The United States is starving North Korean civilians to death in the name of denuclearization.
This past Friday, officials from Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo gathered in Tokyo for a routine trilateral meeting on North Korean affairs. They reaffirmed their commitment to denuclearization, condemned Pyongyang’s missile program, and pledged to keep the sanctions vise tight. The three officials also flagged Russia‑North Korea military cooperation as a concern, though the alliance’s own expanding arms purchases from the same defense‑industrial base the meetings serve suggests the concern is selective. The wire‑service story is as bloodless as the diplomatic language it quotes. But behind the sterile communiqué, a lethal policy continues: the economic strangulation of 26 million people.
Read the meeting instead as a map. The officials themselves — Kim Sang-il, head of South Korea’s North Korean Nuclear Affairs Policy Division; David Wilezol, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Northeast Asia; Kengo Otsuka, Japan’s deputy director‑general for Asian and Oceanian affairs — sit at a level where real coordination work happens away from the camera flashes of ministerial summits. When the U.S., South Korea, and Japan send their nuclear‑policy division chiefs and deputy assistant secretaries to the same room on the same day, they are not performing diplomacy. They are operationalizing it. And the agenda items — Russia‑North Korea military cooperation, North Korean malicious cyber activities — tell you what they are operationalizing. These are the domains where trilateral coordination has the most acute near‑term operational relevance and where keeping the conversation at the working level rather than elevating it to ministerial public attention serves a specific strategic purpose. The coordination is becoming bureaucratic. Which, in diplomacy, is another word for permanent.
South Korea’s own framing in the readout is worth pausing on. Seoul said it “explained our effort in easing tension and building trust in inter‑Korean relations” — language that, days after proposing four‑way peace talks with North Korea, the United States, and China, positions the government as the alliance’s designated engagement channel even as Tokyo and Washington lean toward pressure on the military‑cooperation and cyber fronts. That division of labor — Seoul leading diplomatic signaling while the trilateral apparatus hardens on sanctions enforcement and intelligence sharing — is the actual architecture being built in these unremarkable working sessions. A separate managing‑board meeting the same day, bringing together Wilezol, Otsuka, and South Korea’s director‑general for North American affairs, reviewed cooperation on security, the economy, and technology. That a “secretariat managing board” exists at all is the story: the three countries have built a standing bureaucratic structure for trilateral coordination that holds its own meetings, tracks its own progress, and produces its own concrete outcomes. Every standing agenda item, every managing‑board session, every division‑chief‑level meeting that happens without a press conference is a brick in an edifice that will be very difficult to dismantle when the political winds shift.
The sanctions regime that the United States has built and enforced against North Korea is one of the most comprehensive sets of unilateral and multilateral economic restrictions ever imposed on a peacetime state. It blocks almost all trade, restricts financial transactions, bans the import of industrial machinery, and — critically — chokes the flow of humanitarian goods. The State Department insists that sanctions are “targeted” and do not affect civilian populations. This is a lie that the evidence does not sustain. UN special rapporteurs, humanitarian organizations, and defector testimony all converge on the same finding: the blockade has devastated food supplies, collapsed medical systems, and caused excess deaths that independent researchers estimate in the thousands, with some assessments suggesting a far higher toll over the long years of the blockade. According to the 2022 UN Panel of Experts report to the DPRK Sanctions Committee (S/2022/137), the humanitarian exemption mechanism is so cumbersome that aid is severely delayed. Children die of malnutrition. Tuberculosis patients die without drugs. The elderly die in unheated homes. The United States is killing people. It calls this “maximum pressure” and “denuclearization.” The words are the policy’s armor. The dead are its ledger.
The diplomatic theater in Tokyo serves a purpose that has nothing to do with peace. As Andrew Bacevich argued in Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010), the foreign‑policy establishment operates on a set of unwritten “Washington Rules”: maintain global military primacy, sustain a permanent forward posture, and treat every regional tension as a justification for that posture. The Korean Peninsula is the longest‑running laboratory for this pathology. For seventy years, the United States has kept tens of thousands of troops stationed in South Korea, flown nuclear‑capable bombers over the peninsula, and conducted annual war games designed to intimidate Pyongyang. The North’s nuclear and missile programs, monstrous as they are, did not spring from a vacuum. They grew in the soil of a permanent threat. The trilateral meetings that make the news are not efforts to resolve the conflict. They are efforts to manage it at a temperature that keeps the defense budgets flowing and the alliance architecture intact.
Eisenhower warned us about this. Late in his farewell address, he spoke of the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” whose “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.” He called for an alert and knowledgeable citizenry to compel the proper meshing of that machinery with peaceful purposes. The Korean status quo is a direct product of the machinery he named. The defense‑contractor sector profits from the missile‑defense systems sold to Seoul and Tokyo. The Navy justifies its carrier presence by the North Korean threat. The think tanks that produce the sanctions‑escalation studies are funded by the same firms that build the hardware. The trilateral coordinating body that met in Tokyo is not a peace negotiation; it is a customer‑service meeting for the military‑industrial complex.
The human cost of this arrangement falls overwhelmingly on the North Korean people. The sanctions restrict the import of fertilizer, which means smaller harvests. They restrict fuel, which means hospitals cannot run generators and medicines cannot be transported. The public record — including declassified assessments and congressional testimony — makes clear that Washington is not operating in ignorance. The policy continues because the American public does not see the bodies, and because the permanent foreign‑policy class does not count them.
There is an alternative on the table. South Korea’s own government has recently proposed four‑way peace talks involving Washington, Pyongyang, and Beijing — a framework that would exchange phased sanctions relief for verifiable steps toward denuclearization. That is the diplomatic path that the Eisenhower tradition demands: one that subordinates the appetites of the arms industry to the actual goal of peace. But the trilateral machinery that met in Tokyo is structurally allergic to such a framework, because peace would dry up the threat that keeps the budgets high and the alliances rigid.
I write this as a man who once wore the uniform of the same country that is administering this slow‑motion atrocity. From where I sat in the gunner’s seat in Iraq, I learned that the men and women in the political class do not pay the cost of the policies they write. That is true for American soldiers, and it is true for the civilians whose lives are deemed acceptable collateral damage in a sanctions war that has lasted nearly two decades. The Christian tradition in which I was formed demands that I name what I see: the United States is using food and medicine as weapons, and it is killing people. The diplomats who gather in Tokyo will never say that. It is my job to say it for them.
The cold ledger is this: the denuclearization‑through‑sanctions policy has produced more nuclear weapons in North Korea, not fewer. Sanctions hawks counter that Pyongyang would have built weapons regardless; but the timeline tells the opposite story — every major testing acceleration has followed a round of escalated pressure. It has produced more suffering, not less. It has produced a permanent garrison state on the Korean Peninsula that enriches the same defense contractors Eisenhower warned about in 1961. The only thing it has not produced is peace. The wire saw a routine meeting. The architecture says otherwise. The alert and knowledgeable citizenry Eisenhower called for must finally ask the question the trilateral communiqué will not: how many dead North Koreans is denuclearization worth?