The Senate Banking Committee approved legislation on Tuesday that would sanction banks in China and other countries if they continue to do business with North Korea.
“This bill sends a clear message to the world that the entire U.S. government is committed to the strongest possible sanctions against North Korea,” Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., said during a Senate Banking Committee markup of the legislation.
The BRINK Act passed unanimously out of the committee Tuesday morning, in a vote timed to take place hours before President Trump arrives in China for diplomatic meetings focused largely on restraining North Korea’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program. If passed into law, the bill would apply to financial institutions around the world, but China is the top target after decades of throwing economic lifelines to the pariah state.
“I think it’s important that when [Trump] arrives that this committee has sent a signal to China and it’s government — and other governments around the world, and other banks and firms — that the United States means business,” Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who worked with Toomey to draft the legislation, said Tuesday. “We intend to enforce these sanctions in order to bring North Korea to the negotiating table with the ultimate goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.”
That’s been the stated goal of the U.S. government for decades, but western sanctions have failed to bring North Korea to heel. American lawmakers blame China, which accounts for about 90 percent of the regime’s economic partnership, for insulating North Korea from the full effect of the punitive measures.
“For 20 years, China has carried out a policy where they smile at us, but they’ve done enough with North Korea so that [North Korea’s] GDP is 50 percent higher in real terms,” Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., said during a recent House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing.
Toomey and Van Hollen seek to resolve that problem by imposing mandatory sanctions on all banks that facilitate trade with North Korea. That move would take the question of whether to sanction a Chinese entity out of the Trump’s hands; the president would be allowed to issue sanctions waivers, but the lawmakers doubt he would do that regularly.
The bill stops short of imposing country-wide sanctions on China, as some lawmakers have suggested, but Van Hollen believes it’s “pretty leak proof” in terms of punishing Chinese support for the regime.
“If China is doing what it said it was going to do with respect to its banks, then the result should be the tightening of the screws significantly on North Korea,” Van Hollen told reporters Monday.
Toomey hailed the unanimously-passed bill as a sign of increased focus on the threat posed by North Korea.
“For too long, we’ve been too complacent about the growing and gathering threat of the North Korean regime,” he said. “I am delighted that both the United States and the international community seem to be working more aggressively to confer this threat. I hope this bill will amplify that effect.”
