Following several rounds of sanctions, the White House is now urging China to turn off the tap on oil supplies to Kim Jong Un’s regime.
The Trump administration’s primary North Korea strategy would do little to curb the country’s nuclear program and could trigger a famine, according to experts.
After spearheading several rounds of sanctions, the White House is now urging China to turn off oil supplies to Kim Jong Un’s regime and the 25 million people he rules.
Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, summed up Washington’s thinking Sunday: „You cannot shoot a missile without fuel.“
Many analysts say such a move would have minimal impact on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs and would instead hit the country’s agricultural sector, potentially leading to mass starvation.
„If it could be done, a full oil cutoff would certainly dramatically reduce the amount of domestically grown food available to the civilian population,“ according to David von Hippel, a senior associate at the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability, a California-based think tank.
Von Hippel warned the results of an oil embargo — which he conceded would be almost impossible to enforce — could have a catastrophic impact on a humanitarian level.
„Unless China or the rest of the world exported or gifted food to the DPRK to compensate, this would likely lead to famine,“ he added, referring to the North by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
North Korea’s population would feel a lack of oil more acutely than most countries.
Much of the country’s 46,000 square miles, an area around the size of Pennsylvania, is covered in mountains. According to the CIA World Factbook, only around 22 percent of North Korea is used for agriculture, compared with 44 percent of the United States.
What arable land there is, North Koreans farm intensively. They’ve also come to rely on tractors, irrigation pumps, refrigerators and transportation trucks to harvest and distribute food before it rots.
Von Hippel said that even without further sanctions, measures imposed in September as a result of Kim’s missile and nuclear tests would likely impoverish North Korea’s breadbasket.
„The civilian population will certainly feel the burden of the sanctions well before the nuclear weapons or missile programs or the DPRK elites do, if these noncivilians feel them at all,“ he said. „At some point, however, the agricultural sector will feel the pinch of sanctions.“
Elizabeth Rosenberg, a senior fellow and the director of the energy, economics and security program at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, said that famine is „among the possibilities“ that lawmakers should consider when deciding whether to impose tighter trade restrictions.
