Sanctions just got more serious:
President Trump announced he has just signed a new executive order that "significantly expands our authority to target individual companies, and financial institutions that facilitate trade with North Korea."
The announcement came at a lunch with South Korean President Moon Jae-In and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
The order, which aims to cut off sources of revenue that fund North Korea's nuclear and weapons programs, comes in response to North Korea's repeated missile and nuclear tests. It targets any individual or entity that trades goods, services or technology with the North.
Mr. Trump also praised a new action taken by China's central bank to demand that other banks stop doing business with the North. "This just happened," Mr. Trump said.
That's great. But I hope nobody on the DMZ is lowering their guard. Sanctions effective enough to compel a foe to change their policies may be indistinguishable pain-wise from an actual kinetic attack:
[Sanctions] are unlikely to achieve our objectives peacefully for the simple reason that any sanctions that hurt a target nation enough to compel them to change their priority policies more to our liking will be sanctions tough enough to seem like an act of war to the target nation's leadership. So sanctions tough enough to work will likely just compel the target nation to escalate to military action as their response.
If these sanctions truly bite, North Korea could consider them acts of war and respond with their own form of war--actual warfare.
Remember, the choice of war is not our decision alone. North Korea could initiate war.
