Trump’s tweets show the right instincts on North Korea.

Kim Jong-un’s New Year speech turned out to more interesting than I’d predicted. No, he isn’t going on Atkins; he’s threatening to fire an ICBM that can hit the United States with a nuke. One wonders how the usual suspects at 38 North will spin this speech into predictions of glasnost and perestroika, but for now, consistent with another prediction I made, Kim Jong-un’s transition-year provocations are molding the President-Elect’s policy at a critical moment, and not to Kim Jong-un’s advantage:

For the last several months, Korea watchers have speculated which Donald Trump we’d see making our North Korea policy. Would it be the deal-maker who, in one breath, suggested he’d withdraw our troops from South Korea, sit down with a mass-murderer over hamburgers, and cut a deal? Or would it be the one who, in the next breath, called His Porcine Majesty “a maniac” and suggested that China should kill him? The two tweets Trump posted last night have given us the clearest vision of his North Korea policy since Election day.

Whatever you may think about trade policy, Trump is unquestionably right about North Korea. China has done much less than nothing to help us in North Korea; it has actively undermined sanctions against it. Its companies sell North Korea the trucks that haul its missiles, its ports let WMD components and weapons pass through on their way to the Middle East and Africa, and its banks are laundering the money that ships North Korean weapons and enriches North Korean proliferators. If the Chinese government hasn’t been willing to help until now, it isn’t going to help unless it faces a much higher cost for its conduct. In fact, it probably won’t be swayed to help at all, but China’s banks and trading companies can be. In the short term, they should be our first targets.

In the long term, our strategy should be to put the North Korean government into something like financial receivership. We should identify and freeze every North Korean account, releasing only as many dollars as necessary for North Korea to import food, medicine, fertilizer, and humanitarian necessities. That strategy must be pursued unblinkingly – subject only to temporary and partial waivers – either until North Korea’s disarmament is verified and it makes fundamental humanitarian reforms, or until the regime no longer exists. We cannot afford to repeat the errors of 1994 and 2007 by throwing away our leverage before North Korea is disarmed, one way or another.

Lest anyone accuse me of proposing a “sanctions-only” policy – and I have never proposed one – our next targets should be the North Korean elites in Pyongyang. We must persuade them that they have no future with Kim Jong-un – that their salvation from purges and a bleak future for their children lies in reunification. How, exactly? Well, read this strategy paper.

We must also reach out to North Korea’s poor, beyond the limits of Pyongyang. We should advocate for their human rights at the United Nations, bilaterally, publicly, and at every opportunity – and we should tell them we doing so. We should help them build the clandestine banks, churches, schools, unions, factories, farms, clinics, newspapers, relief agencies, and police forces – a clandestine civil society that could also become the political foundation of both a national resistance movement and a reunified Korea.

Finally, if North Korea goes through with launching that missile, Trump should tell the military to shoot it down.

Before Donald Trump even ran for President, my wife and I had an involved conversation about what makes presidents effective. We concluded that Reagan was effective, whereas Obama and Carter, despite being much more intelligent men, were not. Why? Because an effective president doesn’t necessarily have to master the details of policy. All an effective president really needs are good instincts about policy, good judgment about appointees, the decisiveness to pick policies and stick with them, and the judgment to know when he’s about to cripple himself with a bad ethical or policy decision. To my liberal friends, and to my friends who are reluctant conservatives, hold that last thought. In fact, hold all of them until we see what the new cabinet and policies look like.

For now, in two tweets, Donald Trump has shown better instincts about the nature of our problem in North Korea, and how to address it, than Barack Obama (undoubtedly a fine man and a highly intelligent one) displayed in eight years in office. When Trump decides to make policy of the instincts he displayed in his tweets, the first man he should turn to is Senator Cory Gardner.

While the Obama administration has implemented portions of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, I encourage the Trump administration to continue with the full implementation and more importantly, the enforcement of the sanctions outlined in the legislation.

In particular, I urge the new administration to utilize the so-called “secondary sanctions,” which target outside entities, or companies, that help Pyongyang engage in illicit behavior. Many of these companies are based in the People’s Republic of China, and the US must not be afraid to anger Beijing by going after them. While the Obama administration has sanctioned and indicted four Chinese nationals and one Chinese-based company for its business tied to North Korea’s weapons program, there are many more that the Treasury Department can — and should — target with financial sanctions. [CNN]

Whether you voted for Trump or not, you should be rooting for him to get North Korea right. So much depends on that. We only get one president at a time. For the next four years, this is the president we are going to have. At this point, if Trump has any designs on making a North Korea deal, the indications are pointing more toward the parody I wrote nearly a year ago than “just another walk in Central Park.”