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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un

The US government announced sanctions against North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on July 6. It was an unprecedentedly harsh measure. It made this choice even though it may bring about strong resistance from Pyongyang and instability in the region, considering North Korea’s sensibility about its leader. The failure to restore US relations with North Korea during President Obama’s administration will clearly lead to problems for the next US administration, as well.

On Wednesday, the US State Department submitted a report to Congress about human rights violations and censorship in North Korea in line with tougher sanctions against North Korea that Congress passed in February, and the Treasury Department released a sanctions list of 15 individuals, including Kim Jong-un, and eight government agencies. ”Under Kim Jong-un, North Korea continues to inflict intolerable cruelty and hardship on millions of its own people, including extrajudicial killings, forced labor, and torture,” said acting Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Adam J. Szubin about the inclusion of the North Korean leader on the sanctions list.

The list also included not only high-ranking officials such as Ri Yong-mu and O Kuk-ryol, former vice chairmen of the National Defense Commission, Hwang Pyong-so, vice chairman of the State Affairs Commission, but also mid- and low-level bureaucrats such as Kang Song-nam and two other bureau directors at the Ministry of State Security, Choi Chang-bong of the People’s Investigation Department, Ri Song-chol, counselor in the Ministry of People’s Security.

“With these efforts, we aim to send a signal to all government officials who might be responsible for human rights abuses, including prison camp managers and guards, interrogators and defector chasers, with the goal of changing their behavior,” said US Department of State spokesperson John Kirby. This stands as a warning that those responsible for human rights violations could face punishment according to international law after the fall of North Korea.

The announcement of these sanctions is an unusually hard-line response. Generally, sanctions aimed at the leaders of other countries are symbolic and issued when there is little hope of reaching a diplomatic solution. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe are typical targets of US sanctions. The move indicates a break in US efforts to improve relations with North Korea.

The current measures came about as a result of an effort to strengthen sanctions against North Korea mandated by Congress in February. But since issuing the sanctions list—through which the sanctions actually take effect—was left up to the Treasury Department, the Obama administration could have indefinitely delayed its announcement. The combined release of the State Department’s report and the sanctions list by the Treasury Department signals the intention to increase pressure on North Korea regardless of how this will affect the political situation moving forward.

Two main factors are cited as the cause of the US administration’s firmer stance on North Korea. The Musudan ballistic missile launch made by Pyongyang at the end of last month has raised concerns within the US government about continued technological advances within North Korea. The US territory of Guam and US army bases are thought to be within the current range of Pyongyang’s missiles. Considering Secretary of State John Kerry’s relationship with Congress, he was also probably strongly urged to include Kim Jong-un in the measures. Given the increasingly hawkish mood in Congress in regard to North Korea, the inclusion of Kim Jong-un was an inevitable political step.

The goal of the current actions on the part of the US is not to achieve practical results. The sanctions include barring entry into the US as well as freezing assets and suspending business dealings inside the US. This is unlikely to have any actual consequences for Kim and the other figures on the sanctions list. US government officials also acknowledged in a teleconference that there was little chance of the current sanctions having any real impact on improving human rights within North Korea. On the one hand, there is certainly political motivation ahead of the US presidential election and the desire to show the force of the US government’s will, while the efforts could also be seen as an attempt to knock Kim down a few pegs.

But the US stands to lose more than it gains, diplomatically. The country has broken with its diplomatic tradition of generally considering political issues separately from human rights matters. The Obama administration is essentially acknowledging the use of human rights as a tool to put pressure on North Korea.

During a teleconference with reporters on Thursday, a senior official from the administration said that the sanctions represented a separate effort from North Korea’s nuclear issue while expressing the administration’s belief that the two efforts would strengthen each other’s effectiveness in the long term.

The current steps are expected to make it difficult for the next US administration to succeed in any measures to restore the relationship between Washington and Pyongyang. These actions will certainly be among hostile policies whose retraction will have to be discussed in order to improve relations with North Korea going forward. However, while imposing sanctions is easy, repealing them, given Congress’s current negative view on the North, will be considerably more difficult.

In the short term, tensions could increase on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia. When a resolution on North Korean human rights was passed by the UN General Assembly in 2014 recommending that North Korean human rights abuses be brought before the International Criminal Court, Pyongyang responded aggressively by declaring the September 19 Joint Statement invalid and talking about nuclear tests. This time it also seems Pyongyang will have no option but to answer with some form of aggression.

On top of this, ROK-US Combined Forces training exercises are scheduled to be held next month, and the public announcement of THAAD placement in South Korea is also under discussion. The already frozen relations between the US and Pyongyang are bound to become colder, while Chinese and Russian opposition to the THAAD placement could also contribute to an increasingly stormy political situation in Northeast Asia.

By Yi Yong-in, Washington correspondent

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