NEW
YORK -- President Trump on Thursday announced an executive order to
grant additional authority to the Treasury Department to enforce
economic sanctions on North Korea and countries that do business with
the rogue nation in Northeast Asia.
The president also said that
Chinese President Xi Jinping had ordered Chinese banks to cease
conducting business with North Korean entities. Trump called the move
"very bold" and "someone unexpected," and he praised Xi.
"I must
tell you this is a complete denuclearization of North Korea that we
seek," Trump said in brief public remarks during a meeting with
the leaders of South Korea and Japan to discuss strategy to confront
Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile tests.
Trump
said the United States had been working on the North Korea problem for
25 years, but he asserted that previous administrations had "done
nothing, which is why we are in the problem we are in today."
He
added that the order will give Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin the
"discretion to target any foreign bank knowingly facilitating specific
transactions tied to trade with North Korea."
Trump's announcement
came as he has sought to rally international support for confronting
dictator Kim Jong Un's regime during four days of meetings here at the
United Nations General Assembly. In a speech to the world body on
Tuesday, Trump threatened to "totally destroy" the North if necessary
and referred derisively to Kim as "rocket man."
In recent weeks,
the U.N. Security Council has approved two rounds of economic sanctions
but also left room for further penalties. For example, the sanctions put
limits on the nation's oil imports but did not impose a full embargo,
as the United States has suggested it supports. The Trump administration
has signaled it also wants a full ban on the practice of sending North
Korean workers abroad for payments that largely go to the government in
Pyongyang.
Sitting down with South Korean President Moon Jae-in
before the trilateral discussion with Japan, Trump said the nations are
"making a lot of progress."
Moon praised Trump's speech to the
U.N., saying through a translator that "North Korea has continued to
make provocations and this is extremely deplorable and this has angered
both me and our people, but the U.S. has responded firmly and in a very
good way."
The Security Council had also applied tough new export
penalties in August, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Wednesday
that there are signs those restrictions are having an economic effect.
“We
have some indications that there are beginning to appear evidence of
fuel shortages,” Tillerson said in a briefing for reporters. “And look,
we knew that these sanctions were going to take some time to be felt
because we knew the North Koreans...had basically stockpiled a lot of
inventory early in the year when they saw the new administration coming
in, in anticipation of things perhaps changing. So I think what we're
seeing is a combined effect of these inventories are now being
exhausted, and the supply coming in has been reduced.”
There is
no sign, however, that economic penalties are having any effect on the
behavior of the Kim regime and its calculation that nuclear tests and
other provocations will ensure its protection or raise the price of any
eventual settlement with the United States and other nations.
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