Trump’s
threat to stop trading with ALL NATIONS who do business with the DPRK is
foolish, aggressive, unrealistic and potentially damaging to the US economy.
by
ADAM GARRIESeptember 3, 2017, 20:04
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:
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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