North Korea And The Perpetual Sanctions Quandary
While North Korea has long been sanctioned by much of the world, this has left it isolated and insulated; how then, can change be affected?
The United States has sanctioned many a nation across the last 75 years, from Iran, to Vietnam, Cuba, Venezuela, and many, many others. North Korea, however, holds a special place in American – and indeed, global – foreign policy concerning its own sanction yolk; since 1950, North Korea has been sanctioned by the United States in some manner and to some degree, as well as by much of the rest of the world – singularly and collectively – across that very same span. Since the UN – without Russia’s veto in the Security Council, which they were boycotting at the time over Chinese representation and the overall aims of the institution – voted to send a coalition force into Korea in 1950 – which was in the midst of a Civil War at the time – the north has been under sanctions while the South has received western assistance in various ways.
Three North Korean leaders have led the nation across this time, with the Kim family at the heart of the North Korean state’s very mythology and origin story. Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un have all rightly been derided across the as autocratic cranks for their behavior across these seven-plus decades, but as was noted in a discussion I was in recently, they also do deserve credit for having constructed a nuclear and missile program under a sanction yolk as stiff and persistent as any witnessed across the 20th and 21st centuries.
While North Korea is in absolute peril from a bevy of issues, ranging from COVID-19, to dietary malnutrition and many of the other natural perils that come with being upon the fringes of the international community, the rest of the world that opposes Kim Jong Un’s nuclear ambitions and human rights record also faces a real dilemma as well. With the latest slew of missile tests from North Korea – which, at the time this was written, have been occurring consistently and steadily since 25 September – the world has been rightly horrified with the reckless operations which have sent missiles cruising over Japan at least one time.
That same world and international community, however, must now face the reality that, over seven-plus decades of a multilateral sanction campaign with very few de-escalatory moments, pursued offramps or positive innovations, the west has left itself little response short of marching into Pyongyang – which obviously cannot nor should be attempted. This predicament illustrates, as though it were taking place in a foreign policy lab of sorts, the limits to which sanctions can be applied in coercive means or as general deterrence over long periods of time.
Sanctions perhaps have their place within the international diplomatic toolbox- despite my distaste for them – such as when a nation invades another on some trumped-up pretense or pretenses. Although, with how effective they work even in these extreme moments, perhaps now.
Do not get me wrong, there are certainly neo-Nazis in Ukraine, as well as human rights issues. Yet Russia uses neo-nazis, and has grave human rights issues too - so clearly that cannot be a general basis for invading a sovereign nation in most instances. Neo-nazis and fascists are appalling in all instances and across all nations, to be sure, but they must be rooted out through cultural, diplomatic, educational means, or even mutual, multilateral cooperation – not through military operations by lone nations against their neighbors.
Still, concerning Russia, Ukraine, and sanction campaigns, we witness in real time that – whether national, institutional, personal, economic, diplomatic or otherwise – they cannot stop the bloodshed and violence in the immediate, despite that their multilateral nature in this particular circumstance does lend them greater power to debilitate Russia and their war efforts than would unilateral, American sanctions have been able to.
As it concerns North Korea, however, it is prudent to ask both what should be done internationally for such wanton displays of aggression, as well as why so little can realistically be done short of diplomacy or conventional conflict at this point. The answers go hand-in-hand with one another, and yet, they are not wholly satisfying either.
Like America’s own relationships with Saudi Arabia and Brazil – as well as so many others, in my estimation – the tale of American and international foreign policy with North Korea is one in which many mistakes made across many years have led us to our current, collective position, where fewer options are viably available to the international community for making the right impact upon a perpetually disagreeable nation such as the polity in question. Because mistakes have been made so far down the line, it is not simple to readjust the international environment all of the sudden – either to remedy relations with North Korea, or else to push back against their machinations in any legitimate, meaningful way.
Regarding what should be done for increased missile tests by North Korea, starting at the ideal and working back and down to what will or can be done is most useful. Both ideally, as well as practically speaking, negotiations are the only real way forward. While it might defy “conventional wisdom” to suggest diplomatic negotiations after such aggressive posturing, all the sanctions in the world have yet to stop this behavior over the years, so conventional wisdom hasn’t necessarily been winning the day itself for nearly a century either.
An “NK-JCPOA,” as we’ll call it, needs to be constructed by the world in coordination and conjunction with both North Korea and South Korea. The world must look to trade unbiased access to the international community of nations over time and stages for North Korea in return for nuclear and human rights innovations in that nation. This would leave the entire world safer, and the people of North Korea in a better position to live positive lives than they have likely found themselves in for several decades; it is not likely for several reasons, however.
The most important of those reasons is that, unlike almost every other nation I’ve previously listed or written about other than Russia, North Korea doesn’t really want to negotiate with any semblance of good faith. They are firmly, after over seven decades in isolation, entrenched in their position and thinking – that their nuclear program is their best means of survival as a state – and will use their nuclear bargaining chip to get as much power at some point in the unforeseeable, perhaps nonexistent future while relying upon their great feudal lord, China, in the meanwhile.
While nations like Iran, Cuba, and Venezuala are ready – with the usual level of diplomatic guile and prevarication – to strike a reconciliation – however minor or major it might be – with previously disagreeable nations across the world, North Korea does not really trust any nation within the international sphere apart from China and Russia; the latter is of less use to them today than in January of this year, but that matters little to North Korean leadership, and therefore, to the whole society. It is the natural evolution of a people trapped in the yolk of a sanction regime – where life is so perpetually difficult – yet after so long, it has produced a nation and people that are in many ways impervious to sanctions themselves.
It is a point that has been previously discussed in some of my prior work, but it must be reiterated. Sanctions are devastating to the people of a nation and their society – despite that they do not often stop a conflict that has begun in a timely manner, or lead to amicable, timely negotiations between nations bilaterally or multilaterally either. They crush economies, leaving the people of countries ultimately paying for the misdeeds of their nation or its most powerful private or public citizens.
The problem always remains that sanctions maintained endlessly, inevitably normalizes the circumstance and environment in that same, insidious manner as so much of life: nearly impercievably. Generations are normalized to sub-human economic and practical living conditions, backed by many numerous states and polities, under the guise of human rights and global self-interest, and those sanctions must be increased or upped over time to create the same externally desired feeling or effect.
With all of that noted, the second crucial reason negotiations will never happens at this juncture remains that the rest of the world really doesn’t want to negotiate with North Korea either. There is less trust between much of the world and North Korea than between the rest of the world and many of the most heavily sanctioned nations – sans Russia, of course – and that reflects the absolutely barren nation itself, where fleeing refugees often enter the rest of the world bearing signs of persistent disease, parasites, illness, malnutrition, and incessant over-working.
While Cuba has often been used to juxtapose the material conditions of Castro’s nation and a nation like the US, it is literally nothing in comparison to North Korea, where much of the innovations – Potemkian as they are – serve as no more than a literal facade to deceive any interested visitors – professional or recreational.
Now, what might happen, or what usually does, is that sanctions would be levied upon North Korea, from nations like the US, South Korea, Japan, and other agreeable countries too. These are actions more designed to create the appearance of action than to fix anything particularly. The track record of them across recent history across the world indicates this better than paragraphs of explanations could, and yet it is inevitable that announcements concerning them will come eventually. With the position that the world has put itself in by its means of deterrence, it’s really all that will be thought to be done concerning the matter.
When they are newly applied though, what will that do precisely? For a nation that has created and developed a nuclear program while sustaining what is essentially an absolute monarchy with the traditional Marxist-Leninist-Maoist trappings, where the population believes all sorts of outlandish things about the leader and his great, mythical family, and Hennesey was imported for elite consumption as though North Korea wasn’t the most isolated and secluded nation on the face of the planet, the truth of the matter is quite simple. To loosely paraphrase from a famous contemporary television program, sanctions from the governments of today will not produce the desired change or effect vis-a-vis North Korea, because the governments of the last 70 years already tried to produce those changes through those means.
What might be called the “North Korean Perpetual Sanctions Quandary,” or something to that effect, is nothing more than a case of overusing and relying on one tool in the foreign policy toolbox at the expense of both the other tools, as well as the actual objectives of diplomacy. It feels a bit like a scenario where venom overpowers virtue or true valor, where disagreeable nations are punished for their lack of cooperation or for their intimated or stated threats when a bit of indulgence in diplomacy, despite the circumstances, could prove more constructive than the predictable show of economic force. While it is the technical right of the powerful nations of this planet to use their power as they see fit of course, this is only the most basic, primitive interpretation of the powers of the truly powerful.
It is true – without a shadow of a doubt – that with great power, does, in fact, come great responsibility. The US and its allies had every right over the years to apply sanctions to North Korea, or anyone else for that matter, but whether that was the correct course for that power for the development of a liberal, open international society, is certainly not a foregone conclusion. On the contrary, I would argue that it was absolutely the wrong course, and that the consistent decisions to do so across decades has set the US and many of its allies on the course we find ourselves still upon.
Had a different course been taken so many years ago, working to bring North Korea into the international community more vehemently during sunnier days, maintaining dialogue towards the hope of diplomatic reconciliation between North and South Korea, as well as between North Korea and much of the rest of the world, international repercussions would position that nation with much more to lose out on than is currently the case. Put another way; it is difficult to sanction a nation nicknamed “The Hermit Kingdom” – of which bears the nickname exclusively because of its heavily sanctioned, 70-plus year isolation. What sanction or grand machination could strip away that which has already been stripped as bare as any other polity on the face of the planet over nearly 100 years?
America and its allies’ use of raw economic power for so long has left raw economic power powerless to coerce North Korea from its position, who, in turn – with evidence from the Geneva Accords to the Iran-JCPOA – do not trust the US and its allies to abide by their own agreements. It is not entirely difficult to understand why North Korea would not trust diplomacy with the western allied nations, any more than it is to see why sanctions are more useless against that nation than against any other.
But, with all of this considered, we are left in very much the same place as we began in; if history has shown us why sanctions cannot be either perpetually abused, nor exclusively relied upon to achieve foreign policy objectives, why the powerful must use their power selectively and for a more positive, altruistic purpose, and it has also illustrated why the ideal solution is currently unrealistic, what solutions do exist and persist in spite of it all?
The course of extreme and perpetual sanctions was first undertaken, carried on, diminished during the 1990s and early 2000s, before being further accentuated over the years, precisely because the ideal solution was considered as ideal and unrealistic in 1950 as – to many – it does so many years later. Over the succeeding decades, the conventional wisdom used to justify the sheer, human and material brutality of a nearly century-long sanction regime has been proven to be lacking in any wisdom at all.
Like the isolation that former-President Harry S Truman once made the intellectual hallmark of his foreign policy, sanctions have not solved national questions ranging from modern issues that carry on like Iran and Cuba, and have perpetuated the problem while starving and suffocating so many millions of people in the process of decades-long campaigns of “conventional wisdom.” To change the environment in which this all takes place and occurs in, the powerful nations must demonstrate their great responsibility, instead of emptily harping on about it in the finest poetics purchasable.
Doing the same thing over and over again – whether in our lives or in the lives of nation-states – will more likely than not produce the same result. For North Korea, a nation that has grown so accustomed to existing without what much of the world has consistent access to that it can laugh and shrug off sanctions that make even nations like Russia blush, and that has gone all in on the development of a nuclear weapon to bargain with, there is no more incentive to negotiate with the world after further sanctions are introduced against them than there ever has been for them to break down and finally comply with the paradigm and general wishes of the international community previously.
The answer, therefore, is that – first and foremost – multilateral attempts at better communication and a more mutual, relationship must become the norm as it concerns North Korea. The US is an easy target to turn down over and over again – as routinely is witnessed concerning the eternally-prevaricating Hermit Kingdom – but the rest of the world does not generally maintain the same ire at many of America’s allies as towards America itself.
It will take time, and those fruits will not be born for some time going on – perhaps even several US Presidents. Donald Trump helped to prove America’s unreliability as it concerns dealmaking and what different American regimes will honor as it relates to foreign policy, but it will, however, be up to the present and future American presidents to fix an impression that was only accentuated after 70 years of cold, sanction-based, maximum-pressurized evidence.
A multilateral plan of action, in which North Korea can feel as though their interests were being considered alongside those of their enemies – with their allies China and Russia there backing them – initiated and delivered at first by nations that have earned less enmity from North Korea than the US has, is the only way forward short of China unilaterally intervening in some meaningful way, or else a traditional, militarized conflict, of which is, to be sure, the least likely of any scenario in this essay. It will take time undoubtedly, but it should also be noted at this point that, funnily enough, that time only ever seems to be of any real concern when it concerns the only plan for any actual reconciliation or diplomatic progress.
When it comes to sanctions, those tools of which have failed to garner their intended results for endless decades for nations across the globe; however, time is of no concern. Let the sanctions destroy people’s lives and deteriorate society for years upon years, generations upon generation, neverminding all the while what those policies are doing to the people both physically and mentally – emaciating and radicalizing them year after year in the name of saving them from a fate worse than what their family has endured since America got involved in the first instance.
One might even come away thinking after considering the dichotomy of responses that the excuse regarding time is insincere; the evidence certainly intimates as much, but it is possible – nigh, very likely – that those souls of previous generations sincerely did believe that proper diplomacy would take too long and ultimately fail against nations like Iran, Cuba, Guatemala, North Korea, Vietnam, and so many others across the last 75 year. The problem then becomes and indeed, became, as John Maynard Keynes once noted regarding economics, not in developing new ideas, but from escaping the old ones.
Those folks in 1950 did not have the knowledge through experience that we today have. They could not know that American and allied sanction regimes would fail over and over and over again to curb disagreeable nations, because enough evidence of this did not yet exist to be learned from. Each decade and generation succeeding them, however, must be held more accountable for the continued application and use of sanction regimes than the last, and our views upon their logic and diplomatic guile must diminish accordingly. To continue to use the same, clearly flawed, and inadequate tools for a job which requires so much more historical knowledge, cultural empathy, and tact, as well as diplomatic and political know-how and sense, is not only reprehensible, but the actual waste of time.
While the world knows what decades of sanctions have done to alleviate international strain and tension – nothing – what is not known is what decades of constructive attempts at communication, empathy, mutuality and a greater comfortability could have done in that vein. Surely, with all that has been accomplished by sanctions in so many of the nations mentioned here – including, of course, North Korea – working with great determination and vigor to learn more and understand better those nations whose relationships have been so frayed for so long, communicating and building proper relationships towards multilateral ends would easily have accomplished at least as much as sanctions, and likely much more in much less time than what has been seen regarding the likes of North Korea, Iran and Cuba.
Time was always just an excuse, but despite that time is both ever fleeting and a figment of our collective and individual perception, it must be ignored today more than ever before. Everyone would like the quick solution, and that’s why we are stuck now with sanctions. Instead of arbitration and diplomatic solutions, the powerful figured they could use their economic and material strengths to bully less prosperous, developed, or well-connected nations into submission, yet here we are, decades later, with many of those same problems begging for solutions.
The time to do something meaningful for the future was in the past, and in the present, there are no quick-fix, remedy-all solutions for international circumstances such as the Russian-Ukrainian conflict or for the relationship between the world and a nation like North Korea. That diplomacy, however, was considered too wasteful of effort and time, and so now, years later, our present leadership and intelligentsia must finally understand that the theoretical solution of the future of yesteryear is never going to be the consistent, actual solution of today or tomorrow. So much time has been wasted in solving issues between nations, but the solution to the North Korean perpetual sanctions quandary – in the end – begins with simply stopping American and Western reliance upon sanctions to solve all and any international problem, instead of only the most severe or deadly of them.