Sanctions on Chinese Banks

Reuters is claiming an exclusive on a story yesterday that says the U.S.will shortly levy new sanctions of some banks trading with some of North Korea's front companies that help them with their nuclear weapons program.  The article then goes on to say,

"The targets now being weighed for sanctions would come from a list of firms numbering 'substantially more than 10' that Trump shared with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a Florida summit in April and which U.S. experts have continued to compile for review, according to one of the officials."  

This will be a little tricky since China is already making claims that this is unnecessary and the ambassador to the US said they were not acceptable.  On its side, the U.S probably thought that giving the list of companies to Xi would result in them stopping what they were doing.  The people who believed that are the same ones that thought ZTE would stop violating sanctions with Iran when they were called out on it - and they weren't the only ones violating those sanctions, but the only one identified and fined by the Obama Administration.  The other aspect is in naming the companies the banks were doing business with.  In order to do that, we have to show that we know the names of those North Korean front companies.  Those are state secrets on both sides, though now they are known to everyone involved and so is our knowledge of them.  Probably unavoidable if the sanctions are going to be applied.

I'm not a real believer in sanctions.  It might have been better to watch these companies and disrupt them where possible.  The logical outcome will be that the North will change the names of all the identified companies, causing them some grief and inconvenience, but little else.  The Chinese will be more careful about getting caught trading with these new companies.  Nothing will change except the names of people and businesses that are used.  It just makes work for both sides and accomplishes very little.  The Chinese need a better incentive to stop supporting the North's and Iran's nuclear weapons program.  Neither of them could survive without Chinese support.  Perhaps we could work on that a little more.