Here we go again

By John Burton

This year's holiday season will be less than happy on the Korean Peninsula. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is promising to deliver an unwelcome "Christmas gift" to U.S. President Donald Trump in response to stalled negotiations on denuclearization.

A big stumbling block is Washington's refusal to ease sanctions until Pyongyang makes substantial progress in ending its nuclear and missile programs.

Nearly a year ago, that logjam appeared to have been broken. Leaks in press ahead of the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in February suggested that the U.S. was willing to gradually lift sanctions in return for interim moves by North Korea toward denuclearization.

But at the summit Trump took a much harder line. He insisted that North Korea completely give up its nuclear program before the U.S. would proceed with sanctions relief. This "all or nothing" offer reflected the influence of John Bolton, then Trump's hawkish national security adviser, as well as the president's own calculation that he needed a big diplomatic win as he faced possible impeachment.

There are now calls for Trump to resume an incremental approach in solving the crisis. Last week, eight Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Charles Schumer, sent a letter to Trump, urging continued diplomatic outreach to Pyongyang as they cautioned against a return to the president's "fire and fury" rhetoric of 2017.

The senators proposed an interim deal that would include a "sequenced process to verifiably freeze and roll back North Korea's nuclear weapons and missile programs in conjunction with continued appropriate sanctions and other pressure." This would include a "phased process to verifiably dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear complex and other nuclear facilities." This is basically the same deal that Trump was reportedly considering a year ago before the Hanoi summit.

Meanwhile, China and Russia last week called on the U.N. Security Council to lift some sanctions on North Korea as the best option to reduce tensions.

But persuading the U.S. to accept sanctions relief will be hard. Washington has long embraced sanctions as a cure-all for international crises around the world. They enable politicians and policymakers to claim they are addressing pressing issues short of going to war. They are also an easy tool for the U.S. to use given its great economic power.

In the U.S., sanctions are difficult to remove once they are placed on the statue books. Even if the Trump administration wanted to remove some sanctions on North Korea, it could face opposition in Congress. As part of the new defense funding bill signed by Trump last week, Congress authorized new "secondary" sanctions on foreign banks and companies, mainly in China, that engage in financial transactions with North Korea.

But sanctions are a problematic solution. Many academic studies show that they are ineffective. "Politically, sanctions are most effective against friends and allies; in the case of adversaries, they can stiffen their resolve," noted a 2015 report from the World Economic Forum.

Sanctions can also backfire. In the most famous case, historians agree that U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's decision in 1940 to impose an embargo on oil and scrap metal exports to Japan prompted Tokyo to lash out and attack Pearl Harbor a year later in a desperate move for survival.

Kim's apparent threat to resume missile and nuclear tests next year may be an acknowledgement that sanctions are beginning to bite and a sign of desperation.

Sanctions are undermining Kim's efforts to switch to an economy-first policy and hampering inter-Korean and regional initiatives. North Korea's economic growth has stalled due to sanctions after a relative improvement during the first four years of Kim's rule as he gave greater freedom to a bottom-up market economy.

Meanwhile, around 40 percent of his population is facing food insecurity and the country this winter is once again suffering from electricity shortages.

Sanctions are also impacting international humanitarian aid projects. The U.N. has ruled that such aid should not be subject to sanctions, although in practice the U.N. sanctions have affected the delivery of aid in many cases. The U.S, financial sanctions have added to the problems that international NGOs face in funding their efforts.

The sanctions regime is also discouraging international donors from contributing funds to U.N. humanitarian projects in North Korea. In 2019 the U.N. requested $120.3 million for these projects, but received only $32 million, or 26.6 percent of funds requested. This was the second-largest funding gap for U.N. aid after Venezuela. This may be one reason why the U.N. has reduced its funding request for North Korea by 11 percent to $107 million for 2020.

Taking the uncontroversial step of relaxing the impact of sanctions on humanitarian aid may be a good place to start to help defuse what looks like a coming crisis on the peninsula.

John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant.