The Trump administration made clear on Friday, with what it described as the largest set of sanctions against North Korea yet, that it will continue to isolate Pyongyang even as the South seeks to engage with the North.
The designations target 27 shipping and trade companies, 28 vessels, and one person that the Treasury Department said have enabled North Korea to skirt sanctions and finance its weapons programs.
“Today’s actions will significantly hinder the Kim regime’s capacity to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and limit the regime’s ability to ship goods through international waters,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters.
The announcement named nine international shipping companies and nine of their vessels, including some based or flagged in China, the Comoros, and Panama. The Treasury Department said that these entities have allowed Pyongyang to export coal or engage in prohibited oil transfers.
“Those who trade with North Korea,” Mnuchin said, “do so at their own peril.”
“They are now basically toxic,” Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at Treasury, told TWS. “If anybody wants to deal with the United States, they are not going to be able to deal with these companies.”
North Korea is known to use the profits from its coal exports to finance its weapons programs, according to Treasury. The administration on Friday also targeted 16 North Korean shipping companies and 19 of their vessels.
On top of the designations, the administration, in conjunction with the U.S. Coast Guard, issued a shipping advisory alerting companies of the sanctions risks associated with the transfer of goods to and from North Korea. Pyongyang, an administration official told reporters, is known for using deceptive shipping practices such as painting over vessel names or disabling collision avoidance technology “to try to intentionally mask their movements.”
“As if the sanctions themselves were not warning enough, there is now this stark warning to the rest of the shipping community that the U.S. is actively looking to punish those who are engaging with North Korea,” said Schanzer, now the senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The designations fit into the administration’s larger strategy of economically and diplomatically isolating North Korea in an effort to drive it to denuclearize.
“This brings up the total to over 450 sanctions that we have on North Korea,” Mnuchin said Friday. “Approximately half of those have been done in the last year.”
A 2018 U.S. intelligence community assessment said that North Korea’s commitment to having nuclear weapons, which it describes as “the basis for its survival,” suggests that Pyongyang “does not intend to negotiate them away.”
The administration has led sanctions efforts against Pyongyang at the United Nations. An administration official told reporters Friday that North Korea’s oil imports are down 89 percent due to U.N. restrictions. Its continued illicit ship-to-ship oil transfers, the official said, represent an effort to “make up that difference.” Another administration official said that the U.S. would seek U.N. designations on the entities that were unilaterally sanctioned on Friday.
Friday’s sanctions come as Trump’s daughter Ivanka is in South Korea for the Winter Olympics closing ceremony in Pyeongchang. She discussed the sanctions with South Korean President Moon Jae-in ahead of their release, Mnuchin told reporters Friday.
Moon said Friday that North Korea’s participation in the games has “served as an opportunity for us to engage in active discussions between the two Koreas, and this has led to lowering of tensions on the peninsula and an improvement in inter-Korean relations.”
Vice President Mike Pence had reportedly planned to meet in secret with North Korean officials earlier this month while both were in South Korea for the Winter Olympics, though the North pulled out of the meeting last minute.
Some Trump administration officials have insisted that talks with Pyongyang could only occur if the country took credible steps to denuclearize first. Others, like Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, have suggested greater openness to talks without preconditions.
Pyongyang has not conducted a missile test in weeks, though the country conducted over a dozen missile tests in 2017 as well as its most powerful nuclear test yet in September.
