How to write like an expert on sanctions: Step 1, read the sanctions.

I don’t doubt that Stanford scholar Yong Suk Lee’s minor premise—that Pyongyang shifts economic pain to the proles and peasants—is correct. To extend this into a convincing policy argument, however, that Pyongyang would only shift the pain of sanctions to the North Korean people, requires a more convincing case for his major premise–that the deprivation of the North Korean people is a function of sanctions, rather than state policies that willfully impose that deprivation. It’s a case that Lee fails to make, in part because he fails to demonstrate a basic understanding of the subject matter through the citation, analysis, and explanation of the sanctions themselves. You don’t have to be a lawyer to do this. Treasury’s summary of U.S. sanctions on North Korea is simple, readable, and publicly available.

Yet nowhere does Lee cite 31 C.F.R. Part 510, the North Korea sanctions regulations, or tell us what they do and don’t do. Nowhere does he discuss the main executive orders that apply—13382 (proliferation sanctions), 13466 (a place-holder for sanctions that weren’t lifted in 2008), 13551 (belatedly implementing UNSCR 1718), and 13570 (banning imports from North Korea, of which there were virtually none anyway). Nowhere does he count or track the North Korean entities on the SDN list–and it’s not that hard to count to 63–or compare their significance or number to those of other sanctions targets (hundreds each in the case of Iran, Cuba, and the Balkans).

Of course, there are also sanctions authorities promulgated by the U.N., the EU, and Japan. In the case of China, there is the notable lack thereof. That matters very much, because China is North Korea’s largest natural and historic trading partner, and China isn’t enforcing U.N. sanctions, including in luxury goods and missile carriers lumber trucks. If Pyongyang can sell and buy pretty much anything it wants, but for some reason still isn’t feeding and providing for anyone beyond the limits of Pyongyang, that would tend to kick the major premise out from under Lee’s syllogism.

Lee’s failure to understand his subject matter means he misses the yawning gaps in current U.S. and U.N. sanctions, and the negligible effect they’ve consequently had, except between September 2005 and February 2007. Instead of a detailed legal and historical analysis of the sanctions, Lee instead offers an incomplete selection of high-profile events that either sanction or aid the regime, and ends up blending and baking this into one simple integer to describe the strength of “sanctions,” without regard to their very different authorities, targeting, and impact. The result, in Table 1 at page 28, looks more like the product of a 20-minute Google search than the result of a careful, year-on-year observation sanctions as they’ve been imposed, relaxed, or simply not enforced. In doing so, Lee subtracts food aid from sanctions targeted at proliferation—which is an apples-to-artichokes comparison.

This methodology causes Lee to make significant errors. For example, he notes North Korea’s placement on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, but fails to register President Bush’s removal of North Korea from the list in 2008–discuss among yourselves–or the lifting of Trading With the Enemy Act sanctions. He speaks of “a unanimous UN Security Council Resolution that restricted North Korean activities in all dimensions,” which would certainly make Kim Jong Un giggle as he schusses down the slopes of his new ski resort. Judging from Table 1 of Lee’s paper, this is a rather wild exaggeration of UNSCR 1874 (Lee fails to mention the more significant UNSCR 1718 and 2094). Lee’s table also refers to U.S. restrictions on financial transactions, but with the exception of transactions specifically tied to proliferation, where are those? (Hint: read 31 C.F.R. 510.201; they aren’t there.)

Lee even bumps his integer upward in 2007, just as the Bush Administration was busy weakening North Korea sanctions. An annotation in Table 1 says of the U.S., “impose license requirements for export to DPRK and travel further regulated.” Lee misapprehends that any changes to export license requirements that year were actually the replacement of stronger regulations with weaker ones. As for travel sanctions, there are no travel sanctions against North Korea. If you don’t believe the U.S. Treasury Department, just ask Kenneth Bae.

At pages 24 through 27, Lee then even attempts to tie his sanctions index to the amount of light visible in North Korea in satellite photos at night in graphic form, producing a chart that assumes that sanctions became tougher throughout the entire duration of George W. Bush’s presidency—again, when they were substantially weakened!—as well as that of President Obama.

A more accurate sanctions chart would have shown sanctions largely outweighed by aid from 1994 to 2001 (and most likely a negative value), then rising and peaking in late 2006, falling precipitously through 2009, and then showing some small peaks in 2010, 2011, and 2014. I didn’t bother to make that chart myself, because it would have been a data loaf that combines very different kinds of sanctions and tells us nothing. Furthermore, all of these increases and increases would be relative, thus overlooking their small significance in absolute terms (again, with the exception of the 2005 to 2007 years). One could just as well take note of the serious and determined relative mass movement of every passenger and deck chair during the Titanic‘s last hour. The absolute effect would still be negligible.

It is certainly true that the wrong kind of sanctions, or carelessly targeted sanctions, could have adverse effects on the North Korean people–which is why Section 207 of this sanctions law is riddled with exemptions and flexibilities to avoid those consequences. The obvious off-limits targets include food, medicine, and inexpensive clothing, but sanctions on fuel, for example, could have adverse secondary effects on agricultural production (tanks and tractors both burn diesel). On the other hand, it’s difficult to conceive of how blocking the funds involved in purchasing a ski lift, a centrifuge, or a Pullman limousine will turn off the lights or cause mass starvation in Chongjin (although it’s easy to see how Europe’s laissez-faire trade policies toward Pyongyang might contribute to it). By grouping dissimilar sanctions with dissimilar impacts and policy implications, Lee ends up with a product that is useless for policymakers.

Given the lack of empirically verifiable data about North Korea, Lee is to be commended for his creative pursuit of information and relationships, but the linkage in the relationship he seeks to prove is a weak one. Most of North Korea’s electricity is from domestically produced coal and hydroelectric power, and its electricity shortages are more a function of rationing and governmental incompetence–its inability to maintain a functioning power grid despite its ability to access just about any product whose procurement it really prioritizes. Even if Lee had understood the sanctions well enough to empiricize them, any correlation he might have shown between sanctions and luminosity could just as well have been a case of coincidence as causation.