WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Monday announced that his administration has re-designated North Korea while a state sponsor of terror, a move aimed at increasing pressure on Pyongyang a decade after the George W. Bush administration eliminated the rogue nation from the list.
Trump made his decision public during a brief photo op at a Cabinet meeting, calling it "a very critical step" that "should've happened a long time ago." The president cited assassinations by dictator Kim Jong Un's regime carried out on foreign soil, and also the treatment of American college pupil Otto Warmbier, who died in June days after he was released in a coma by the North after spending 17 a few months in captivity.
Trump vowed that Pyongyang will face further sanctions in the near future and that this will be the "highest level of sanctions by the time it's finished." White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders amplified the message on Twitter.
"POTUS announced that the U.S. is again designating North Korea circumstances sponsor of terror," she tweeted.
The White Home had signaled during Trump's Asia trip this month that the president was likely to produce the designation. The North spent 10 years on that list before getting taken out in 2008 by the Bush administration for conference nuclear inspection requirements. Pyongyang afterwards violated the agreement.
In a speech to the South Korean national assembly two weeks ago, Trump cited atrocities completed by the Kim regime and called the North "a hell that no person deserves." Among other works, Kim's regime stands accused of carrying out the assassination of his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, with a deadly nerve agent at a Malaysian airport in February.
Iran, Sudan and Syria also are on the list, which is administered by the State Department. According to that agency, sanctions for those nations on the list include "restrictions on U.S. foreign assistance; a ban on defense exports and sales; specific handles over exports of dual use items; and miscellaneous economic and other restrictions."
Last month, a bipartisan group of House members wrote to Secretary of Condition Rex Tillerson urging him to add North Korea to the list, citing the deaths of Warmbier and Kim Jong Nam.
"Such acts are not isolated events, but part of a consistent pattern by the Kim regime," stated the letter, signed by Rep. Edward Royce, R-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the committee's ranking Democrat, among others.
Michael Green, who served seeing that senior Asia director in the National Security Council under Bush from 2001-2005, said the removal of the North from the terror-sponsor list was "very controversial" and turned out to be a "crappy deal" that Pyongyang quickly violated. He added that the Japanese government had lobbied the Bush administration not to remove the North in 2008 until Pyongyang brought resolution to Tokyo's promises that the North experienced kidnapped at least 17 Japanese citizens in the 1970s.
During his go to Tokyo fourteen days ago, Trump met with families of the dozen Japanese abductees whose cases have not been resolved.
"Putting them back in the list is important symbolically simply because a demonstration of good faith with Japan," Green said of North Korea. "It also helps add spin on the ball with sanctions overall."