In 2013, US sanctioned Belarus. Belarus notified US that US broke Budapest Memorandum. US replied it didn’t (what?), because sanctions are for human rights, and not designed to subordinate etc.
The US claim is that it did not sanction Belarus in order to secure its own advantage. At face value that claim looks plausible: it seems like they have a plausible case that Belarus leadership is suppressing dissent and running fraudulent elections, this does seem to be a major motivation for US conduct, and sanctions do look like they were targeted at offending officials. If that claim is true it seems like US behavior is compatible with the text of the memorandum (at least the parts quoted here).
I feel like I’d have to dig into this more to have an actual view because it’s very easy for people to have a plausible story even if they are behaving quite badly. But this comment didn’t help me see why this should be considered an absurd reply.
US didn’t deliver heavy oil because Congress didn’t fund it. What were they thinking?! To North Korea, non-proliferation promise was directly linked to delivery of heavy oil.
I wasn’t able to quickly substantiate this claim; I’d be interested in a link to some kind of discussion of the background. E.g. what was the actual content of the promise and then what happened? Your description of this situation is different from my understanding, but my understanding is super rough and comes from US sources (which focus on late deliveries of oil, e.g. delivering the last of the 2017 oil in December instead of October, though my sense is that the first year was rougher than that) and so I’d be quite interested in checking out a clear and reasonably-substantiated account of the bad behavior.
The US claim is that it did not sanction Belarus in order to secure its own advantage. At face value that claim looks plausible: it seems like they have a plausible case that Belarus leadership is suppressing dissent and running fraudulent elections, this does seem to be a major motivation for US conduct, and sanctions do look like they were targeted at offending officials. If that claim is true it seems like US behavior is compatible with the text of the memorandum (at least the parts quoted here).
I feel like I’d have to dig into this more to have an actual view because it’s very easy for people to have a plausible story even if they are behaving quite badly. But this comment didn’t help me see why this should be considered an absurd reply.
I wasn’t able to quickly substantiate this claim; I’d be interested in a link to some kind of discussion of the background. E.g. what was the actual content of the promise and then what happened? Your description of this situation is different from my understanding, but my understanding is super rough and comes from US sources (which focus on late deliveries of oil, e.g. delivering the last of the 2017 oil in December instead of October, though my sense is that the first year was rougher than that) and so I’d be quite interested in checking out a clear and reasonably-substantiated account of the bad behavior.