North Korea did not act alone in its devastating cyberattack on Sony Pictures, as President Barack Obama asserted on Friday, says Asia expert and Forbes columnist Gordon Chang.
And Chang told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
Newsmax TV that the president's reluctance to blame other countries could be for political reasons.
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"[It] could be very well be the case he's having discussions with the Chinese about trying to separate them from their North Korean allies — and maybe he felt that it would be impolitic to discuss this in the open," Chang said.
"We've had these relations with China where we're sort of afraid of them. We're not willing to say in public that which is obvious and we need to change that.
"Otherwise the Chinese will think we're afraid of them and that is going to lead to even worse results so the policy formulation that underlies that statement is incorrect."
Obama said the U.S. will respond to North Korea’s assault on Sony — which resulted in the studio yanking its release of "The Interview," a raunchy comedy in which North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is assassinated.
The cyberattack on Sony computers also bared embarrassing emails written by studio execs, as well as star's salaries and other personal information.
Chang said China was certainly involved because the hackers were using Chinese IP addresses.
"Presidents sometimes [withhold information like] this when they think there is a greater good, but … our relations with China are flawed," he said.
"These policy formulations are just not of this president as one of the president before and actually going back to Nixon. We've got this wrong from the get-go."
Chang believes the U.S. can strike back at North Korea by putting in place the sanctions that the George W. Bush administration had in 2005 when it cut off the country from the global financial system.
"And I would certainly enforce security council resolutions that go against the North Koreans for the sale of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons technology," he said.
"We need to do that in any event, but we need to make the regime hurt."
Asked if any foreign powers have the ability to launch a cyberattack that would take down America's power grid, Chang told Steve Malzberg:
"Yes, the North Koreans, probably, the Chinese, certainly. There have been all sorts of speculation about who caused the great 2003 blackout.
"Some people say it was actually a Chinese hacker who made a mistake that cascaded all sorts of problems in the United States, which shows the weakness of our grid, but also its vulnerability to foreign hacking."
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