Category: Sanctions

William Newcomb, formerly of the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.N. Panel of experts (UNPOE), was at The Korea Society last Friday to talk with Stephen Noerper about North Korea sanctions, what they are, and how to make them a useful policy tool again. Newcomb didn’t have time to explain all of the authorities and their provisions in detail, but he did make some important points. First, Newcomb blames “politics” for the fact that the UNPOE hasn’t designated a number...

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...

Writing at the blog of the (cough, cough) Korea Economic Institute, Klingner, a former CIA analyst and a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, hammers home the weakness of our North Korea sanctions and their enforcement. While still at the State Department, Campbell realized that “Burma had much more in the way of sanctions” than North Korea and correctly, if belatedly, concluded that “Clearly we have not been successful at putting substantial pressure on North Korea [and] it would be possible for us...