This is simply a case of punishing the weakest and most vulnerable people in North Korea in a vain bid to revive a „maximum pressure“ policy that has already failed.<\/b>
\nThe Trump administration continues using humanitarian aid as a bargaining chip in talks with North Korea. The result is the spread of preventable and treatable diseases:
Delaying humanitarian assistance to sick and hungry people is a cruel and unworthy tactic. Worse still, it is being cruel for no good reason. As I said in October when this pressure tactic was first being reported, the North Korean government is not going to be suddenly moved to give up its nuclear weapons because our government interferes with the delivery of aid. If the North Korean government were greatly concerned about the health and welfare of these people, there would not be such a need for outside aid in the first place. Note that the aid efforts that the administration is interfering with are charitable works being done for the sake of helping North Korea\u2019s poor and sick. Our government is getting in the way because it wants to turn that aid into an incentive that it can use in its fruitless negotiations with Pyongyang.
Impeding the delivery of aid to sick and starving people has become a recurring theme in Trump administration policies. In each case, it doesn\u2019t achieve anything except to impose greater hardship on already suffering people. There is some opposition from Congress to this pointless cruelty:
This is simply a case of punishing the weakest and most vulnerable people in North Korea in a vain bid to revive a \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d policy that has already failed. It\u2019s unnecessary, unjust, and serves no American interests.<\/p>\n