Donald Trump’s Tweets have been dominated by North Korea ever since Pyongyang sucessfully tested what the goernment claims was a domestically produced hydrogen bomb.
Below are today’s Trump Tweets on the subject:
North Korea has conducted a major Nuclear Test. Their words and actions continue to be very hostile and dangerous to the United States…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017
..North Korea is a rogue nation which has become a great threat and embarrassment to China, which is trying to help but with little success.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017
South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017
I will be meeting General Kelly, General Mattis and other military leaders at the White House to discuss North Korea. Thank you.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017
The United States is considering, in addition to other options, stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017
Apart from the par for the course insults to China and threats of military action, the most strange Tweet was the one in which the US President threatened to cease trading with any country doing business with North Korea.
While North Korea conducts little business with the outside world by contemporary standards, a great number of nations do in fact conduct legal business with the DPRK on a frequent basis. This includes many US allies.
North Korea’s most prominent import partners include:
1. China
2. India
3. Russia
4. Thailand
5. Philippines
North Korea’s most sizeable export partners include:
1. China
2. India
3. Pakistan
4. Burkina Faso
Other countries with business relations with North Korea include but are not limited to: Egypt, Sweden, France, Peru, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Ukraine, Syria, South Africa, Ecuador, Germany, Malaysia, Singapore, Poland, the EU as a whole (including Britain) and many others.
As things stand, were the United States to stop trading with the aforementioned countries, the US would be ceasing trade with some of the most prominent economies in the world.
Clearly, the idea is for America to effectively bully other nations into ceasing their business dealings with North Korea in order to preserve their import and export relations with the US government and US business.
Such a tactic is not only unwise but it is patently aggressive and largely unrealistic. While the UN Security Council has spoken in a unified voice on sanctions, Russia and China have both come out in opposition to further unilateral sanctions passed by the United States.
Russia has likewise repeatedly stated that attempting to starve North Korea into submission is an American plan that Russia would never endorse. The same applies to China.
If Trump were however to instruct the US Treasury Department to try and implement such a threat, America would effectively be using sovereign economic blackmail to ideally (from Trump’s perspective) starve North Korea or otherwise to punish countries which do business North Korea, something which depending on which countries wouldn’t respond to the blackmail, could possibly destroy the US economy in respect of both imports and exports. This is especially true when one considers that countries with powerful economies like China do not respond well to blackmail and are economically diverse enough not to require total reliance on any one country, no matter how large.
Furthermore, in ‘starving’ North Korea, it would be less of a starvation into submission than a starvation into a desperate state where using nuclear weapons would ultimately be more likely in respect of Pyongyang.
While Trump’s statement is technically unofficial, it does speak to the important differences between geo-politics and domestic business ventures. The great economies of the world aren’t a cement company from New York…some of them even have nuclear weapons, including the countries that do the highest levels of business with North Korea.
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