A key House Republican is planning legislation imposing new sanctions on major Chinese banks and other entities that help North Korea circumvent international sanctions.
“How do you hold Russia and China accountable?” Rep. Ted Yoho, R-Fla., who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee for the Asia-Pacific, told the Washington Examiner. “That’s really where the fight is going to be on bringing North Korea to the table.”
The Florida Republican met Friday with State Department officials, after an initial move Thursday to coordinate his effort with the House Financial Services Committee. It’s an effort to stiffen the implementation of sanctions in one area where some North Korea hawks believe the administration’s pressure campaign has been soft.
“We’re either serious about bringing this to an end or we’re going to repeat the mistakes of the last three administrations,” Yoho said.
The Trump administration has vowed not to make such errors. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated that North Korea would receive no economic sanctions relief “until denuclearization is complete” during a July 8 press conference.
His public reminder came on the heels of a rocky trip to Pyongyang. The North Korean foreign ministry decried Pompeo’s “gangster like” demands. Then, North Korean officials failed to appear on Thursday at a meeting with U.S. officials to discuss the repatriation of the remains of U.S. soldiers killed during the Korean War.
North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s resistance in the month since the historic Singapore summit with President Trump has been enabled by Russian and Chinese assistance. Oil has continue to flow into the pariah state, in defiance of an annual cap imposed by the United Nations Security Council in December. North Korea breached that cap sometime between February and May, according to United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, buoyed by at least 89 illegal ship-to-ship transfers on the high seas.
“We’re going to do everything in our power to hold this administration accountable, but we’re also going to put the pressure on China and Russia,” Yoho said. “I personally feel Russia and China love the distraction for the United States to be involved in this because it allows [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to expand over there in the Baltic nations and allows China to keep expanding around the world.”
Yoho’s plan to achieve that goal entails confronting China with the kind of sanctions pressure that the Trump administration, at least so far, has refused to apply. Congressional Republicans last year provided the administration with a list of Chinese banks implicated in money-laundering on behalf of North Korea. The Treasury Department shelved a plan to sanction two of the largest banks on the list in April.
“Chinese banks are violating U.S. law and are allowed to do so… for things that, if European or other banks had done for Iran sanctions, they would have been punished long ago,” sanctions expert Anthony Ruggiero told the Washington Examiner in June.
At the time he offered that criticism, Ruggiero was a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. But he joined the White House National Security Council’s North Korea team in July, a personnel move that national security hawks find reassuring.
“The fact that they are bringing in hardliners to keep them honest will only bolster the case of the people who want to take a wait-and-see approach,” a senior congressional Republican aide told the Washington Examiner.
Yoho is inclined not to wait, however. For one thing, he hopes that sanctions saber-rattling will empower the Trump administration, as Congress plays a “bad cop” role. And he believes that the congressional maneuvers will find favor within the Trump administration.
“We were talking about the different tools and they agreed that there’s more sanctions [to be implemented],” Yoho said of his meeting with officials from the State Department Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation. “They were real welcoming of any stuff we can do to give them another arrow in the quiver.”
Still, his targeting of “the big banks” in China will press the Treasury Department to take a step that “they
chose not to” take just a few months ago, he acknowledged. “My goal is to have them mandatory, have the force of law behind them that these need to be implemented; and if they’re not implemented, you got to let us know why,” the lawmaker said.
Yoho recalled that Treasury Department officials told lawmakers that it would be “too disruptive” to blacklist the largest Chinese banks. But that’s not true, he argued; the assessment underestimates the severity of the North Korea crisis.
“There are no banks too big to sanction when it comes down to doing this stuff with North Korea,” he said. “They’re going to have to decide, is the price of doing business with North Korea worth the pain the United States is causing?”
The legislative process for Yoho’s plan is in its infancy, but he has been in contact already with House Financial Services Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, and expects to draft the bill as a joint effort between the two committees.
“I’m going to team up with every other entity I can in the House that we can,” he said. “It’s going to be a continual process, but what [the Trump administration] can be rest assured on is that we’re going to continue the pressure out of our committee, with the other members we’ve talked to in Financial Services and some of the other committees.”
