Whose Blockade?

A debate I’ve had too many times is the question of whether sanctions against North Korea are counterproductive to the goal of liberalizing North Korea. The “Trojan Horse” theory holds that if only the United States would drop its sanctions against North Korea and trade with the regime, consumer goods, DVDs, and Western culture would flood into the country and gradually reform it. It’s a great idea, actually. I happen to agree that contact with the outside world would have a reforming–if not revolutionary–impact.

Too bad Kim Jong Il also agrees:

It is the imperialist’s old trick to carry out ideological and cultural infiltration prior to their launching of an aggression openly. Their bourgeois ideology and culture are reactionary toxins to paralyze people’s ideological consciousness. Through such infiltration, they try to paralyze the independent consciousness of other nations and make them spineless. At the same time, they work to create illusions about capitalism and promote lifestyles among them based on the law of the jungle, in an attempt to induce the collapse of socialist and progressive nations. The ideological and cultural infiltration is their silent, crafty and villainous method of aggression, intervention and domination . . . .

No wonder attempts to penetrate the North Korean market have failed abyssimally to break the regime’s airlock around the North Korean people. There is a blockade; it’s just not ours.

Of course, we need not guess about what would happen if the world opened itself to the North. It has. The United States lifted most of its sanctions against the North in 1999, and South Korea and China haven’t let trivialities like nuclear proliferation or human rights impede their all-out efforts to expand trade with the North. Japan and North Korea have had generations of trade relations via a large Korean-Japanese community. Yet North Koreans still can’t get South Korean DVDs or Chinese cell phones without risking severe punishment.

Cultural penetration does appear to be having an effect anyway, despite the best efforts of the North Korean government. Outside information is surreptitiously making its way into the North and may be having some impact on society there. We ought to do everything we can to encourage this underground trade, since North Korea will probably never allow it to take place legally.

But that has nothing to do with sanctions on the kind of trade that the North Korean regime controls and uses to sustain itself.