The incident winds down

From al-Jazeera, as well as NYT, CBC, and about every other news organization on the planet:

The United States says it believes North Korea's artillery attack on an island close to its disputed maritime border with South Korea was an isolated incident.

"This was, in our view, a one-off, premeditated act," PJ Crowley, the US state department spokesman, said on Wednesday. "Without getting into intelligence matters, we don't see that North Korea is ... preparing for an extended military confrontation."

Evan Osnos at the New Yorker sums up the problem moving forward:

By the morning after North Korea’s most serious artillery attack on the South in decades, the unofficial American consensus had coalesced around a clear, unsurprising, and ostensibly comforting position: "The United States and its allies should hold Beijing responsible for putting a stop to Mr. Kim’s dangerous behavior," as the Washington Post editorial page put it. The Times agreed: "China … has the best chance of walking the North back from the brink. It must take the lead."

Now that this is settled, there’s only one problem: China doesn’t want to take the lead, and chances are that it won’t anytime soon.