Don’t prematurely ease the pressure on North Korea

The clock is ticking on the Trump administration’s time to turn senior officials’ rhetoric on North Korean denuclearization into action. Even North Korean leader Kim Jong Un stressed that his patience for progress is not unlimited in his New Year’s address. While Kim did not provide a specific deadline for action, it would be careless for President Trump to miss this diplomatic opportunity to move the potential denuclearization process forward — assuming that both leaders are actually striving toward this stated goal.

While the Trump administration should seek to capitalize on the opening for thoughtful, strategic denuclearization negotiations, it is essential that all levers of the largely effective maximum pressure campaign remain fully engaged.

Easing the pressure on Pyongyang prematurely would be shortsighted and irresponsible. While President Trump may be inclined toward impetuously claiming an early diplomatic victory with North Korea, doing so without demonstrable results on denuclearization risks undermining his administration’s own success under the maximum pressure campaign.{mosads}

The need to maintain the pressure is reflective of the effectiveness of the campaign thus far. President Trump launched the maximum pressure campaign early on in his presidency, marking a shift from the “strategic patience” of the previous administration aimed at “containing North Korea’s proliferation activities rather than rolling back its nuclear program,” according to the Congressional Research Service, to an aggressive, largely effective policy early on. Since then, the Trump administration has been steadily escalating sanctions pressure on North Korea, both unilaterally and multilaterally. This crescendo of sanctions has generally unified members of the United Nations Security Council against the Kim regime — a significant accomplishment for the Trump administration bureaucrats — though the so-called maximum pressure has yet to arrive at the apex of actually applying maximum pressure. Despite this, the campaign has been impactful.

At the UN, successful efforts in late 2017 to ban all key North Korean exports, including coal, iron ore, seafood and textiles fueled an international effort to terminate trade relationships and cut most ties with North Korea. Exacerbating North Korea’s domestic hardship was the December 2017 decision to limit Pyongyang’s imports of refined petroleum products to half a million barrels per year, which constituted a 90 percent reduction from the previous year.

While the combination of sanctions has not compelled Beijing to terminate Pyongyang’s crude oil supply or block its remaining exports, Beijing has made significant strides in implementing UN sanctions. In fact, North Korean exports to China — which comprise over 90 percent of Pyongyang’s external trade — dropped by one third in 2017. More recently, China’s trade with North Korea for January through October 2018  was down by 54.7 percent compared with the same duration in 2017, according to official data from the General Administration of China Customs (GACC). Beijing also ceased importing North Korean coal, dropping down from 1.6 million tons in August 2017 to 0 in the first quarter of 2018, according to GACC data.

In addition to the significant achievements in the trade space, Pyongyang ceased its missile and nuclear bomb tests, though satellite imagery shows continued activity at possible weapons facilities. Pyongyang has also returned the remains of a number of American fallen soldiers. And last April, Kim eased up on his demand for a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea as a precondition for denuclearization.

Despite this, many of the achievements of the maximum pressure campaign are increasingly being discounted or overlooked. This is due, in part, to inconsistent White House messaging on North Korea. President Trump shifted his rhetoric from declaring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the “rocket man on a suicide mission” at the 2017 United Nations General Assembly to professing that they “fell in love” as a result of the Singapore Summit less than one year later. Further, President Trump’s decision to agree to a Presidential level meeting with Kim — a break from diplomatic protocol that generally leaves heads of state out of the picture until the deal is done — also dampened the united international front against Kim.{mossecondads}

Although both Seoul and Beijing have attempted to capitalize on this perceived lessening of the maximum pressure campaign, the full framework of the campaign does — and should — remain in place. It also means that there can still be repercussions for violations of the United Nations sanctions. This is largely due to structure of United Nations Security Council Resolutions on North Korea which, in effect, hamper the ability of an individual country to lift the UN sanctions unilaterally. While that has not stopped Moscow or Beijing from lessening their full compliance with the international sanctions (particularly following President Trump’s mixed messages), it does mean that all 15 members of the Security Council must proactively vote to ease or limit the sanctions. For this to happen, a member of the Security Council must propose a resolution terminating the sanctions. Such a resolution must garner nine votes in favor and no vetoes by any of the permanent members of the body (namely the United States, China, Russia, Great Britain, or France). Given the composition of the Security Council, UN sanctions on North Korea should have sufficient support for the foreseeable future.

Equally important, the United States should not ease up its domestic pressure on North Korea prematurely. National Security Advisor John Bolton recently affirmed that the North Koreans have not lived up to their commitments so far, so there is no US policy rationale for lessening the domestic pressure framework.

While consideration should be given to legitimate humanitarian exceptions that are consistent across all U.S. economic sanctions programs, any further broadening would be inappropriate at this juncture.

The Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on North Korea has arguably driven North Korea both to the negotiating table with President Trump and, simultaneously, to explore alternate strategies for evading sanctions should diplomacy fail. With another summit on the horizon, the United States must capitalize on the successes of the maximum pressure campaign and ensure the pressure is maintained until measurable success is achieved.

Samantha Sultoon is a visiting senior fellow in the Atlantic Council’s Global Business & Economics Program and the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security; she is a former sanctions policy expert for the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).