North Korea’s weekend nuclear test is fueling a new round of US pushes for sanctions, both unilateral sanctions as well as at the UN Security Council. North Korea’s extremely limited trade with the world, however, limits actual options to sanction them.
That’s mostly meant sanctions against companies that did business with North Korea in the past, or banks that did business with other hanks that are linked to North Korea. That the moves target major Chinese banks risks some of the world’s banking industry giants over very limited North Korea ties.
Directly going after North Korea is something officials really want to do, however. This has led them to target one of the few things North Korea does import: oil. Some officials are really hopeful that cutting off all oil to North Korea could have an impact.
No oil could stall the nation’s tanks and other military vehicles. On the other hand, it would also cost the nation its agricultural vehicles. North Korea is already on the verge of starvation, and this could make it much worse.
As with most sanctions buildups, however, it’s not clear there’s an end-game envisioned at all. Rather, more sanctions are intended to cripple an economy and harm the nation’s population. North Korea has no economy to speak of, and making the population even hungrier isn’t going to give them any more political influence.
When the US hegemon speaks (whines), everyone should kneel…didn’t the Chinese get the memo? Idiots.
Remember what happened when FDR tried to cut off Japan’s access to crude?
Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal propaganda rag tried to run a story about how the Chinese were ‘building up’ forces on the border. But if you read closelly, what they were doing was putting more Border Police and surveilence drones on the border.
That is of course because cutting off oil to North Korea might well collapse the country and cause millions of refugees to run towards China. So, for some strange reason, the Chinese government decided to put more border troops along the border along with beefed up surveilence drones.
A government doing something sensible to protect its borders. What a strange concept.
Assange correctly predicted that if Trump followed through with this version of his trade wars, he’d be immediately removed from office. US corps do $650 Billion of trade with China. Companies like Apple and Walmart would be badly hurt by such actions. And it major Chinese banks are effected, then its unlikely that Wall Street will be uneffected ….. certainly the large US investment in factories in China would be strongly effected. All of which adds up to getting some very powerful people very, very mad.
“Assange correctly predicted that if Trump followed through with this version of his trade wars, he’d be immediately removed from office.”
In order to assess that prediction as accurate, Trump would have to follow through with his version of his trade wars, and be immediately removed from office. Neither of those two things has happened, at least yet. Until and unless the first one does, we have no way of knowing whether the prediction was accurate or not (by seeing whether or not the second thing follows).
It’s hard for me to process how evil the US government has become.
Sanctions have been working so well. So well that China and Russia have about reached the end of strategic sanctions patience.
“Clear? Huh! Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head or tail out of it.”