The US President Donald Trump on Monday declared North Korea a state sponsor of terrorism even as his top diplomat said Washington has not given up hope of a negotiated end to the nuclear standoff with Kim Jong-Un’s regime.
Trump cited the death of a US student who had been held in a North Korean jail and the assassination by nerve agent of Kim’s elder half-brother on foreign soil as reasons for the move.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said sanctions and diplomacy could still pressure Kim into talks on nuclear disarmament.
“We still hope for diplomacy,” he said, adding that punitive measures were already having a significant impact on Pyongyang’s economy.
The White House has said it will not tolerate the North’s testing or deployment of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to US cities.
Experts believe Pyongyang is within months of such a threshold, having carried out six nuclear tests since 2006 and test-fired several types of missiles, including multi-stage rockets.
But US officials say their main hope is that Pyongyang will back down, in the face of what Tillerson described as an inexorable increase in economic and diplomatic pressure — supported by China.
“We know that there are current shortages of fuel based upon what we can gather anecdotally and also from certain intelligence sources,” Tillerson said.
“We know that their revenues are down,” he said. “So I think it is having an effect. Is this the reason we haven’t had a provocative act in 60 days?“
North Korea is already under a crushing sanctions regime, and Monday’s terror designation will not have much immediate economic impact.
But Trump said his declaration would kick off a two-week period of announcements — starting with a “very large” US Treasury sanctions measure — that will amount to a “maximum pressure campaign.”
US officials see the designation — which was removed by then-president George W. Bush in 2008 — as a way of ratcheting up pressure on other states and foreign banks that may be failing to fully enforce the sanctions.
In addition to threatening the world by nuclear devastation, North Korea repeatedly supported acts of international terrorism including assassinations on foreign soil,” Trump said.
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