Your Tax Dollars at Work: Navy Tracks “Multiple” Suspicious N. Korean Ships It Won’t Actually Stop

The United States said it was monitoring “multiple” North Korean ships suspected of carrying weapons and that it would discuss with its allies what to do with one suspect vessel it is tracking.While the United States has been tracking the Kang Nam since last week, the Pentagon said it is closely monitoring several other North Korean ships allegedly carrying weapons. “We have been interested in this one ship [the Kang Nam], but we’ve been interested in, frankly, multiple ships,” Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said.  [Joongang Ilbo]

UNSCR 1874 clearly prohibits North Korea’s weapons trade and deliberately fails to give any member state an effective way to enforce it.  Because China is intentionally trying to thwart sanctions against North Korea, and because of the unhappy accident of Burma’s location as an idea way station to the Middle East, North Korea can go on trading in prohibited weapons despite UNSCR 1874.  Congressional Republicans are, quite rightly, dismayed about this:

McCain dismissed “toothless” UN sanctions to curb North Korea’s alleged spread of weapons and nuclear know-how, pointing to news reports that a North Korean ship, potentially carrying arms, was headed for Myanmar.  [AFP]

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell added this:

The United States needs to “figure out some way” to board and search North Korean ships suspected of carrying weapons or nuclear know-how, a senior US lawmaker said Thursday.

“There’s no question that our goal here ought to be to get into a position to board and search these ships,” said Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who described as toothless a UN Security Council resolution adopted two weeks ago that calls for inspections of ships but rules out the use of military force to back up the searches.

“It has some serious limitations,” he told AFP, underlining that North Korea would have to consent to a search on the high seas, which the secretive Stalinist regime has made clear it will never do.

“If, however the ship were to go to port — and we got lucky — and it went to a port of a country that was sympathetic with us, you know, maybe it could be helpful,” said the Kentucky lawmaker.  [AFP]

It’s unfortunate that our diplomats settled for a resolution sabotaged by China.  China and Russia have made the United Nations an obstacle to the protection of America’s vital national security interests, and we’ve let them.  The time has come for us to choose between those vital interests and Chinese malevolence.  If China in particular can reserve the right to disregard international conventions, and to disregard and affirmatively undermine U.N. resolutions, surely the protection of our national security entitles us to exceed those resolutions’ explicit terms to allow their purposes to be realized.  How can we allow ourselves to be bound by the word of the U.N. do when China is so determined to make a farce of it?  It’s time for us to enhance the authorities of the Proliferation Security Initiative, and to make of it what the United Nations will never be.