UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved tough new sanctions on North Korea Friday in response to its latest launch of a ballistic missile that Pyongyang says is capable of reaching anywhere on the U.S. mainland.
The new sanctions approved in the council resolution include sharply lower limits on North Korea’s oil imports, the return home of all North Koreans working overseas within 24 months, and a crackdown on ships smuggling banned items including coal and oil to and from the country.
But the resolution doesn’t include even harsher measures sought by the Trump administration that would ban all oil imports and freeze international assets of the government and its leader, Kim Jong Un.
The resolution, drafted by the United States and negotiated with China, drew criticism from Russia for the short time the 13 other council nations had to consider the text, and last-minute changes to the text. One of those changes was raising the deadline for North Korean workers to return home from 12 months to 24 months.
U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said after the vote that “the unity this council has shown in leveling these unprecedented sanctions is a reflection of the international outrage at the Kim regime’s actions.”
The resolution caps crude oil imports at 4 million barrels a year. And it caps imports of refined oil products, including diesel and kerosene, at 500,000 barrels a year. This represents a nearly 90 percent ban of refined products, which are key to North Korea’s economy, and a reduction from the 2 million barrels a year the council authorized in September.
The new sanctions also ban the export of food products, machinery, electrical equipment, earth and stones, wood and vessels from North Korea. And it bans all countries from exporting industrial equipment, machinery, transportation vehicles and industrial metals to the country.
North Korea’s test on Nov. 29 of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile yet was its 20th launch of a ballistic missile this year, and added to fears that the North will soon have a military arsenal that can viably target the U.S. mainland.
Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said the Security Council is sending “a very strong united signal to the North Korean regime that enough is enough, that they must stop their nuclear program and they must stop their intercontinental ballistic missile program.”
France’s U.N. Ambassador Francois Delattre said: “We believe maximum pressure today is our best lever to a political and diplomatic solution tomorrow … (and) our best antidote to the risk of war.”
The previous sanctions resolution was adopted on Sept. 11 in response to North Korea’s sixth and strongest nuclear test explosion on Sept. 3.
Haley said at the time that the Trump administration believed those new sanctions, combined with previous measures, would ban over 90 percent of North Korea’s exports reported in 2016.
Those new sanctions banned North Korea from importing all natural gas liquids and condensates. It also banned all textile exports and prohibited any country from authorizing new work permits for North Korean workers — two key sources of hard currency for the northeast Asian nation.
The U.S. Mission said a cutoff on new work permits would eventually cost North Korea about $500 million a year once current work permits expire. The United States estimated about 93,000 North Koreans are working abroad, a U.S. official said.
The resolution approved Friday expresses concern that the foreign earnings from these workers are being used to support the country’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs. It requires all countries to send North Korean workers and safety monitors home by the end of 2019.
DonnieBoy and Trixie Haley are just itching to start WWIII. Time for some industrial strength flea powder.
My admittedly pessimistic prediction is that this will not do anything to change North Korea’s commitment to its nuclear program.
It may “succeed” in further impoverishing and isolating the country. And might (though I doubt it) slightly slow the progress of their nuclear program, due to resource scarcity. But my guess is it probably won’t, and if it does it won’t be by much…the impoverishment will mostly come out of the hides of everyday North Koreans, not the military or political elite.
The increased impoverishment of the population may somewhat destabilize the regime…but seems unlikely to topple it. Meanwhile a somewhat destabilized regime is likely to be even more hawkish.
All that being said, I don’t have any easy answers to the North Korean situation either. In the long term, I guess the best hope is some kind of Grand Bargain in which the U.S. and North Korea officially end the Korean War and the U.S. abandons any attempts at regime change, and in exchange the North Koreans agree to freeze and/or phase out their nuclear program. But I don’t see much chance of that happening with Trump as our President and Kim as their leader.
I continue to think that the most likely path is one of a continued “cold conflict” with occasional saber-rattling and diplomatic flare-ups, while North Korea continues to gradually build up their nuclear capacity…but never actually uses it.
Under this scenario, the North remains an international pariah state for many years to come, but war never actually breaks out and eventually North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons just becomes a fait accompli and fades as an issue.
Still, there is certainly a nontrivial risk that an actual shooting war breaks out at some point. I think the chances of that happening are quite low – I don’t subscribe to the “Kim is a madman, and surrounded by folks so fanatically devoted to him that they will readily follow him into mass suicide” school of thought – but given the devastating consequences of all-out war on the peninsula combined with NK’s nuclear capacities, it’s still well worth worrying about.
I don’t even think it would destabilize the regime. At this point, Kim can lay this squarely on Trump. He can say it’s all because Trump’s insane, and the North Koreans coming home… will only verify that.
This shores up the perception of persecution by the West, nothing else.