Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
U.S. is not safe ‘across the ocean’
State-run media denounces new U.N. sanctions
North Korean state media says the U.S. will “pay dearly” for a round of strict sanctions.
BEIJING — North Korean state media said Monday the U.S. will “pay dearly” for a round of strict sanctions approved by the United Nations during the weekend because of Pyongyang’s ongoing quest to develop a nuclear arsenal.
“There is no bigger mistake than the United States believing that its land is safe across the ocean,” the staterun Korean Central News Agency said in a statement.
The vow of defiance two days after after the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved new sanctions to punish North Korea, including a ban on coal and other exports worth more than $1 billion, suggested the isolated country remains committed to its nuclear ambitions and is willing to bear the economic costs.
As President Donald Trump demanded full and speedy implementation of the new penalties, his top diplomat laid out a narrow path for the North to return to negotiations that could ultimately see sanctions lifted. Stop testing missiles for an “extended period,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said, and the U.S. might deem North Korea ready to talk.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” Tillerson said. “This is not a ‘give me 30 days and we are ready to talk.’ It’s not quite that simple. So it is all about how we see their attitude towards approaching a dialogue with us,” he told reporters at a regional Association of Southeast Asian Nations conference in Manila.
“The best signal that North Korea could give us that they’re prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” he said.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has also signaled a willingness to talk.
Pyongyang has tested 14 missiles this year, including two intercontinental ballistic missiles in July, showcasing its technical ability to launch a potential strike on parts of the U.S., including Alaska, Los Angeles and Chicago.
Armed with the new U.N. sanctions, nations raced Monday to ensure that North Korea’s biggest trading partners carry them out, an elusive task that has undercut past attempts to strong-arm Pyongyang into abandoning its nuclear weapons.
The sanctions could slash North Korea’s annual export revenue, totaling an estimated $3 billion, by more than a third, according to a statement from the office of Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Yet North Korea’s Monday statement illustrates the degree to which Kim Jong Un, the country’s ruler, prizes the country’s nuclear and missile programs as a crucial deterrent against the United States and a point of national pride.
“This U.N. ‘sanctions resolution,’ to all intents and purposes, is an outcome of diabolical attempts of the U.S. to isolate and stifle the DPRK,” the news agency said, using the initials of the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
The U.S. “is trying to drive the situation of the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war,” it said.
Even as they celebrate a diplomatic victory in persuading China and Russia to sign on to new sanctions, the U.S. and other countries are deeply concerned that failure to rigorously enforce them could significantly blunt their impact. Since Saturday’s U.N. Security Council vote, Washington has put Beijing in particular on notice that it’s watching closely to ensure China doesn’t repeat its pattern of carrying out sanctions for a while, then returning to business as usual with the pariah nation on its border.
John Delury, a China and North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul, noted that the Chinese population that lives along the 800-mile border with North Korea is already struggling financially.
“They’re almost going from sanctions to embargo and really trying to slam the North Korean economy,” Delury said of sanctions hardliners. “If you really start to go down that path, I’m not sure how far the Chinese will go down with you.”
The other mounting concern: that by the time the sanctions really start cutting into the North’s economy, potentially changing the government’s thinking about the wisdom of pursuing nuclear weapons, it may be too late.
Tillerson conceded there would likely be a lag period before the sanctions “actually have a practical bite on their revenues.”
“I think perhaps the more important element to that is just the message that this sends to North Korea about the unacceptability the entire international community finds what they’re doing to be,” he said.
Nevertheless, the belligerency expressed in a statement carried by the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency indicated Pyongyang was far from considering a halt or reversal to its nuclear program anytime soon. “We will make the U.S. pay by a thousand-fold for all the heinous crimes it commits against the state and people of this country,” the statement said.
North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho made similar comments during the ASEAN conference in Manila on Monday.