Not all sanctions were created equal.

David Albright has questioned the conclusions of Josh Pollack, in a to-be-released academic paper, that North Korea has now acquired the ability to advance its nuclear weapons with indigenous technology, that the technological horse is out of the barn door, and that there’s nothing more that sanctions can do. (Implication: North Korea is a nuclear state, and we just have to live with that.)

Only we really don’t know the exact parameters of what Pollack concludes, because (at least according to Albright) Pollack isn’t ready to release the full paper yet.

I’m not a nuclear physicist myself, so I won’t try to add value to that part of the debate. Much of it obviously depends on things we don’t really know, as Albright points out. Furthermore, when it comes to interpreting the growing evidence of North Korea’s HEU program, most of the nuclear physicists got it wrong anyway.

On the other hand, I do feel qualified to opine on Pollack’s conclusions — or more accurately, the newspapers’ third-hand characterizations of Pollack’s conclusions — that sanctions against North Korea “won’t get much traction.”

“That means, unfortunately, that we won’t be in a good position to spot them expanding the program through foreign shopping expeditions, and that policies based on export controls, sanctions and interdiction won’t get much traction, either,” said Joshua Pollack, one of the experts presenting the findings this week. “The deeper implication, if they are able to expand the program unchecked, is that we’ll never be too confident that we know where all the centrifuges are. And that in turn could put a verifiable denuclearization deal out of reach.” [NYT]

Again, I can’t say if this quote accurately represents the nuance of Pollack’s views, but it suggests a simplistic understanding by someone of what our sanctions authorities are and what they can and can’t do.

Counter-proliferation sanctions and export controls, which are really just a specific kind of trade sanctions, were always one of the leaker vessels in our legal cupboard. I’d extend that to any kind of sanction that attempts to interdict the shipment of specific categories of goods and technology across a specific border. Sanctions like these can put pressure on states that are sensitive to domestic political discontent, and they can slow the rate of a determined buyer’s acquisitions, but they’re never airtight, and they have a poor record for forcing dictatorships to change policies. Their greatest success may be their part in taking down Milosevic, and their worst failure is probably Oil-for-Food in Iraq. But this isn’t all we have in our cupboard.

The sanctions that work best—the ones that are collapsing Iran’s economy and bringing it back to the bargaining table, probably to keep lying to us, but never mind that—are those that make the targeted commerce and those who choose to participate in it toxic to the key nodes of global commerce, trade, and finance. Sanctions like these have a far better record of pressuring targeted states — including Burma, Sudan, Ukraine, Iran, and yes, North Korea — into making difficult policy changes, provided we keep the pressure on until the dictators actually follow through with those changes. Or fall from power.

Again, I’ll emphasize that sanctions are only one part of a broader policy that needs to include information operations, law enforcement, and a lot of good public and private diplomacy.

In case I haven’t mentioned this before, there’s a bill in Congress that would give the President a potentially lethal legal arsenal against Kim Jong Un. I’m just saying.