More sanctions on North Korea is not enough

NO ONE who grasps the seriousness of the threat from North Korea can dismiss the significance of a unanimous vote of the 15-member UN Security Council, including China, Russia and the US, for yet another round of sanctions, the eighth in 11 years.

The vote reflects a broad sense of international alarm, which reached new levels after the July 4 and July 28 tests of ballistic missiles that could reach the United States.

But going beyond alarm to effective action has long been the hard part. Every military option carries the risk of setting off a devastating war; regime change, the best outcome for the North Korean people, is not imminent. What remains is a combination of persuasion, negotiation and coercion. The target is a belligerent leader of a country that has, over decades, repeatedly negotiated in bad faith. Not simple at all.

The latest round of sanctions prohibits North Korea from buying, selling or transferring coal, iron, iron ore, seafood, lead and lead ore to other countries, and attempt to restrict North Korean labour abroad. By some estimates, if fully implemented, the punishment would cut North Korea’s foreign earnings by a third.

However, sanctions can take a long time to have any effect. The sanctions on North Korea, first imposed after the 2006 nuclear test and significantly broadened in 2016, have so far had little impact. Why? Implementation has been spotty. Andrea Berger, in a recent report for a British think tank, says the UN sanctions on North Korea are a “house without foundations”.

She adds, “The narrative around the UN Security Council table that sanctions are the ‘strongest’ they have ever been may be true of their paper form, but is fiction in practice.” The problem, she notes, is that North Korea exploits illicit supply networks, individual states don’t implement sanctions fully and private-sector firms can often undermine them.

So far, the Security Council has not taken the full plunge to choke off all economic activity that allows Kim Jong-un’s regime to carry on.

President Donald Trump seems to grasp the dangers of North Korea’s expanding nuclear and missile programmes, but it is not clear what he intends to do. Beijing’s role in any solution is large but not singular. This is the kind of security problem that requires alliance-building – not the forte of the Trump administration, at least so far.

New sanctions are a potentially useful precondition, but what are the next steps to bring North Korea to negotiate a verifiable agreement to stop his nuclear and missile programs? We have yet to see a coherent strategy, and Kim has not felt the heat.