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THE UN SECURITY Council has unanimously backed a US-drafted resolution that significantly strengthens sanctions on North Korea, imposing a ban on exports aimed at depriving Pyongyang of $1 billion (about €850 million) in annual revenue.
The sweeping measures were the first of that scope to be imposed on North Korea since US President Donald Trump took office and highlighted China’s willingness to punish its Pyongyang ally.
The resolution imposed a full ban on exports of coal, iron and iron ore, lead and lead ore as well as fish and seafood by the cash-starved state — stripping North Korea of a third of its export earnings estimated at $3 billion (about €2.5 billion) per year.
US Ambassador Nikki Haley said the stiffer measures brought the penalty imposed on North Korea for its ballistic missile tests “to a whole new level” and that the council had put leader Kim Jong-un “on notice”.
“This is the most stringent set of sanctions on any country in a generation,” Haley told the council after the vote.
“These sanctions will cut deep and in doing so will give the North Korean leadership a taste of the deprivation they have chosen to inflict on the North Korean people.”
The resolution also prevents North Korea from increasing the number of workers it sends abroad whose earnings are another source of revenue for Kim’s regime.
It prohibits all new joint ventures with the isolated nation, bans new investment in the current joint companies and adds nine North Korean officials and four entities including the country’s main foreign exchange bank to the UN sanctions blacklist.
If fully implemented, the measures would tighten the economic vise around Pyongyang as it seeks to develop its missile and nuclear programmes.
Trump hailed the unanimous vote, saying on Twitter the sanctions will have “very big financial impact”.
In a statement released several hours later, he specifically commended China and Russia for their votes.
“The President appreciates China’s and Russia’s cooperation in securing passage of this resolution,” the White House said.
The statement said Trump will continue to work with “allies and partners to increase diplomatic and economic pressure on North Korea” to end its threatening and destabilising behaviour.
The US entered into negotiations with China a month ago on the new resolution after Pyongyang launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile on 4 July, which was followed by a second test on 28 July.
But the measure does not provide for cuts to oil deliveries to North Korea as initially proposed by the US — a move that would have dealt a serious blow to the economy.
The new raft of embargoes are the seventh set of UN sanctions imposed on North Korea since it first carried out a nuclear test in 2006.
Sanctions not an end
The United States has put heavy pressure on China, which accounts for 90% of trade with North Korea, to enforce the sanctions and the fate of these measures largely hinges on Beijing’s cooperation. China and Russia had resisted the US push, arguing that dialogue with North Korea was the way to persuade Pyongyang to halt its military programs.
Chinese Ambassador Liu Jieyi said the resolution “does not intend to cause a negative impact” to North Korea’s people and stressed that it called for a return to talks on denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula.
“The fact that the council adopted this resolution unanimously demonstrates that the international community is united in its position regarding the nuclear issue of the peninsula,” Liu said.
Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzia stressed that sanctions “cannot be an end in themselves” but rather “a tool for engaging this country in constructive talks”.
Backed by Japan, South Korea and its European allies, the US has maintained that tougher sanctions would put pressure on North Korea to come to the table.
As negotiations at the United Nations entered the final stretch, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared that Washington was not seeking regime change in North Korea and was willing to talk to Pyongyang.
Next step
Speaking to reporters after the council vote, Haley said “what’s next is completely up to North Korea”.
“The United States has been loud about it, now the international community has been loud and North Korea now has to respond,” she said.
Trump’s national security advisor, HR McMaster, said the United States would not tolerate the threat posed by North Korea’s missile and nuclear tests.
McMaster, in an interview with MSNBC, said Trump had told China’s President Xi Jinping it was no longer enough for North Korea to “freeze” its programmes since it had already crossed “threshold capability” and the goal was now denuclearisation.
North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are set to dominate talks today and tomorrow at a regional summit in Manila in the Philippines, which will see a rare gathering of foreign ministers from the six countries most involved in the issue — both Koreas, China, Russia, Japan and the United States.
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This is just going to make it even tougher for the North Korean population to eek out an existence. They will be the ones that suffer. The omnipotent Kim Jr doesn’t give a toss about them.
@Marcus Maher: To blame the US for starving a country where upwards of 23% of the GDP goes to military spending (compared to a 2% global average, 4.5% for the US) for the starvation in the country is definitely among the most disgraceful distortions I’ve seen anyone make on this site.
Kim Jong Un and his predecessors have continually used the tactic of blackmailing the UN by flirtation with deadly weapons, so that the UN will do the job of feeding North Koreans for them (so the regime can spend even more exorbitantly on 170mm self-propelled artillery batteries to point at the city of Seoul).
@methodical2020: In the 90s? You mean when Saddam invaded and annexed a UN member state, proclaiming Kuwait as a new province of Iraq, and he didn’t get away with it?
@Malachi: They are also ignoring the constant military attacks North Korea has carried out against the South over the past 60+ years, kidnapping of Japanese and South Korean citizens and the constant threats made to all ensundry.
[Attempt 2]
@methodical2020: No need to use Iraq as an example when NK is one in itself. Just to attempt to figure out what the normal North Korean thinks of the US…
“What hardly any Americans know or remember is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.” – UC hisotrian Bruce Cumings
“Over a period of three years or so, we killed off 20 percent of the population. We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.” – Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War.
“Every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved, we were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.” – US Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
“Misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation. I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe, but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.” – Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas on his visit to Korea in reference to U.S. airstrikes who, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories, and hospitals.
[cont.]
“between 30 and 50 atomic bombs strung across the neck of Manchuria that would have spread behind us a belt of radioactive cobalt.” – US Gen. Douglas MacArthur on his military plan to win the war in 10 days.
“The hell with all those people. Let’s get rid of all of them.” – Associated Press interviews of retired US military personnel in reference to the No Gun Ri massacre in July 1950 in which hundreds of North Korean civilians were targeted and massacred by the US 7th Cavalry Regiment while they took shelter under a bridge.
[cont.]
“jeeploads” [of U.S. military officers] were present and supervised the butchery”. – The Bodo League massacre where tens of thousands of “suspected” North Korean communist sympathisers were butchered on the orders of the U.S.-backed South Korean strongman, President Syngman Rhee.
“The American air war left a deep and lasting impression and more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats, that would continue long after the war’s end.” – Columbia University historian Charles Armstrong.
@Guybrush Threepwood: And that was how war was fought in that era. Just as the carpet bombing of Japan and Germany. And the Japanese sack of Nanking or what Germany did in Russia.
@Mick Jordan: Whether if that is true or not, or the question of if it was the same era as historians tend to imply that post WW2 was a different political and military era to WW2 due to the widespread, large-scale and all-inclusive devastation that was seen in the latter, it’s still irrelevant to the issue.
“it is still the 1950s … and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened.” – Kathryn Weathersby.
@Guybrush Threepwood: Do you accept that, though targeting civilians is disgusting and unacceptable, the NK regime share a large portion of the blame for such loss of life for starting a completely unnecessary expansionist war of what they called “liberation”?
You wouldn’t accept the US/SK going into NK and attempting to annex the region as a “liberation” – surely this is a nonsense from the Kim dynasty?
@Malachi: I of course accept that North Korea started the war, but to say that they are to blame for the needless massacres of civilians that the American military carried out, as if it gave the US free reign to do anything they wanted – Absolutely not.
If we believe the Western-posed narrative that the North Korean regime are crazy and they don’t care about their own people, what did the targeting of civilians and non-military targets as well as wiping out 20% of North Korea’s population achieve for the US?
@Guybrush Threepwood: They feel that way because that is all they are told by the regime. With zero access to the outside world they are told that they are living in a virtual paradise compared to their neighbours in South Korea. All one has to do is listen to the stories of those that have managed to escape the North. Why is North Korea a giant prison camp for it’s population? Why is the North Korean Regime so fearful of allowing it’s own people freedom of travel, freedom to seek out information on the rest of the world?
@Frank Cooney: But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not necessary. There were plenty of Japanese military targets that would’ve most likely ended the war as in terms of practice it was already over at that stage anyway. The US decided against this and targeted areas with little to no military significance and high populated areas. This US military tactic was the same in NK. Every population centre from village upwards was flattened. When they ran out of them everything else from farms to hospitals was flattened. The US didn’t shy away from the public that they literally ran out of targets.
But MacArthur was a 5-star General and in essence the highest ranking member of the US army. A complete lunatic that was hugely popular with the American public(which is indicative of what info the US public were being fed at this time) and that wanted to exapnd the Korean war into a full-scale nucleur war with China. The fact that someone with that way of thinking was able to rise so high in command is purely reflective of American military practices not just in Korea but around the globe for that period and the decades to come.
@Guybrush Threepwood: Sorry, I wasn’t arguing that North Korea take all the blame for US massacres. That would be stupid. I was asking if you agree that they should take a large portion of the blame since they were the aggressor, no? Completely unnecessary war putting so many innocents at risk including their own citizens for expansionist motives?
As for the NK regime caring about their people – it’s hard to get the impression that a dictator dynasty overseeing multiple famines and countless millions starved while spending ridiculous money on military aggression has the people at heart.
The UN’s recklessness knows no bounds. What state could have a third of its revenue switched off overnight and be expected to deliver a decent standard of living for its citizens?
@Muiris O’Daltuin: The NK regime does not feed its downtrodden citizens with its revenue intact. The UN does, and will continue to. The obese, cartoonish hobgoblin in Pyongyang is much more concerned with how many pieces of artillery he can line up along the DMZ.
@Frank Cooney: The DPRK Army is an integral part of the North Korean economic model. Just as in the USA or any other militarised nation any cut to the defence budget would have a negative impact on the economy as a whole. These sanction will now make it harder to reform the economy and instead of pushing North Korea away from its militarism it will cement it further.
@Muiris O’Daltuin: “Just as in the USA or any other militarised nation any cut to the defence budget would have a negative impact on the economy”
Comparing NK to any other country in terms of a military economy is facile. They are by far and away the biggest military spenders in the world as a percentage of GDP, the US aren’t even in the same ballpark.
A cut to their defense budget would maybe go to helping, I don’t know, the 41% of the country the UN estimate to be malnourished. Over a million starving children under the age of 5 relying on outside aid. Sanitation, basic healthcare.
A cut to the NK defense budget and a redistribution of wealth to the hungry and impoverished is absolutely necessary, it’s morally indefensible to argue otherwise.
@Muiris O’Daltuin: Get out more, turn off your PC and breathe some air. NK are the bad boys, not the UN and something has to be done to prevent a lunatic getting nuclear weapons.
@Marcus Maher: Marcus don’t be ridiculous. The U.S. spends money it can well afford. North Korea spends money it doesn’t have. That’s not up for debate. Its fact. No comparison
@Marcus Maher: Marcus don’t be bringing your facts on here destroying peoples weak arguments. You’ll upset the whole equilibrium of the journal.ie comments section.
@Stephen murphy: Good man Stephen. If anything needs turning off its the relentless baseless alt facts that our media propagates against the DPRK on a daily basis. Many journalist write opinion pieces on a country they know nothing about and that many of them have never visited and in turn the gen pop gets a skewed view of a nation that is forced to live on the margins. You should really be asking yourself why DPRK and other non capitalist nations feel the need to arm themselves with nukes and why countries who haven’t i.e. Iraq, Afghanistan, Lybia, Syria etc.. are now lying in ruin.
@Muiris O’Daltuin: It’s a big capitalist propaganda machine running overtime against the ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’, eh? You tell ‘em. Fight the power.
Don’t let the starving children and concentration camps put you off.
@Frank Cooney: In an act of blatant intimidation the South runs joint military exercises with NATO forces on yearly basis so spare me the olive branch bs. If the British were running mock amphibious invasions of Ireland in their waters on a yearly basis we too be tooling up for the inevitable conflict.
@Muiris O’Daltuin: There was a conflict. In 1950 – North Korea tried to “liberate the Fatherland” by invading and attempting to annex the South.
Was that a capitalist conspiracy as well?
@Muiris O’Daltuin: When was the last time South Korea shelled the North? When was the last time the South sent incursion troops into the North? When was the last time the South dug tunnels into the North? When was the last time the South sent a submarine into a Northern Harbour and sunk a Northern Warship killing members of it’s crew? When was the last time South Korea kidnapped North Korean and Chinese citizens? When was the last time the South Korean President publicly assinated his own brother or has is Uncle executed? When was the last time the South threatened to annihilate it’s neighbours?
Looks like China has had enough of Kims nonsense.
@Honeybadger197: It really is China’s call, it is they who prop up Kim and it is a factor that is not called out enough.
@Honeybadger197: A rare instance where Russia and China didn’t impede the UNSC.
Sadly, sanctions are unlikely to be very effective. It’s estimated that 70% of the NK population rely on UN food aid – that’s almost 18 million people. Eventually, the UN will cave and provide this aid in order to prevent another Korean famine in which countless millions would perish. This is understandable and necessary – but it means the regime don’t waste money feeding ‘their’ citizens because they know the UN will do it for them. Thus, the money can go into the war machine.
It’s an impossible situation. I think anything other than total withdrawal (not just sanctions) from China will have the NK regime propped up for a long time yet.
If there was oil at stake the US would have taken Kim out. Its the quickest and best solution to preventing mass famine.
@Joseph Bloggs: Would that not kickstart an attack on SK?
@Joseph Bloggs: Maybe maybe not . But you cant strike a country with nuclear weapons and not expect some sort of escalation . Beside with China next door they wont like it .
@Robert Preston: good point. But if Kim and his associates are taken out, there’s a good chance that those remaining will see sense and not retaliate, hopefully a revolution would take place because the public were no longer in fear and they’d try to build a democracy.
That said, it’s not a good solution. I’m just pointing out that if oil was at stake then they probably would take him out.
@Joseph Bloggs: Those that have any kind of power in NK are totally Loyal to the Kims. And after 70+ years of total brainwashing those that are around Kim would retaliate as the view the family akin to God’s.
But unfortunately the poor will bear the brunt , as always …
@Gerry Campbell: not once it becomes a wonderful deomcracy and the citizens become debt slaves like the rest of us – which is what the un is all about
Lots of comments here from NK experts but none of them address the root of the problem. The self-isolationism of NK is down to the savage war crimes carried out on its civilians by the US which make what Japan suffered in ww2 look like a bun fight. NK just shut it’s doors and wants a deterrent to stop it happening again. In return the US wants to starve it out of existence. The real fat cartoon bully is actually the US not the man in NK.
@Patrick J. O’Rourke: The civilian casualties in the Korean war were far too high – it’s undeniable. Then again, I don’t really have much sympathy for a regime claiming they’re infuriated about a war they started in order to annex South Korea.
“wants a deterrent to stop it happening again”
Well, you could spend an absolutely outrageous amount of money on nuclear and conventional weapons, starving millions in the process – or… you could… not invade your neighbours next time? Just a thought.
Malachi: I think that far too high is a serious understatement. They weren’t collateral damage, the civilians were targets for the new wonder weapon called Napalm designed to roast people and burn wooden buildings. If course it’s now 2017 and a this could be settled if the US could give a cast iron guarantee that it would not invade, or back anyone else to invade NK and have it underwritten by the UN and the big 5 in particular. That deal has been I the table for 50 years and the western press will never even mention it. Will they do that? Nope. This is about the US wanting to get on China’s doorstep.
@Patrick J. O’Rourke: I wouldn’t dare use the disgusting ‘collateral damage’ term. Ultimately, some share of the blame for such a huge loss of life must go to the regime that invaded, starting the war, no? You seemed to avoid that part.
The problem with a UN-backed ‘no-invasion guarantee’ is that it gives the NK regime unprecedented freedom. If they continue to violate the genocide convention, invade/attack/annex neighbours, etc. then who will put a stop to it? The League of Nations?
As for the West getting on China’s doorstep, it seems even China have finally reached their limit with Pyongyang as they backed these sanctions.
Malachi: I have now tried twice to reply to this but have bee caught twice in the offensive language filters. I have not used offensive language by any stretch of the imagination. It has all been a articulate English. I’m off to complain now. I’m just trying to explain that understanding the history, ancient culture and mentality are the key to understanding what’s going on rather than just accepting the raw propaganda of the western MSM. I’ll try again in a minute. It’s Sunday and I didn’t want to boot up my computer as it’s my day off from preparing military history papers.
@Patrick J. O’Rourke: Then your Military History papers will tell you it was the North that invaded the South in 1951 and began the Korean War. And it was a Unified United Nations Force of 26 nations that repelled the North and was in the process of crushing the North Korean Military when Mao chose to interfere on the side of the North and support the Kim regime. Resulting in the stalemate that exists today. And your historical military papers will also tell you about the continuous military incursions and assaults by North Korea on the South (without any retaliatory strikes by the South or it’s allies) since the supposed ceasefire (only actually observed by the South) was signed.
@Patrick J. O’Rourke: I understand – the journal often screws up when I try to submit longform comments. Extremely irritating.
This is a big win for Donald Trump. He successfully persuaded North Korea’s erstwhile ally, China, to back these sanctions at the UN Security Council, where China could have vetoed them as one of the five permanent members of the council.
@John Reid: Persuading Russia, as well as China, to back the US-drafted sanctions was also a big personal achievement for Donald Trump; as China and Russia would not have backed such sanctions against their erstwhile ally, North Korea, had Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton been in the White House (both of whom were regarded as weak and gullible on the world stage by Beijing and Moscow).
Because sanctions will really hit the little fat fella. Not.
@Alan: in his defence, it miss be hard being the only day guy in the country.
Being completely sexist,she’s a fine stab waiting for journal sanction.
A$ap Ferg
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