thebigp

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Sanctions hurt everybody. That’s the problem with imposing them on a reckless and brutal regime. Instead of pressuring the few in charge, you punish the people as a whole. Sometimes that’s necessary, but it’s never ideal.
In the case of North Korea, however, economic sanctions chiefly hurt the rulers. Virtually all proceeds from trade coming into the country are seized by Kim Jong-un’s kleptocracy and distributed to the military, the leadership, and the bureaucrats who run the police state. And so the Trump administration was wholly in the right when on September 21 it unilaterally imposed the severest possible economic sanctions. If maintained rigorously, these could weaken the Kim regime and hasten its demise.
We wonder, in fact, if sanctions is even the right word for the administration’s executive order. The multilateral, U.N.-brokered sanctions of the past have generally targeted specific industries—oil, textiles—or tried to stop the regime from advancing its nuclear program. Those are good and necessary measures, and they have had the effect of limiting North Korea’s capacity to make war and slowing its development of missile technology. But multilateral sanctions are designed to pressure a targeted government into altering its behavior. Kim Jong-un will not be pressured to do anything; negotiation with his government is hopeless. Traditional multilateral sanctions have intrinsic weaknesses, too. In the case of North Korea we’ve had to depend on China upholding its obligations, which, of course, it hasn’t done; and U.N. sanctions haven’t stopped Venezuela and Iran from supplying North Korea with oil, refined petroleum, and perhaps even nuclear materials.
These latest sanctions are designed not to hurt Kim’s regime but to break it. The administration’s executive order gives the U.S. government the power to shut out North Korean banks from the international banking system. It can now freeze the assets of anyone—banks, companies, individuals—for doing any business at all with North Korea. And it can ban ships from U.S. ports if they’ve been to North Korea as of the date of the executive order. Rather than crippling the DPRK’s capacity to do this or that, these sanctions attack the country’s very economy. Rather than sanctions, we might better call this a blockade.
Most of the companies and individuals likely to be affected are Chinese. The vast majority of North Korea’s commerce—90 percent, at least—comes from China, which has long had an interest in supporting the Kim regime. If the DPRK collapses, Chinese leaders think, destitute refugees will flood across the border into their territory. Further, if the collapse of the Kim regime leads in time to reunification with South Korea, China will have a U.S. ally on its border—a disaster in the Chinese Communist mindset.
. Even tight multilateral sanctions like the ones passed by the U.N. Security Council in August can only do so much damage if China looks the other way while its banks and manufacturers supply cash and goods to its tiny homicidal neighbor. If the Trump administration follows through on its promise to punish those banks and exporters, though, or even if China feels the threat is credible, we may see the situation change fast.
There’s evidence that’s happening already. On the day he announced the new sanctions, President Trump claimed that China’s central bank had issued a directive to the country’s banks to “immediately” (Trump’s word) cut off business with North Korea. We have not been able to confirm that claim, but China has not denied it, and the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post cites “four sources” saying that the country’s banks have been ordered to cut financial ties with their North Korean customers.
If true, the status quo just ended.
The danger, of course, is that “Little Rocket Man,” as President Trump has tauntingly dubbed him, will act in desperation and actually try to deploy a nuclear warhead against U.S. or allied targets. It’s costing Kim extraordinary sums of cash to build nuclear weapons and missile systems and to conduct constant military exercises in a vain effort to feign parity with the U.S.-South Korean alliance. And cash is what Kim has less and less of. Not even forced labor can prop up a government if that government has no access to international markets.
King Jong-un is often said to be irrational. He may be. But his military elite and party functionaries are probably not irrational, and as Kim brings his country closer to economic ruin and nuclear annihilation, they may feel compelled to act. North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong-ho likened Trump’s executive order to a “declaration of war,” and we hope the administration thinks of it that way, too: not as a means to coerce the DPRK into more pointless negotiations but as an attempt to bring the Kim dynasty to a richly deserved termination.
source-weekly std, dprk, south china morning post ri yong ho,