Sanctions can hobble countries that have bustling global trade and whose leaders give higher priority to feeding their malnourished people than building a nuclear bomb.
But that’s not North Korea.
The UN’s new sanctions against North Korea to punish it for its latest atomic test are mostly a symbolic, feel-good gesture by the international community. The moves are unlikely to stop the Stalinist regime from trading weapons with rogue nations or hobble its already crumbling economy.
The sanctions — approved late on Friday by the UN Security Council — toughened an arms embargo and authorized ship searches on the high seas in an attempt to thwart its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
UNANIMOUS
The unanimous support for the resolution reflected the international disapproval for North Korea’s defiance of the council after its second test on May 25 that heightened global tensions to a fever pitch.
But even though its economy is in shambles, North Korea will likely be able to limp along, many experts say. In some ways, the nation’s financial failures help stoke its desire for developing and selling dangerous weapons. Without the ability to nuke Japan or hit Alaska with a missile, the country is just another foreign aid-addicted Third World economic basket case that can be pitied and ignored.
“North Korea is so far behind South Korea in terms of the economy and military capability, and that trend is irreversible,” said Lee Woo-young of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “But a nuclear weapon is something that can put North Korea on an equal footing at very low cost and very effectively.”
One sanction that will likely hit North Korea hard seeks to deprive it of financing and material for its weapons program and bans the cash-strapped country’s lucrative arms exports, especially missiles.
Pyongyang is believed to earn between US$500 million and US$1 billion in arms sales a year, compared with its annual civilian trade of about US$3 billion.
The provision most likely to anger the communist nation, however, deals with searches of cargo, and calls on all countries to inspect North Korean cargo at their airports, seaports or on land if the ships are reasonably suspected of carrying banned arms, weapons or the materials to make them.
But North Koreans have proved to be wily traders in the past, and many of their customers may be nations like Iran and Syria that may not cooperate with UN sanctions.
Much of the freight can also be transported by plane and one of North Korea’s most prized products — technical nuclear know-how — is safe in the minds, hard drives and brief cases of their scientists who can travel without restrictions and transfer their knowledge in person.
The new resolution also calls on all countries to prevent financial institutions or individuals from providing financing or resources that could go to North Korea’s weapons program — a move that could damage the North’s already fractured economy.
SHRIVELED
North Korea’s economy shriveled up for several reasons.
Disastrous economic planning and ill-conceived mega projects played among the biggest roles.
One grandiose scheme involved mobilizing millions of workers to chop down trees on mountain slopes to create about 300,000 hectares of terraced cropland in the 1980s and 1990s.
But the terraces weren’t properly reinforced, so when the summer rains came, they collapsed and the soil got washed away into reservoirs, rivers and irrigation canals — clogging up the waterways and creating a double disaster.
Its economic woes intensified when the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc countries — huge sources of aid and trade — began crumbling in the 1980s and early 1990s. The crisis was compounded by bouts of severe flooding and crop failure, setting the stage for a famine in the mid and late 1990s that killed millions of people.
“We got used to seeing dead bodies everywhere — at train stations, on the streets,” a saleswoman who survived the disaster and defected to South Korea was quoted as saying in a Human Rights Watch report in 2006.
Oddly though, the famine has helped the regime survive, said Jasper Becker, author of the book Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea.
“One of the reasons they get by now is that the population shrank by 3 [million] to 4 million during the famine,” he said. “There are fewer mouths to feed.”
But Becker said North Korea’s industry barely functions because factories are outdated, dilapidated or have been stripped of their parts by starving people who sell scrap metal to China to buy food.
“If you wanted to modernize the economy today, you would have to junk everything,” he said. “You would do them a favor if you bombed it into the ground.”
A gleaming new factory park in the border town of Kaesong — run jointly with South Korea — has been a good source of hard currency.
But a desperate North Korea demanded a fourfold increase in wages, and a 31-fold increase in rent on Thursday — which could end up dooming the lucrative industrial park.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and
RSS