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Trump Tries To Undo North Korea Sanctions – Gets Sabotaged By His Own Staff
Last week saw some confusion within the Trump administration about sanctions against North Korea. A Trump tweet seemed to contradict his own administration's policies. The White House then thought up an implausible explanation for what Trump had done. The face saving measure worked, but new leaks now again undermine him.
U.S. media reported of the episode but missed a major point. The timeline below shows that the internal White House conflict was prompted by reactions from North Korea's side.
After bad weather and a strong sanctions regime against it, North Korea is running low on food. Last month its ambassador to the UN requested food assistance:
Kim, the ambassador to the U.N., said record-high temperatures, drought and flooding last year shaved more than 500,000 tons off of the 2018 harvest from the nearly 5 million tons produced in 2017.
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Humanitarian assistance from the U.N. agencies is “terribly politicized,” he said, and sanctions against North Korea are “barbaric and inhuman.”
On Thursday the 21st the Treasury Department, ignoring the dire situation, issued new sanctions (pdf) against two Chinese shipping companies that are trading with North Korea. It also named more North Korean vessels that it suspects to be involved in sanction busting efforts.
National Security Advisor John Bolton tweeted:
John Bolton @AmbJohnBolton – 18:31 utc – 21 Mar 2019
John Bolton Retweeted Treasury Department
Important actions today from @USTreasury; the maritime industry must do more to stop North Korea’s illicit shipping practices. Everyone should take notice and review their own activities to ensure they are not involved in North Korea’s sanctions evasion.
The next day North Korea reacted to the move by pulling its officers from the liaison office with South Korea:
Matt Lee @APDiploWriter – 9:25 utc – 22 Mar 2019
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — #SouthKorea says #NorthKorea has withdrawn its staff from an inter-Korean liaison office in North Korea.
The move was unexpected:
Seoul's Unification Ministry said Friday that North Korea informed South Korea of its decision during a contact at the liaison office at the North Korean border town of Kaesong.
The ministry calls the North's decision "regrettable." It says the North didn't give a specific reason for its move.
The liaison office opened last September as part of a flurry of reconciliation steps.
The liaison office is one the few diplomatic contact points where talk between the two sides are still happening. The U.S. uses it to indirectly communicate with North Korea. Following the North Korean pull back there was likely a phone call from President Moon Jae-in of South Korea to U.S. President Donald Trump.
Ten hours after North Korea pulled back its liaison officers Trump contradicted his administrations position:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump – 17:22 utc – 22 Mar 2019
It was announced today by the U.S. Treasury that additional large scale Sanctions would be added to those already existing Sanctions on North Korea. I have today ordered the withdrawal of those additional Sanctions!
The New York Times reported of confusion:
President Trump undercut his own Treasury Department on Friday with a sudden announcement that he had rolled back newly imposed North Korea sanctions, appearing to overrule national security experts as a favor to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.
The move, announced on Twitter, was a remarkable display of dissension within the Trump administration. It created confusion at the highest levels of the federal government, just as the president’s aides were seeking to pressure North Korea into returning to negotiations over dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
The North Korea hawks were aghast. They wanted to keep the sanctions but could not contradict Trump. The White House needed to come up with an explanation:
It was initially believed that Mr. Trump had confused the day that the North Korea sanctions were announced, and officials said they were caught off guard by the president’s tweet. Asked for clarification, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, declined to give specifics.
“President Trump likes Chairman Kim, and he doesn’t think these sanctions will be necessary,” she said.
Then, hours later, an official familiar with Mr. Trump’s thinking said the president was actually referring to additional North Korea sanctions that are under consideration but not yet formally issued.
That statement sought to soften the blow that Mr. Trump’s tweet had dealt to his most loyal aides. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, personally signed off on the sanctions that were issued on Thursday and hailed the decision in a statement accompanying them.
The Washington Post noted:
The move to forestall future sanctions represents an attempt by the president to salvage his nuclear negotiations with North Korea in the face of efforts by national security adviser John Bolton and others to increase punitive economic measures against the regime of Kim Jong Un.
The explanation that Trump referred to future sanctions seemed implausible. Why would Trump need to publicly prevent future sanctions? It made no sense.
To me it seemed that Trump had tried to play the good guy by revoking the sanctions that were enacted the day before but was overruled by his staff. The issue was then presented in a way that made Trump still look good in the eyes of North Korea. It was a face saving measure. After the failed Hanoi summit between Chairman Kim Jong-un and Trump both sides emphasized their good personal relations. Trump wanted to keep the relation alive but the sanctions were kept up.
Luckily North Korea swallowed the additional sanctions and accepted the face saving explanation. On Monday it reacted to the happy spin:
Some North Korean officials returned to a liaison office with South Korea just days after Pyongyang withdrew from the facility that allowed the rivals to communicate around the clock.
The cut-off of the last face-to-face communication line was avoided.
But to some people in the White House that situation is not to their liking. They want to further undermine Trump's efforts to continue negotiations with North Korea. They now leak that the "future sanction" explanation, which North Korea accepted, was indeed nonsense.
Bloomberg reports today:
President Donald Trump last week intended to reverse sanctions imposed on two Chinese shipping companies accused of violating North Korea trade prohibitions — until officials in his administration persuaded him to back off and then devised a misleading explanation of his vague tweet announcing the move.
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The president in fact intended to remove penalties Treasury had announced the day before against two Chinese shippers that had helped Pyongyang evade U.S. sanctions, according to four people familiar with the matter. It was unclear whether Trump knew about or signed off on the measures before they were issued, or what triggered his tweet the next day.
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There were no additional North Korea sanctions in the works at the time, according to two people familiar with the matter.
It is quite obvious what "triggered" Trump's tweet. It was the North Korean pullback from the liaison office. But Bloomberg, like other U.S. outlets, ignores that quite obvious explanation. This constant ignorance of the action of the other side is one of the systemic problems U.S. media have.
New sanctions were announced to which North Korea reacted negatively. Trump, who wants to keep the door open for future negotiations, took note and pulled back on the sanctions. But John Bolton intervened. The sanctions were kept. A well sounding but implausible explanation was found. North Korea accepted that and came back to the table.
The new leak now again aggravates the situation. It shows that Trump has little real say about his administration's policy. It shows that he was powerless when he tried to undo the sanctions that had worsened the situation in the first place. The leak undermines whatever trust Kim Jong-un still has in Trump's words.
How will North Korea react to this? Will it again pull back from the liaison office, a step the John Boltons of this world would see as a win?
Will it ignore the new leak?
‘What am I missing?” oo goo gachoo @ 4
What you are missing are the dozens of indications that the US government is riven by factions struggling for control over policies in every area.
Indications which long precede Trump’s period in the White House.
And that is curious because one of the great strengths of this blog is that b has a nose for the subtleties indicating that, behind the bland wall of unanimity and the PR work of the spokespeople, these struggles are taking place. And that the current saga of talks with Korea is a prime example of what has also been happening, within recent memory, regarding Syria, Iraq, Turkey, NATO and just about everything else, Venezuela included, involving US Foreign Policy.
The remarkable thing is the number of explanations that are inevitably advanced to show that, contrary to appearances, everything is carefully plotted. It is all part of an incredibly complex plan to achieve objectives more speedily by feigning dissent and disunity, whereas in fact All Was Planned.
There are those who hold that the 2016 Election was precisely what the Deep State ordered and that all taking part in it, including Hillary and Trump were merely acting. And were well pleased with the results.
The sheer persistence of those who insist, some of them a dozen or so times a day, that “nothing surprises them” and that they “saw it all coming” attracts naturally sceptical minds to come up with “Good Cop-Bad Cop” explanations of their own.
The reality is that b’s analysis is correct: there is a real struggle going on between those like Bolton who believe that thuggery is the answer to every question and more reasonable viewpoints, which in this matter include Trump himself, though, dummy that he is, he is not very confident in his common sense.
And there is nothing new about this. There have been raging disputes about foreign policy questions since Washington’s first term, they are part of the system. Just as stupidity and arrogance are part of human nature.
The problem is that the belief in American Exceptionality and the inevitability of US victory is so deeply imbued in otherwise sensible people that everything the government does is greeted with wise nods and knowing looks as confirmation that it is, like Pearl Harbor, just as intended.
It is part of a political culture of hopelessness, to which the “Left” in the US has long been prone; elections are all fixed, most of them are bought and the rest of them finessed by the computer operators. There is no point in campaigning for a reformer because they are invariably assassinated or neutralised. No sooner does one get elected than the Left begins to prove that she will sell out soon and probably was always a fake. It is the only thing that saves the lives of the likes of Bernie and OAC.
It is the other side of the coin: one side tells us that, despite appearances, the ruling class is united around not only its objectives but the means to arrive at them. And the other side tells us that resistance is useless, the script was long ago finalised and no changes are possible now.
It’s a form of Calvinism: political predestination. There are no free agents, just fools and actors pretending to be playing the parts.
Meanwhile in North Korea belts are being tightened again. Still the great advantage of being North Korean is that, hunger notwithstanding, they know that the US government is startlingly incompetent- they have been attacking them, subverting them, bombing them, lying about them, bullying their trading partners and food suppliers, stealing their shipping, blockading their coastlines to make them submit and, seventy years later, they are undefeated.
Posted by: bevin | Mar 27 2019 0:17 utc | 41
@41 bevin.. as you know i always enjoy reading your comments..
however, i am curious about a quote you have given and whether you think changes might have happened that are too late to take back? i am thinking of eisenhowers words about the military industrial complex applying to the cia-fbi at this point?
your quote “What you are missing are the dozens of indications that the US government is riven by factions struggling for control over policies in every area.”
Posted by: james | Mar 27, 2019 2:20:04 PM | 79
The point is James that yes, the CIA have such a large place at the table and in all the back rooms and related institutions that they can (almost) always manipulate things to get what they want, but the power and control that they have is (still, thus far) illegitimate, on the one hand, and intrinsicly corrupt, on the other. One of the most important takeaways of the Russiagate puppet show is that under Obama the CIA/Deep State was very close to closing the gap to total and immutable control, and even the “officialisation” of the CIA ultimate control. (By “CIA” here I don’t just mean what is officially CIA as a legally constituted institution, but overlapping with an illegal construct that includes ex-CIA such as Brennan on the one hand, and Deep State billionaire string-pullers – here not meaning the whole of the Deep State as a whole entity though – on the other. If Clinton had won the election, some of the things that came out in Russiagate indicate that that gap would have soon been closed and the (unofficial side of the) CIA would then be in total and immutable control (that is, until the total collapse of the US which would then be totally predestined and not far off). Now, as things stand, they might still achieve that but several obstacles stand in the way, and the hand and leverage of the non-CIA-(plus) minority at the table of power has been increased.
Don’t make the mistake of assuming that everything is united under one leadership – people are not made that way. Whatever the organisation or institution or government, it is always made up of people. There are a multitude of reasons why individual human beings join an organisation, remain in it, support it, defend it, show (for the time being at least) allegiance to it – yet those individuals may or may not be ethically at one with the leadership and overall actions of that institution. Take for example an arbitrary Army “X”, such as one of the more brutal armies of Latin America at the time when Operation Condor was in full swing – that army was regularly committing massacres of indigenous peoples and protestors and “leftists”, torturing opponents, etc. Now take an arbitrary member of that army, person “Y”, who is a human being. Does the fact that he is a soldier in that army, and true to that army, necessarily mean that he is evil, that he is either guilty of human rights offences or he supports human rights offences? He may feel dedicated to Army X even while despising those in control of its leadership and actions, or he may have pure faith in the purity and actions of his beloved army and believe that all rumours of misdeeds are misinformation and propaganda. Or maybe he is an intrinsic part of those misdeeds … or maybe a part of the misdeeds in limited ways and at the same time disbelieving of the major part … etc. I believe there are some poor souls who join the CIA genuinely believing they are doing a noble service to the protection of the American People and their Country – some will later become corrupted by offers of personal gain, others will be corrupted by ignorance, hubris and foolishness, others will become critical and leave, others will become critical but keep quiet and submit out of fear, others will become critical but think they can be a force for good from within or just want to try to do what they can, others will become whistleblowers, still others will waver between several of these options.
The CIA was born out of its predecessor WWII organisation the OSS, which in turn was set up very specifically as a joint operation with organised crime, and specifically the US-Italian mafia bosses, with the intention to use the Italian mafia on the ground to assist in the military assault on Italy under Mussolini. Using the Italian mafia as a terrorist/proxy force, in today’s jargon. The joint nature of the operation with Mafia criminals was explicit from the start, and major mafia bosses were released from jail in New York and Chicago for the purpose. In reality there was nothing ethically superior about the “intelligence” leadership of the OSS and the leadership of the criminal gangs they partnered with, and the core of the OSS – warts and all – became the core of the CIA at its inception. Therefore there was never any point at which it “became” a criminal organisation – it was a criminal organisation from the moment of the inception of the OSS and uninterruptedly thereafter.
As an intrinsically criminal organisation, many of its gang members are easily swayed by greed for criminal profits on the side – whether promise of career advancement for compliance, semi-legal inducements from the MIC, personal participation in drug dealing, assistance of theft of gold from Syria/Libya, inflated “expenses”, or whatever. Therefore it should come as no surprise that the CIA is often ineffective and incompetent, carries out foolish projects that never had much chance of success and massive blunders, for such is the nature of greed and criminal enterprise. By the same token – given that all large administrative organisations are intrinsically amorphous masses of discrete human beings – there will always be countering positions motivated by ethical principles, countering factions based on greed and struggles for power between and within factions, and complex combinations of both.
Much the same basic considerations apply to the FBI, which also ever since it’s inception under Edgar Allen Hoover was using large scale illegal surveillance to gain information to blackmail fellow political and bureaucratic operatives.
Don’t be swayed by simplistic commenters who try to bludgeon their point of view by endless repetition, James – that is just an example of the cognitive capture and the Illusory Truth Effect discussed recently by Caitlin Johnstone.
As the Empire descends into its final collapse – like the fall of Rome – it’s many criminal factions, driven by greed, foolishness, fear and lack of serious interest in real issues, compete amongst each other in a race to the bottom – competing for gains, competing for influence, competing for power, and trying to protect their own backs from charges of criminal malfeasance. At the same time different factions have different strategic viewpoints just as commenters on this board have different viewpoints. Historically the CIA and FBI have always used surveillance of politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and everybody under the sun to gain information to blackmail their opponents so that they can control everything, and this is why they have a privileged place at the table. But ultimately, a criminal organisation will always be undermined by the fact that it is a criminal organisation. It’s votes at the table will always be substandard votes, inferior votes, dishonest votes, even when it manages to get it’s way through underhand manipulation. There will always be those who resent it’s power, there will always be those who try to undermine it when opportunities present themselves. Thence the US Government being “riven by factions struggling for control over policies in every area” that you question.
Posted by: BM | Mar 28 2019 16:19 utc | 87
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