda.