Archive for Diplomacy

Joel Wit: Agreed Frameworks “Worked Very Well”

March 30, 2013 Appeasement, Diplomacy, Six-Party Talks No comments

Fortunately, Sung Yoon Lee is there to remind us of the reality of Mr. Wit’s sterling record. Depending on your perspective, you may wish to avert your eyes:


Watch Kim Jong-un Orders Rockets Ready to Strike United States on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Some viewers may judge Wit a bit too boastful about the length of his experience dealing with the North Koreans, but on closer examination, he understates his experience almost as much as he overstates his success. According to some reports, Wit was meeting with Kim Gye Gwan in January 2007, and seemed familiar with the terms of Agreed Framework II, which the North Koreans and Chris Hill signed the following month.  It’s reasonable to infer that Wit was, at the very least, greasing the wheels for Hill’s deal.  As late as February 2008, after North Korea was caught lying about its HEU program, after North Korea refused to provide a full disclosure of its nuclear programs as agreed, and even after the Israeli Air Force destroyed the reactor Kim Jong Il was building for Bashar Assad, Wit was quoted as saying that “the level of cooperation is very good, better than I have seen it in 10 years.”  (Wit was an avowed denier of North Korea’s HEU program, at least before the North Koreans showed Sig Hecker an underground complex filled with thousands of centrifuges.)  In his eagerness to bolster the length of his experience dealing with North Korea, Wit also takes responsibility for a longer list of misjudgments and failures.

So if Wit’s approach is the right one, why, after all these years of brilliantly successful diplomacy, is he on the PBS News Hour talking about North Korean nuclear blackmail?

 

North Korea’s cash-for-summit demands put 2010 attacks in a new light

March 15, 2013 Appeasement, Cheonan Incident, North-South, Sunshine, Terrorism (NK), Yeonpyeong Attack No comments

WERE THE 2010 ATTACKS North Korea’s way of making good on extortion?  Stephan Haggard, not widely know for his hard-line views, cites an article in the Chosun Ilbo revealing that Kim Jong Il wanted a summit with Lee Myung Bak, but at a price.

The sticking point was money. How much? According to the Chosun Ilbo, $500-600 million in rice and fertilizer aid, which had effectively been cut from the first of the year, and perhaps some cash too; that was about the price that Kim Dae Jung paid for the first summit. Negotiations continued through November at Kaesong, when the North Korean delegation even presented a draft summit declaration including a resumption of aid.  [Stephan Haggard, Witness to Transformation]

The Chosun Ilbo story adds this important piece of evidence:

In January 2010, after the secret contacts ended and North Korea realized that it was impossible to extract any aid from Seoul, it vowed to launch a “holy retaliatory war” against the South and fired multiple artillery rounds at the Northern Limit Line, a de facto maritime border on the West Sea.  [Chosun Ilbo]

Haggard makes a compelling (if circumstantial) argument that the attacks were meant to demonstrate that North Korea’s extortion should be taken seriously. We now know that two months after Lee refused to pay up, North Korea sank the Cheonan.

Wondering if I could make this case a bit less circumstantial, I decided to consult my archives and see what else North Korea said and did in the months between Lee’s refusal to pay and the Cheonan attack. I didn’t find what I expected.  Although there were certainly some menacing acts and words by North Korea, the threats were nowhere near as extravagant or as frequent as those issued in early 2009, after President Lee cut off aid, and as President Obama warmed up his chair.  What’s interesting, however, is that in early 2010, North Korea was facing a severe popular backlash against The Great Confiscation.

In November, of course, North Korea followed up with the Yeonpyeong attack.

Let me take Haggard’s point a step further:  if he’s correct in his inference, this course of conduct would be a good fit for the legal definition of “international terrorism.”  Some commenters have suggested that the 2010 attacks — particularly the Cheonan attack — are not a basis (not that another is needed) to re-list North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism, but fresh evidence of a motive to extort merits reconsideration. The key element is that the violent act must have been intended to influence South Korean government policy, and some of North Korea’s statements from 2009 provide additional evidence of North Korea’s intent.  The evidence is circumstantial, but somewhere in North Korea are people with direct evidence, and one of them is probably thinking about defecting.

What will a U.N. inquiry on N. Korean human rights actually mean?

March 14, 2013 "United" Nations, Human Rights 2 comments

The U.N. Human Rights Council is set to approve an inquiry into human rights conditions in North Korea, conditions that a U.N. investigator says “may” be crimes against humanity:

Marzuki Darusman, an investigator for the United Nations, is expected to present a report to the council urging the creation of an international commission of inquiry to follow up on the abuses recorded in the eight years that a United Nations official has monitored human rights in the North.  [N.Y. Times]

So, what exactly would that mean?

“An inquiry mechanism could produce a more complete picture, quantify and qualify the violations in terms of international law, attribute responsibility to particular actors or perpetrators of these violations and suggest effective courses of international action,” Mr. Darusman said in the report. [N.Y. Times]

It could also presage indictments in the International Criminal Court — indictments that China would have to expend cred and capital to block.

The U.N. Human Rights Council will likely consider and approve Darusman’s recommendation in March, in a resolution to be co-sponsored by the EU and Japan in March.  South Korea’s co-sponsorship is notably absent, but at least South Korea will actively support the measure, which is a change for the better.  Here’s another change for the better:

“We are in effect ramping up international political pressure on this unparalleled, systemwide failure in respect to human rights,” Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe, the American ambassador to the Human Rights Council, said by telephone. “We’re hoping that even if it doesn’t crack the whole system that on some of these issues we might see some opening and some change because of this pressure.”  [N.Y. Times]

Robert Joseph puts this in context nicely:

“Exposing the North’s brutality toward its own citizens has not been a priority component of U.S. policy,” Robert Joseph, the top State Department disarmament diplomat in the George W. Bush administration, told a U.S. Senate hearing on Thursday.

“In fact, concerns about how such exposure might affect the prospects for engagement with the regime have worked to place human rights atrocities in a separate box which is mostly neglected if seen as complicating higher order diplomacy,” he said, in a view widely shared by the human rights community.  [Reuters]

Reading further, it’s clear that this effort by human rights lawyer Jared Genser played an important role in getting the U.N. to finally focus on this issue.  Another factor appears to be the emerging consensus that quiet diplomacy has failed to disarm North Korea or address the human rights issue.  Policymakers no longer worry that emphasizing human rights will cause North Korea to walk away from disarmament talks.  After all, they walked away from those talks five years ago.  Since then, they’ve carried out two missile tests, two nuke tests, and two major attacks on South Korea.

I’ve been as skeptical as anyone about the capacity of the U.N. to do much of anything binding, and in fact, even the Times agrees that an inquiry would be a largely symbolic gesture. Where this will really matter is in how it shapes other, more tangible debates in committee meetings, floor votes, and in the boardrooms of companies making investment decisions.

Last week, I asked whether Dennis Rodman would have played Sun City. He wouldn’t have, because at least one responsible adult of average intelligence would have warned him that it would have been career suicide.  Maybe playing Pyongyang will be prove to be career suicide for Rodman; his career is long over anyway.  But the Rodman episode does illustrate that in most households, North Korea isn’t yet the pariah it deserves to be.  When it is, that will have severe consequences for a regime that survives on foreign currency.

For a variety of reasons, the U.N. Human Rights Council doesn’t have the moral authority to pin that label on North Korea. Ironically, one good reason may be that it has it has ignored this issue for so long.  Still, such things require a steady and determined drumbeat to work.

Update:  North Korea calls the charges “faked material … invented by the hostile forces, defectors and other rabbles.” Am I a “hostile force” or an “other rabbles?”

Chinese banks host massive slush funds for Kim Jong Un despite “tough” new U.N. resolution

March 11, 2013 "United" Nations, China & Korea 2 comments

So over the weekend, I read U.N. Security Council Resolution 2094, and I didn’t see much that deviated from the low expectations I expressed based on the press reports.  (Since then, Marcus Noland has expressed a similarly pessimistic view).

For those nations that are interested in strict enforcement, there is useful material in this; for example, the reference to the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, which you can find on Page 13 of this document, will cause some nations to be more circumspect about letting their banks host North Korean funds.  But in the end, as with previous resolutions, the effectiveness of this one will depend on how different nations interpret vague terms like “credible evidence” and “reasonable grounds to believe,” and more specifically, how strictly China is willing to enforce it.

What’s that, you ask? A timely and relevant example that could answer the critical question in the previous paragraph, thereby providing useful guidance to policy-makers?  OK, I think I’ll go with this one:

12. Calls upon States to take appropriate measures to prohibit in their territories the opening of new branches, subsidiaries, or representative offices of DPRK banks, and also calls upon States to prohibit DPRK banks from establishing new joint ventures and from taking an ownership interest in or establishing or maintaining correspondent relationships with banks in their jurisdiction to prevent the provision of financial services if they have information that provides reasonable grounds to believe that these activities could contribute to the DPRK’s nuclear or ballistic missile programmes, or other activities prohibited by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), and this resolution, or to the evasion of measures imposed by resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), 2087 (2013), or this resolution;

Someone play Handel’s Messiah as we enter a new world of financial due diligence, in which the regime and its key figures can no longer keep massive slush funds in offshore banks and freely repurpose them for suspicious alloys, hollow-point ammo for the border guards, and a customized Maybach electric scooter for His Porcine Majesty to ride around the Kwangbok Area Supermarket. Right?

South Korean and U.S. authorities have found dozens of accounts presumed to belong to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in several banks in Shanghai and other parts of China. They contain hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yet for some reason the accounts were excluded from financial sanctions under the new UN Security Council Resolution 2098, which was adopted last Thursday, posing questions over the effectiveness of the measures.

A government source here said an investigation that lasted for several years led South Korea and the U.S. to the accounts. “We have located the names of the account holders and account numbers, some of them set up in the days of former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il,” the source added.

South Korean and U.S. officials urged China to include the accounts in the latest sanctions against North Korea, but Beijing apparently refused. “Following North Korea’s third nuclear test, China has demonstrated willingness to take part in sanctions against the North,” the government source said. “But Beijing is reluctant to touch North Korea’s real Achilles heel.”  [Chosun Ilbo]

Hat tip to the South Korean government Strategic Leak Wire Service.

So we can already see where this is all headed, if the past isn’t sufficient to tell you.  And in case you missed the point, China is making it clear publicly that it won’t “abandon” North Korea. We can see what China means.  China will need “help” from the U.S. Congress and Treasury Department to enforce this resolution in a minimally effective way.

Plan B Watch: China’s U.N. Bait-and-Switch

March 7, 2013 "United" Nations, China & Korea, Sanctions 5 comments

We’ve seen enough of China’s past conduct when it comes to U.N. resolutions aimed at North Korean proliferation that we ought to recognize duplicity when we see it.  We should also know by now that our hapless U.N. Ambassador isn’t very good at recognizing that duplicity.  That’s why the news that China is expected to vote for another U.N. Security Council resolution this morning underwhelms me.  I even think I have a pretty good  idea what China’s game is here.

Like I said before — China has enough spyware on our computers to see that the political climate in Washington on North Korea policy has shifted.  It knows that its own stalling has put wind in the sails of people like Ed Royce, who know that the U.S. and its allies can do far more damage to North Korea through unilateral (and then multilateral) legislation than they can through the U.N.  China has done everything to enable North Korea and nothing to restrain it, but it has used the U.N. quite effectively to restrain us from restraining North Korea.

China calculates that by agreeing to tougher-looking U.N. sanctions, it might take some wind out of Royce’s sails, give State and its friends in the Senate a basis to oppose legislative sanctions, and maintain its U.N. chokehold over the enforcement of sanctions against North Korea.  In due course, when the Americans calm down, China will go right back to enforcing exactly nothing.  Don’t fall for it.  It’s a bait-and-switch:

The proposed new measures would explicitly ban the sale to Pyongyang of items coveted by North Korea’s ruling elite, such as yachts and racing cars, a council diplomat said on condition of anonymity. The draft also aims to make it more difficult for Pyongyang to move funds around the world. [Reuters]

So, six-plus years after UNSCR 1718 prohibited the sale of luxury goods to North Korea, China is getting around to clarifying that yachts and racing cars are also luxury goods.  Good to know. Maybe next year, they’ll pass a resolution for gold-plated bathroom fixtures, vicuña wool socks, and whichever designer Ri Sol Ju is wearing this week.  Compare this paltry list to the U.S. list of luxury goods in the Code of Federal Regulations (15 C.F.R. sec. 746.1 and supplement, in case you care to look it up).

If enforced — a very big “if,” that — this would be better:

She said the new sanctions would target “the illicit activities of North Korean diplomatic personnel, North Korean banking relationships, (and) illicit transfers of bulk cash.”

Or so Susan Rice said at a press conference, without providing any details.

[A] Security Council diplomat familiar with the measure, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the language may still be subject to revision, said it broke new ground with restrictions and prohibitions on North Korean banking transactions, new travel restrictions and increased monitoring of North Korean ship and air cargo.  [N.Y. Times]

Here’s a little more on the inspections authority:

The council diplomat said that once the resolution is approved, states will be obligated to expel any North Korean agent of a U.N.-blacklisted entity and will be required to inspect suspicious North Korean cargo on their territory. Such inspections of North Korean vessels are currently voluntary.

“All States shall inspect all (North Korea-linked) cargo within or transiting through their territory …. if the State concerned has credible information that provides reasonable grounds to believe the cargo contains items the supply, sale, transfer, or export of which is prohibited,” the draft says. [Reuters]

Ships that refused inspection would not be permitted to dock.  Of course, you don’t have to be a lawyer to see the loopholes in “credible information” and “reasonable grounds.”  Oh, would someone please bring this to the attention of the corrections desk at the New York Times?

It would be the fourth Security Council sanctions resolution on North Korea, which has defied the previous measures with increasing belligerence. A vote was expected on Thursday.

Nope, fifth:  1695, 1718, 1874, 2087, and the next Groundhog Day, however It shall be numbered (don’t these guys check my sidebar before they write these things?).

American officials said privately that the latest resolution did not go as far as they would have liked, reflecting China’s insistence that the punitive measures remain focused on discouraging North Korea’s nuclear and missile behavior and avoid actions that could destabilize the country and lead to an economic collapse.

But the text was stronger than what some North Korean experts had anticipated, particularly the measures that could slow or frustrate the country’s banking activities and extensive dependence on cash payments in its trade with other countries.

“Going after the banking system in a broad brush way is arguably the strongest thing on this list,” said Evans J. R. Revere, a former State Department specialist in East Asian and Pacific affairs, and now senior director at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a Washington-based consulting company. “It does begin to eat into the ability of North Korea to finance many things.”  [N.Y. Times]

Whatever is in this draft, “western diplomats” sound confident that it will pass, plus-or-minus a few tweaks.  If so, I’ll probably start reading it after work, which means I probably won’t have time to digest and analyze it until this weekend.

This isn’t to say that this resolution is worse than nothing, like 2087 was.  After I read it, I’ll know, but it will never be a substitute for well-enforced U.S. and allied legislation providing for tough sanctions against non-compliant entities and nations.  A U.N. resolution will provide the impetus for tougher enabling legislation and better enforcement in Japan, Europe, and Southeast Asia.  It will not mean anything to countries like Syria and Iran. With respect to China, where implementation matters most, a new resolution will be just as unenforceable as the old ones unless Congress “helps” China — and the Chinese banks and companies that also do business with the United States — to enforce it. If Tuesday’s hearing was any indication, most members of both political parties are ready to offer that help.

Another big question is South Korea and its participation in the Kaesong Industrial Park.  I see growing international pressure for the South to either extract some real financial transparency out of Kaesong — ie., put a mechanism in place to use 100% of the proceeds to buy corn and provide commodities directly to the workers there — or shut the place down.  Park will want to resist that, right up to the moment North Korea changes her mind by doing something stupid.

As I read this resolution, I’ll be asking myself what the objective is.  Is it really to end North Korea’s nuclear program, or is it just to make it a little less convenient for North Korea to cheat for another year or so?  If your objective is the former, nothing short of putting the North Korean economy into what amounts to international receivership will do it.  If the latter, then we’re still on the same trajectory we’ve been on since at least 2006, and we can all see where that leads.  It will mean more rounds of whack-a-mole, whereby a sanctions committee receives a report on some prohibited activity, spends two months investigating it, spends another eight months fighting Chinese stalling and blocking, and finally adds a few suspect individuals and entities to some list long after they’ve moved on and folded up their booths.

To be effective, sanctions have to be (1) comprehensive enough to cover all sources of North Korean funds that could be used for prohibited purposes, (2) flexible enough to catch fly-by-night operators, (3) burden-shifting, such that the burden is on North Korea to prove the permissible use of the funds.

Correction:  Sung Yoon Lee reminds me of another resolution from way back in 1993.  So the actual number is now six.

Park Geun Hye will back human rights probe of North Korea

March 5, 2013 "United" Nations, Human Rights 4 comments

You don’t need a Ph.D. to see that North Korea is gearing up to test Park Geun-Hye. The nice people at the quasi-official, Japan-based Chosun Sinbo reacted to Park’s inauguration speech, in which she called on North Korea to disarm, by saying they were “unable to hide our rage.”  Domestically, the North has launched another series of exhausting war exercises, with soldiers forced to live days on end in tunnels, or standing guard and catching frostbite outdoors.

All of this is a reaction to Park’s attempt to offer the North aid, as long as Kim Jong Un quits biting the hand that feeds his subjects.

“As part of trust-building efforts, we will first start humanitarian assistance,” the official said. “Besides the aid, we are also considering what else we can do.”

The government’s policy on North Korea revolves around a “two-track strategy” – supporting UN sanctions against Pyongyang’s provocations while pursuing trust-building policies at the same time, the official said.

“Rather than a strategy of ‘sanctions first and aid later,’ we’re going to participate in the international push for sanctions on the regime as chair of the UN Security Council, but we’ll also make moves based on mutual trust with North Korea,” the official added. [Joongang Ilbo]

Separately, the Joongang Ilbo piece adds the interesting detail that under Park’s predecessor, “the volume of inter-Korean trade … dropped from 289.2 billion won ($267 million) in 2007 to 14.1 billion won in 2012,” despite regular reports that trade at Kaesong has continued to rise.  Park suggests that this trend could be reversed, but also threatens that “[i]f North Korea stages further provocations, that would prompt stronger sanctions, which would pose a grave threat to the future of the Korean people.”

It all sounds sensible enough, even if it’s a little unrealistic.  But while we were all distracted by Dennis Rodman, Park made one decision that really deserves some applause.  Early in her administration, when most presidents would have shied away from controversial decisions, Park gave her government’s active support to a long-overdue U.N. human rights inquiry, after years of South Korean silence:

South Korea’s pledge Wednesday to give “active” support to the investigation comes just two days after the inauguration of President Park Geun-hye and is likely to infuriate the North, which views discussion of its human rights as a “grave violation.” Seoul struggled with the decision, which forced a choice between two key goals: restoring civil relations with Pyongyang and pressing its government to improve treatment of its 24 million people.

The South’s commitment, announced by Seoul’s deputy foreign minister for global affairs at a U.N. Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, is significant because the South holds influence over global policymaking regarding North Korea. With South Korea’s support, the investigation is all but assured of passage when the resolution is put up for a vote this month among member states of the Human Rights Council, rights advocates say. [....]

The new U.N. inquiry would establish a panel of experts who would interview witnesses, document abuses and help formally establish whether the North’s government is committing crimes against humanity. In January, Navi Pillay, the U.N. human rights chief, said in a statement that such an investigation was “long overdue,” particularly because there was no sign of improvement under third-generation leader Kim Jong Eun.  [Washington Post, Chico Harlan]

Separately, Yonhap notes that North Korea appears to be reducing the prisoner population in its gulag to between 80,000 and 120,000, but that this does not suggest an improvement in human rights conditions there.  Unfortunately, the paywall prevents me from seeing (1) Yonhap’s source for that estimate, (2) the basis for the source’s conclusion, and (3) the all-important follow-up question:  so what happened to the prisoners?  If anyone has a subscription, I’d be much obliged for the rest of the story.

Even before Park made this fateful decision, the North had already begun the process of making her into its next Goldstein.  Park will soon learn that the North doesn’t do give-and-take.  North Korea is a society of absolute authority and manichean struggle.  If you’re in charge, you demand tribute.  If you’re not, you pay it.

This Just In: North Korea fails to absorb any of Dennis Rodman’s tact, class, gentility, or gravitas.

February 27, 2013 Appeasement, Humor/Satire, Useful Idiocy 6 comments

So yet again, we learn that visitors do not change North Korea. The tricky part is getting out before North Korea changes the visitor.

Since I broach the engagement-versus-isolation debate, it’s been argued enough times that I seldom hear any new arguments, but this one by Michael Totten, in response to the reliably trite Nick Kristof, is a terrific deconstruction of mirror-imaging by both the North Koreans and the Americans who don’t understand how they think.

The answer to the debated question, of course, is “both,” but we’ve gotten the mechanics of it exactly backwards.  By engaging North Korea’s regime on its terms — lots of cash, no questions asked — we’ve provided it the financial and political means to isolate and immiserate its people, the ones we should have been finding ways to engage in spite of the regime.

What would be the death blow for totalitarianism in North Korea?  Aid workers from free societies — kindly Bible-thumping missionaries from Missouri and Busan, side-by-side with German hipsters with pierced lips and eyebrows — all passing out humanitarian aid in the bleakest quarters of Hamhung and Wonsan, unimpeded by the regime’s minders.  That will only be possible when the regime is so constricted financially that it is forced to allow that to save the residue of its elite.

Update:  Via Spencer Ackerman, Rodman can’t even keep his Koreas straight, so he may also be ignorant of how conditions are for most of the North Korean people.  Kudos to Ackerman for trying to shift the focus back to that.

U.N. may investigate N. Korean officials for crimes against humanity

February 9, 2013 "United" Nations, Human Rights 2 comments

I don’t know what’s gotten into the U.N. lately, but this would be a pretty big deal:

North Korea’s leaders are likely to be the target of a U.N. investigation into their personal responsibility for rapes, torture, executions, arbitrary arrests and abductions, following an expert report published on Tuesday.

The report by Marzuki Darusman, an Indonesian lawyer who is the U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, said North Korea’s “grave, systematic and widespread” human rights violations ought to be laid bare before the U.N. Human Rights Council and the U.N. General Assembly.

“The inquiry should examine the issues of institutional and personal accountability for such violations, in particular where they amount to crimes against humanity, and make appropriate recommendations to the authorities of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and international community for further action,” said Darusman’s report.  [Reuters]

Sure, China will block it and it’s all non-binding, but steps like these would matter for public awareness and to help get third countries to cooperate with sanctions.  It would also matter in smaller ways.  For example, it might make a few “liberal”-minded tourists think twice about taking overpriced guided tours of Pyongyang that subsidize a regime that treats people this way.  I mean, Sun City, anyone?

 

Why Susan Rice’s new Security Council resolution is a great victory … for China and North Korea

January 27, 2013 "United" Nations, Sanctions No comments

The Obama Administration spin on the long-stalled U.N. Security Council Resolution 2087 is that it “tightened” U.N. sanctions against North Korea, and that securing China’s vote for that resolution represents some sort of diplomatic accomplishment for the U.S. and Susan Rice.

Despite China’s rejection of proposals by the United States to add new sanctions, the Obama administration sought to characterize the vote as a tough response. “This resolution demonstrates to North Korea that there are unanimous and significant consequences for its flagrant violation of its obligations under previous resolutions,” said Susan E. Rice, the American ambassador to the United Nations.  [N.Y. Times]

I wish the reporters who repeated that spin, often unskeptically, would have bothered to read the resolution and compare it to UNSCR 1718, the John Bolton-authored resolution on which it largely leans.  Had they done so, they would have seen that by specifically naming a few long-sanctioned entities, individuals, and small fry, it implicitly narrows the potential breadth of its predecessor resolutions.

Because they didn’t, I did, and I’m about to walk you through it.  As you consider the language in these resolutions, you need to keep a few things in mind.  First, the key to making sanctions work is to build enough financial pressure against the regime that it has to choose between its weapons programs and its ability to pay its military and its party elite.  Playing whack-a-mole (as Marcus Noland call it) with just a few North Korean banks and trading companies is futile, because those North Korean banks and trading companies can change names, switch individual representatives, and shift assets to other entities faster than we can sanction them.  Second, we’ll never be able to interdict North Korea’s illicit arms trade as long as China knowingly gives that trade the sanctuary of Chinese airspace, or as long as China’s state-owned enterprises keep selling North Korea missile technology.  Third, sanctions can only work if the unethical third-country banks, investors, and trading companies that provide Pyongyang regime-sustaining hard currency are deterred from doing so.  That strategy can only work if resolutions are read broadly and applied flexibly to those entities that are known to have helped North Korea proliferate — entities like state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, which sold North Korea the chassis for missile transporters that now carry a new type of North Korean ballistic missile, one that some analysts had recently dismissed as fakes, but which now have the U.S. intelligence community and Secretary of Defense sounding very worried.

How will this new resolution influence the behavior of companies like CASIC?  For the answer, we turn to the resolution itself.  Paragraph 5(a) of UNSCR 2087 says that “[t]he measures specified in paragraph 8 (d) of resolution 1718 (2006) shall apply to the individuals and entities listed in Annex I and II, and the measures specified in paragraph 8 (e) of resolution 1718 (2006) shall apply to the individuals listed in Annex I . . . .” Annex I consists exclusively of North Korean entities that had already been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department, and Annex II is also all North Korean, except for one solitary Hong Kong-based trading company.

The original language of UNSCR 1718, however, was much broader than this. Paragraph 8, which contains its key financial provisions, says:

(d) all Member States shall, in accordance with their respective legal processes, freeze immediately the funds, other financial assets and economic resources which are on their territories at the date of the adoption of this resolution or at any time thereafter, that are owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by the persons or entities designated by the Committee or by the Security Council as being engaged in or providing support for, including through other illicit means, DPRK’s nuclear-related, other weapons of mass destruction-related and ballistic missile-related programmes, or by persons or entities acting on their behalf or at their direction, and ensure that any funds, financial assets or economic resources are prevented from being made available by their nationals or by any persons or entities within their territories, to or for the benefit of such persons or entities;

(e) all Member States shall take the necessary steps to prevent the entry into or transit through their territories of the persons designated by the Committee or by the Security Council as being responsible for, including through supporting or promoting, DPRK policies in relation to the DPRK’s nuclear-related, ballistic missile-related and other weapons of mass destruction-related programmes, together with their family members, provided that nothing in this paragraph shall oblige a state to refuse its own nationals entry into its territory;

Emphasis mine.  Of course, effective enforcement always depended on a robust and decisive sanctions committee, something that clearly wasn’t going to happen after North Korea signed up for Agreed Framework II and Chris Hill’s faction got the U.S. government to stop enforcing its most flagrant violations.  After that, China effectively blocked and stalled the sanctions committee’s reports, which implicated China in repeated violations of 1718 and 1874, which followed in 2009.

By specifying a short list of mostly North Korean entities, however, 2087 effectively tells the myriad of Chinese banks and companies that were and are flagrantly violating 1718 — and 1874, and 1695 — that, by implication, they are home free.  This isn’t quite a grant of prosecutorial immunity to all of those other entities (North Korean, Chinese, and other) that continue to violate U.N. sanctions, but given the lilliputian paralysis of the U.N. Sanctions Committee, it’s pretty close.  This is, effectively, a huge victory for Chinese proliferation, and for North Korea.

As far as North Korea’s weapons trade goes, 2087 does nothing that UNSCR 1874 and 1718 had not done years ago, notwithstanding the triumphalism of The Guardian.

I have maintained that no enforcement action that relies on the consent and good faith of the Chinese government has any chance of success, but that multilateral actions to combat North Korean proliferation and money laundering can force Chinese entities to isolate North Korea, despite the opposition of the Chinese government.  This has been done effectively through the partnership of the U.S. Treasury Department and the Financial Action Task Force, a quietly effective global alliance of finance ministries.  Unfortunately, Treasury’s follow-on announcement of sanctions against three “usual suspects” under Executive Order 13,382 only reinforces that Treasury will do nothing to enforce those resolutions independently, because it sanctions just two individual North Korean representatives of a long-sanctioned North Korean bank, and one Hong Kong-based small-fish trading company that China itself was willing to sanction in 2087.  Does anyone suppose that Leader Trading Company had not long since liquidated and hidden its assets?

This isn’t to say that sanctions against small entities can’t work, too, provided that bigger entities also worry they might be next.  I’ve written frequently about how in 2005, sanctions against a small Macau-based bank, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), has a disproportionate impact on multiple sources of North Korean finance, whether illicit, comingled with “legitimate” trade, or indistinguishable.

in 2005 and 2006, the Asian Wall Street Journal, the South China Morning Post, and the Chosun Ilbo printed allegations that the Bank of China and one of its Hong Kong subsidiaries were under the scrutiny of U.S. authorities for possible links to North Korean laundering of illegally derived funds.  The Bank of China denied any involvement in laundering North Korean money, but in 2007, it was so terrified by the alleged association with illicit North Korean funds that it balked at moving $25 million in blocked North Korean funds from BDA to the New York Federal Reserve, at the request of both the U.S. and Chinese governments, to facilitate Agreed Framework II.

Similarly flexible sanctions could work now, but the Obama Administration won’t apply them.  I don’t know whether to attribute that to a spineless reliance on a U.N. Security Council that’s long been a hostage of Chinese duplicity, the incompetence of Susan Rice, the stultifying influence of John Kerry, or a simple aversion to any policy more decisive than trying to “manage North Korea out of the headlines,” but this resolution — if that is indeed our final response to North Korea’s last missile test — was much, much worse than no resolution at all.

What comes next isn’t hard to predict.

Xi Jinping Outsources Meeting With Park Geun-Hye to His Food Taster

January 18, 2013 "United" Nations, China & Korea, Diplomacy 3 comments

food tasterChina’s unhelpful behavior in the Security Council would have been reason enough for Park Geun Hye to follow the example of Shinzo Abe,* who deferred meeting with Chinese officials and instead met with the leaders of “countries sharing the same values, such as democracy and the rule of law.”  In retrospect, that might have been best:

In her meeting with China’s Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun yesterday, President-elect Park Geun-hye said North Korea’s nuclear weapons development cannot be tolerated and that Seoul will take stern measures against Pyongyang’s additional provocations, according to her spokeswoman.  [Joongang Ilbo]

So the Chinese had a Vice Foreign Minister – not even the Foreign Minister, but the Vice Foreign Minister — greet the President-Elect of South Korea and hand her a letter from Xi Jingping?  How many of you can even name a Deputy Secretary of State without googling? Would this be another case of that patient diplomatic sagacity Tom Friedman has been touting?

The incoming president, however, said that doors will be open for dialogue and cooperation through a “trust-building process.”

“North Korea’s nuclear development can never be tolerated,” Park was quoted as saying by spokeswoman Cho Yoon-sun. “South Korea will respond sternly to any provocations by the North.”

Cho said that Park, at the same time, said she will leave open the windows for dialogue and cooperation, including humanitarian aid.

It’s all so rational, it can’t possibly work.  I’ll say it again: when Park Geun Hye talks about North Korea, she sounds a lot like Lee Myung Bak – and Barack Obama — sounded before Kim Jong Il tested a missile and a nuke, murdered Park Wang-Ja at Kumgang, renounced the armistice, sank the Cheonan, and shelled Yeongpyeong.

One person who definitely isn’t planning to offer North Korea any of that hippie dialogue and cooperation crap? Shinzo Abe.

It may be best that Xi himself didn’t show up, given his previously expressed views that the Korean War was, from the Commie perspective, ”a great and just war for safeguarding peace and resisting aggression” that was imposed on China by ”imperialist invaders” and resulted in “a great victory in the pursuit of world peace and human progress.”  Xi added that, to quote the Chosun Ilbo’s translation, “the Chinese people have not forgotten their great friendship with North Korea.  Yes, Melanie Kirkpatrick has written all about how the Chinese people show their friendship to North Koreans, which can sound a lot like the “friendship” that Japanese soldiers showed to the Korean comfort women of their time. Xi Jinping apparently has equally chilling concepts of world peace and human progress.  Yes, friendly guys, those ChiComs.  I’m sure the people of North Korea will remember that friendship for a long time.

It it just me, or has Asia suddenly become a prolific producer of especially zany heads of state? I’d begun to wonder if North Korea’s condition was contagious when Aidan Foster-Carter steered me to this story on how Chinese neo-Maoists have turned North Korea into a place of pilgrimage.

Meanwhile, Kurt Campbell just led a U.S. delegation to Seoul to meet with Park Geun-Hye’s transition team, while the awful Glyn Davies is leading another delegation to Seoul, Tokyo, and Beijing, just to maximize the potential for inconsistency.  Campbell has traditionally been one of the most solid members of Obama’s foreign policy team, which is why it’s a pity that he’s leaving it.  Campbell used the occasion to deliver a strong hint that North Korea should not test a nuke, something the North Koreans have reportedly told China they intend to do soon.

I’m sure that as before, the Chinese are exerting all their considerable influence to prevent that.

Campbell also said that the U.S. continues to push for sanctions at the Security Council, something our U.N. Ambassador, Susan Rice, hasn’t managed to get through the Great Wall of China since 2009.

John Bolton was unavailable for comment.

*  On the other hand, whoever advised Abe that Asian nations would line up like Apple fanboys to join an “arc of freedom and prosperity” really should find a new line of work. It doesn’t do to remind people of your own imperial misadventures when you’re trying to convince people — correctly in my view — that China’s imperial ambitions are the greater danger now. This kind of Japanese bumbling only helps China to confuse the present danger by helping it change the subject to the distant past. Even I find myself in rare agreement with KNCA, at least about the optics of it.

Correction:  A reader points out that the Park-Zhang meeting occurred in Seoul, not Beijing.  I apologize for the error and have corrected it.

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