The U.S. said it will intensify sanctions against North Korea for sinking a South Korean warship, targeting members of Kim Jong Il’s regime and the foreign banks that help sustain the country’s weapons industry.

“These measures are not directed at the people of North Korea, who have suffered too long due to the misguided and malign priorities of their government,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at a press briefing in Seoul today. “They are directed at the destabilizing, illicit, and provocative policies pursued by that government.”

Clinton’s sanctions announcement may raise tensions as she heads to Hanoi for a meeting on region security that includes her counterparts from North Korea and China. North Korea, whose economy has been battered by existing trade restrictions, has threatened to retaliate against any punitive actions over an incident it denies any part in.

“The measures seem to be aimed at what would hurt North Korea the most: its cash line,” said Kim Yong Hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Seoul-based Dongguk University. “It remains to be seen how far the U.S. is willing to push it through, as it wouldn’t want a total collapse in dialogue.”

The U.S. has learned lessons from existing sanctions that will help make the new measures more effective, an administration official traveling with Clinton, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told reporters. Diplomats involved in illegal activities, such as money laundering and counterfeiting, would be targeted, a second official said.

Economic Impact

UN sanctions imposed on North Korea over its defiance of an international ban on missile tests caused the country’s international commerce to shrink 9.7 percent last year, according to Seoul-based trade agency, Kotra. North Korea doesn’t release its own trade figures.

“We have made clear that there is a path open to the DPRK to achieve the security and international respect it seeks,” Clinton said, using the initials of the formal name for North Korea. “If North Korea chooses that path, sanctions will be lifted, energy and other economic assistance will be provided, its relationship with the U.S. will be normalized.”

Continued threats against South Korea and military provocation would only lead to further punishment for the North Korean regime, Clinton said.

The sinking of the Cheonan has prompted the U.S. and South Korea to showcase their military and political alliance. The two countries yesterday said they will conduct joint naval and air exercises off South Korea’s east coast next week.

Show of Force

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were among senior defense officials who were also in South Korea for what Clinton described as “a real show of solidarity” and to mark the 60th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean war.

The 97,000-ton aircraft carrier USS George Washington and three of destroyers arrived in the country today.

In a joint statement after the talks, the U.S. and South Korea urged North Korea to acknowledge that it was behind the attack. The North has said that the evidence of its involvement in the sinking was cooked up as an excuse for the U.S. to wage a “war of aggression.”

Containing China

The U.S. drills mask a hidden aim to “pressurize and contain other big powers by force of arms in the region,” the state-run Korea Central News Agency said today.

China, North Korea’s biggest economic partner, said it is “firmly opposed” to foreign military activities off its coastal water that affect the nation’s security interests, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its website today.

China has refused to join in international condemnation of North Korea, saying that it has no independent evidence of the North’s role in the ship sinking.

In addition to the U.S., North Korea and China, foreign ministers from South Korea, Japan and Russia will also be in the Vietnamese capital tomorrow to attend Asia’s biggest security forum. Those countries form the so-called six-party talks aimed at ending North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.

Southeast Asian countries will push North Korea to rejoin the talks, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said. This week’s meeting of 26 countries and the European Union will be the first to bring together senior envoys from all the six- party participants since the Cheonan sinking.

Asean Seeks Role

“The meeting later this week can provide the necessary political ambiance for things to happen,” Natalegawa said in an interview in Hanoi late yesterday. “We must ensure that we do not allow the situation to regress and develop in such a way that there could be a danger to the peace and stability of northeast Asia.”

Clinton and Gates made an unprecedented joint trip to the armed border dividing the Korean peninsula earlier today, before meeting their counterparts in Seoul this afternoon.

Clinton said that as she looked across the line that divided North from South “it struck me that although it may be a thin line, these two countries are worlds apart.”

In the South, there are leaders of the country “who care about its people,” she said. “The North has not only stagnated in isolation but the people of the North have suffered for so many years.”

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