South Korea has been caught violating 3 UN resolutions this week (so far)

South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade now admits that it first suspected that subsidiaries of its national power company were importing North Korean coal as early as October 2017. For those of you who don’t do math, that was ten months ago. The result of that extensive ten-month investigation? Despite all the red flags that should have put everyone involved in this transaction on notice that they were buying North Korean coal right up until last week, the South Korean government has cleared its banks, the power companies, and (naturally) itself of any wrongdoing and charged three small-time importers with falsifying the certificates of origin for the coal. Mistakes were made. Scapegoats will be punished. Or not.

Bullshit. The point of plausible deniability is to make your denial plausible—as if no one in Seoul has ever heard of Google and shipping trackers. If Pennmike and Chosun Ilbo could identify the names of the ships and track them online, surely the National Intelligence Service could (assuming, of course, that someone inside the NIS wasn’t the source of the Chosun and Pennmike reports).

Argue, if you will, that packing North Korean coal in big white ton bags and shipping it through Siberian ports gave the South Koreans plausible deniability. What’s conclusive to me is that in the end, Seoul willfully allowed the smuggling ships to weigh anchor, leave its ports, and get away long after the “reasonable cause” was clear—in direct violation of a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions that required it to “seize and dispose of” the ships, a duty I discussed in greater detail here.

Let’s not forget that South Korea was buying this coal over a period that spanned Pyongyang’s attendance of the Olympics and the Panmunjom Summit, neither of which yielded any significant concessions that will make South Korea or the American soldiers who are in harm’s way there any safer. I will believe, until convinced otherwise by compelling evidence from the U.N. Panel of Experts, that this trade was part of an under-the-table agreement to funnel cash to His Porcine Majesty to undermine U.N. sanctions and nominal U.S. policy.

Here’s something else I’m wondering—do you suppose the U.S. intelligence community or the State Department was also warning the South Koreans about this as Seoul’s “investigation” dragged on like O.J.’s search for the “real killer?” But not to worry. Now that the North Korean ships are safely away, Seoul plans to ban them from its ports. I guess the North Koreans will just have to use different ships next time.

Is that all? No, that is not all.

South Korea started to supply power to the North Korean border city of Kaesong on Tuesday to prepare for the trial operation of an inter-Korean liaison office there, Seoul officials said Tuesday.

At an April summit between President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, they agreed to establish the office to “facilitate close consultation between the authorities as well as smooth exchanges and cooperation between the peoples.”

Seoul and Pyongyang have been making preparations to open the office at the suspended inter-Korean industrial complex in the North Korean border city of Kaesong.

The Kaesong complex, operated for more than a decade as a symbol of inter-Korean cooperation, was halted in February 2016, when tensions spiked over the North’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

An official at the South Korean government said the supply of electricity is only aimed at opening the liaison office, adding that the supply is not related to a possible resumption of the Kaesong complex. [Yonhap]

There’s just one problem here. Seoul’s request for a U.N. sanctions exemption for this is still pending, and that exemption is a clear requirement under UNSCR 2375:

Joint Ventures

“18. Decides that States shall prohibit, by their nationals or in their territories, the opening, maintenance, and operation of all joint ventures or cooperative entities, new and existing, with DPRK entities or individuals, whether or not acting for or on behalf of the government of the DPRK, unless such joint ventures or cooperative entities, in particular those that are non-commercial, public utility infrastructure projects not generating profit, have been approved by the Committee in advance on a case-by-case basis, further decides that States shall close any such existing joint venture or cooperative entity within 120 days of the adoption of this resolution if such joint venture or cooperative entity has not been approved by the Committee on a case-by-case basis, and States shall close any such existing joint venture or cooperative entity within 120 days after the Committee has denied a request for approval, and decides that this provision shall not apply with respect to existing China-DPRK hydroelectric power infrastructure projects and the Russia-DPRK Rajin-Khasan port and rail project solely to export Russia-origin coal as permitted by paragraph 8 of resolution 2371 (2017);

This is the old strategy of asking for forgiveness when you can’t get permission. Seoul thinks the U.S. will concur with the exemption now that it is already supplying electricity, rather than putting an “ally”—stop laughing—in a difficult position. But the fact that Seoul flouts U.N. resolutions is all the more reason to impose a cost for violating them. As I’ve said repeatedly, if not even South Korea follows U.N. sanctions, the sanctions become a global punchline, the entire strategy fails, diplomacy fails with it, a global proliferation threat metastasizes, and either a catastrophic war or the capitulation of South Korea to a totalitarian dystopia (or both) becomes a medium-term inevitability. This pattern of clear and longstanding violations, combined with evidence that Seoul wanted to undermine the sanctions by reopening Kaesong, is fairly conclusive of an approach that is, at best, blithe to sanctions enforcement on the part of a government led by people who don’t bother to read U.N. resolutions, yet still have the gall to call themselves lawyers. That makes some kind of adverse consequence for Moon Jae-in essential to recapturing his attention.

Incidentally, I don’t expect any of the major news services with correspondents in South Korea to report any of this. I hope I’m wrong. Frankly, I’ve never had less confidence in their diligence, competence, objectivity, or literacy of the sanctions authorities.¹

That Pyongyang gained much and gave nothing at Panmunjom but an ephemeral illusion of calm is all fine for Moon Jae-in. Moon cares far more about his poll numbers than disarming North Korea, and he knows that South Koreans, having everything to lose and little real interest in the nature of the regime that is finlandizing their society and government, have swallowed his blue pill. These are the sorts of decisions democratic societies can make; I just don’t want the Army I served in to enable that process by overstaying its welcome and its usefulness. In the end, the only thing a voting public is entitled to is enough information to decide its own fate intelligently—a fair warning.

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1. To be fair, VOA and RFA at least try to get it right.