Quoting one of the lawyers who helped draft sanctions law:

https://freekorea.us/sanctions-nkspea-faq/

""" Section 207 of the NKSPEA contains broad exemptions for food imports and humanitarian aid, and provides for waivers for humanitarian reasons, or when a waiver is important to the national security or economic interests of the United States. The Treasury Department has also published general licenses permitting humanitarian aid. """

And yet they still starve, it is almost like crippling economic systems but allowing shipments of rice is not humanitarian at all, but more a "face saving" position so they can claim they are not the baddies

It's almost like the place is run by a dictator who would take food out of the mouth of his own people to fund a nuclear weapons program that serves no purpose other than to keep him in power.

It’s exactly like that, but that was always the most likely result and hardly a surprise. The sanctions are meant to drive a wedge between the regime and the people.

Hmm if only there was an economic system or currency that could be used outside the control of authoritarian governments...

I wonder what we would call it.....

The USD - crypto is an amazing tool for authoritarian regimes looking to evade sanctions. Assuming that's where you were trying to go, you totally misunderstand the problem. People in oppressive regimes can have all the crypto in the world but, if every time they use it to buy food, there's a guy with a gun who takes it for the regime, then it's even more useless than it's normal Monopoly money status.

> intended to exacerbate the destitution and starvation

What support is there for this statement?

I’ll rephrase. While the intent is to topple or pacify the government by starving the regime, this strategy essentially requires the suffering of the people. Happy and content people don’t revolt or push for political change.

We are openly doing this to Russia right now, rooting for the economic collapse and stark decline of living standards.

In both situations we assume that making life much more difficult for the people now will achieve our goals.

If he were smuggling in food, sure, but I struggle to see how helping the North Korean government use crypto is going to lead to the people eating better.

The sanctions are to slow the nuclear weapon program and that an ally (south korea) has to spend less on defense.

Two questions:

1) Why SK spending less on defense is a good thing for US?

2) Now that Russia is under even more sanctions, why not share some rocket tech with Kim and accelerate their program?