THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE HAS BEEN PROVIDED BY FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS:

Sanctions and War on the Korean Peninsula
By Martin Hart-Landsberg and John Feffer

The risk of war on the Korean peninsula remains high, and the U.S.
government is raising it higher by opening an economic front. In
September 2005, one day after regional negotiations produced an
agreement with the potential to defuse North Korean-U.S. tensions, the
U.S. government charged North Korea with counterfeiting $100 bills.
Calling this alleged North Korean effort a direct attack on U.S.
sovereignty and technically an act of war, Washington imposed an
ever-tightening and ever-widening web of financial restrictions on the
country.

Washington’s economic gambit, launched in 2005 and strengthened by UN
sanctions in 2006, raises questions concerning timing, threat
escalation, morality, and efficacy. With no further rounds of
multilateral talks currently planned, the hard-line economic approach
toward North Korea has been a counterproductive detour from the more
pressing issue of denuclearization and diplomatic normalization. The
restrictions and sanctions have acted as too blunt a stick to push
North Korea back to the negotiating table and have become instead the
main stumbling block in the negotiations. Deployed as an alternative to
the less palatable military approaches to regime change, the economic
campaign proved counterproductive when the DPRK responded with its
missile and nuclear tests. Finally, this economic approach undermines
North Korean efforts at reforms and opening, the very process that many
argue needs to be supported on moral, as well as strategic, grounds.

FPIF contributor Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics and
the director of the political economy program at Lewis and Clark
College, Portland, Oregon. John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign
Policy In Focus at the International Relations Center.

See the rest of the FPIF article online at: http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/3913