Latest cases of chemical proliferation remind us why Kim Jong-Un must go

Two different member states intercepted the shipments. Previously, Greece, Turkey, and Israel have all intercepted shipments of banned items from North Korea in the eastern Mediterranean. Last year, Egypt intercepted a shipment of North Korean-made rocket-propelled anti-tank grenades at the southern end of the Suez Canal. And just so we’re clear, Pyongyang is willfully supplying the chemical weapons that Assad is using to do this:

During the last year, we’ve also learned that Pyongyang is perfectly willing to make its own use of the deadliest chemical weapons known to mankind, including the persistent nerve agent VX against a noncombatant in an area crowded with completely uninvolved civilians in the capital city of a friendly nation. We know that North Korea would proliferate anything, including the means to produce nuclear weapons, to Syria.

Suspend your belief that Pyongyang (as it continues to insist) will never negotiate away its nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles. Suspend your disbelief that Pyongyang would comply with its agreements even if it signed yet another one. At no point have talks with Pyongyang so much as broached its proliferation, or its chemical weapons, or its biological weapons, or the tube and rocket artillery (some of it chem/bio-capable) it has pointed at the people of Seoul. There is no diplomatic process or agreement that will foreseeably end that threat before Pyongyang proliferates it globally.

Yes, you can rail against Clinton, Bush, and Obama for wasting years we did not have, but we are where we are. The best alternative left to us may be a combination of sanctions and information operations to destabilize the regime, along with the best blockade of North Korea we can now manage in the meantime. When member states don’t inspect North Korean cargo as required under UNSCR 2270, it may not be legally possible to search them, but it’s certainly physically possible. To complicate that option, however, most of North Korea’s maritime trade is run through short-haul trips across the Yellow Sea to China. It would be risky, but possible, to search smuggling ships and those running with their lights and beacons off, but that presents a high risk going hot with Chinese or North Korean ships. If that’s more risk than you’re willing to accept, the KIMS Act would also allow us to penalize ports don’t meet their inspection requirements and flag states that reflag North Korea’s ships, but that would come with economic costs for us. An amendment to the NKSPEA (“notwithstanding section 203(b) of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act”) could close the legal loophole that Air Koryo continues to fly through, and could — eventually — ground it, but that, too, would take time to work.