White House: We’re Not Implementing North Korea Sanctions as Strongly as We Could

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “Situation Room,” White House National Security Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby acknowledged that sanctions against North Korea are not as strongly implemented as they could be and stated that more aggressive implementation of the existing sanctions would be an option if North Korea cuts an arms sale deal with Russia.

Host Wolf Blitzer asked, “You’ve said, John, that North Korea would face consequences if it were to sell more arms to Russia, but as you also said, it’s already under a very strict sanctions regime to begin with. How much more leverage does the U.S. really have here?”

Kirby answered, “Well, we’ll certainly look at options going forward. We could more aggressively implement the sanctions that are in place. We could also look at additional sanctions, either unilaterally from the United States or multilaterally. It’s interesting, Wolf, that, if this deal actually goes through, it would violate U.N. Security Council resolutions that Russia themselves signed up to, and so did China. So, we’ll work inside the U.N. … And then the last thing is, we’re going to continue to call it like we see it. We’ve been downgrading classified information and making it public about this particular deal for weeks now, and we’re going to keep at it. We’re going to keep monitoring it, and we won’t be bashful about laying it out there for the public to see what these two countries are trying to do.”

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