Actually, sanctions are looking like the best thing that ever happened to engagement

Since December 19th, when the President blamed North Korea for the Sony hacking and cyberterrorism attacks, Congress has been pushing for tougher sanctions against North Korea, and it has looked increasingly like it has been pushing against an open door. And suddenly, a North Korean leader who has never gone abroad or met a foreign leader during his three-year reign (no, Rodman doesn’t count) has taken a sudden — even urgent — interest in personal diplomacy.

On January 1, Kim Jong Un made a highly conditional suggestion that he might be interested in meeting Park Geun-Hye. Park, with record low approval ratings and a desperate need to change the subject, seized on the offer and has pushed Kim to hurry along to Seoul.

The next day, President Obama issued an executive order authorizing sanctions against all entities and officials of North Korea’s government and ruling party, and (more importantly) against the third-country entities that provide Pyongyang its regime-sustaining hard currency. The order was potentially sweeping and devastating. In its actual impact, it reached only three entities that were already sanctioned, and ten mid- to low-level arms dealers. But the President also said that this was only a first step, which left Pyongyang scurrying to secure its financial lifelines.

Suddenly, within a week, press reports said that Shinzo Abe might visit Pyongyang, and that Kim might accept Putin’s invitation to Moscow in May.

Kim even reached out to Washington a little, offering a nuclear test freeze if Washington cancels annual military exercises. This was enough to fool the gullible editors of The New York Times, but not President Obama. Still, it’s more than North Korea has offered Washington for the last year.

Today, North Korea’s Central Bank responded to an obviously planted question from its state news agency by “committ[ing] itself to implementing the action plan of ‘international standard’ for anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism.” (quote from KCNA; Reuters report here.) Kim surely knows that international efforts to enforce financial sanctions against Pyongyang will determine their success.

All of this is great news if you believe that talks are an end in themselves, rather than a means to achieve concrete interests. But it’s also great news if you’re searching for a strategy that raises enough colon-clenching horror in the palaces and ministries of Pyongyang to modify the regime’s behavior.

There’s little question that Kim Jong Un’s sudden interest in diplomacy is fundamentally about frustrating U.S. interests, rather than disarmament or genuine reform. Pyongyang is bracing for financial warfare — trying to break up the formation of an international coalition against its finances, protecting key cash cows like Kaesong, and shoring up its financial lifelines to resist sanctions. But at least for now, despite all of the “expert” opinion that sanctions can do no more, we’ve heard, however indirectly, from the best authorities on that subject — the ones in Pyongyang.