WhatFinger


The noose tightens

U.S. imposes even more severe sanctions on those trading with North Korea



U.S. imposes even more severe sanctions on those trading with North Korea Likely media narrative: Mean Yankee capitalists make Pyongyang's sweetheart cry, but she is stoic and unbowed with minimal eye makeup. Oh, in case you missed it, there's also a rogue regime threatening nuclear holocaust, and its greatest vulnerability is that virtually no wealth is produced in the giant prison country, so it's entirely reliant on outsiders to get the things it needs. Today, the U.S. made it considerably more difficult for that to happen:
The Trump administration escalated pressure on North Korea Friday by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the U.S. has now blacklisted virtually all ships being used by the North. The administration billed it as the largest installment of North Korean economic restrictions to date as it intensifies its campaign of "maximum pressure" to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons. President Trump went further, declaring in a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was "the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before." While that claim was questionable, previous U.S. measures have targeted bigger players in the North Korean economy, including Chinese and Russian banks and business networks. It significantly tightens the noose on North Korean trading. Mnuchin told reporters that the U.S. has now imposed more than 450 sanctions against the North, about half of them in the last year -- including "virtually all their ships that they're using at this moment in time." The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on North Korea in the past year. The restrictions are intended to deprive it of revenue and resources for its nuclear and ballistic missile development that pose an emerging threat to the U.S. mainland. Washington is particularly concerned about exports of North Korean coal that are prohibited by the U.N. sanctions and ship-to-ship transfers of imported oil and petroleum products. The Treasury Department said it was barring U.S. business transactions with nine international shipping companies from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Panama, and nine of their vessels. It also blacklisted 16 North shipping companies and 19 of their North Korean-flagged vessels.

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This will not end the shipment of all goods into North Korea

This will not end the shipment of all goods into North Korea, but it will require those determined to keep trading with the Norks to consider the value of this black-market relationship vs. the risk of penalties from the United States. Which is the bigger market? Which can hurt you more by sanctioning you? Bowl Cut Jr. can have you executed, sent to a labor camp, fed to hungry dogs . . . whatever it is that he does. But if you don't take the risk of actually entering this nightmare of a country and you're just shipping things to them, the United States can do you far more harm by denying you access to the consumer market here. Now, it's true that the Norks will not abandon their nuclear program because of this. They will redirect their increasingly scarce resources to building missiles and bombs, because they calculate correctly that nuclear capabilities are the only thing keeping them in power. But that doesn't mean these sanctions will have no effect. Any time you take away resources from an already poor nation, you complicate the process of controlling the population, and even of paying the apparatchniks you need to conduct your tyrannical activities on a day-to-day basis. The more money the regime can get its hands on, the more easily it can wreak all the havoc it wants to wreak. This will make a difference. I still think the regime will ultimately have to be overthrown either from within or from without, but it's also easier to do that when they're denied resources and have to scrounge for change in the couch cushions just to keep the lights on.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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