The latest phase in the North Korean nuclear crisis is a race against time inside North Korea itself. Which will come first: nuclear breakout or economic breakdown? Washington should be moving much more forcefully to tilt the outcome in the West’s favor.
On the one hand, Pyongyang presses ahead with production of nuclear warheads and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Kim Jong Un publicly announced as much nearly two years ago, on New Year’s Day 2018. Mr. Kim successfully parlayed a temporary halt to nuclear and ICBM testing into the summitry with President Trump—with the North manufacturing more strategic weapons all the while. When Pyongyang’s nuclear arsenal is sufficiently developed, Mr. Kim will likely switch back to confrontation, renewing nuclear brinkmanship, this time with the mainland U.S. at risk.
At the same time, American and international sanctions are undermining the North Korean economy, pushing it closer to dislocation. Sanctions seldom work, but North Korea is an exception, given its highly distorted and dependent economy. Through guile and strategic deception, Pyongyang desperately hopes to persuade the U.S. to abandon sanctions, because Mr. Kim is spending down his currency reserves and his strategic stores of food and energy. To outsiders, everything will look “normal”—until it starts to spin out of the regime’s control.
America’s national security depends on forestalling North Korea’s strategic breakout and hastening the breakdown of its war economy. That calls for “maximum pressure” once again—this time with gusto. Three decades of failed denuclearization talks demonstrate that diplomatic negotiations with the Kim family simply can’t get the U.S. where it wants. “Threat reduction,” on the other hand, can begin as soon as the U.S. says it does.
How to proceed? Here are a few suggestions:
• Double down on economic sanctions. Chinese, Russian and other interests regularly violate existing U.S. and United Nations Security Council strictures. Yet Washington has a fearsome tool for coercing compliance with sanctions against North Korea: the U.S. dollar, still the world’s reserve currency.
The U.S. can ban sanction-busting commercial and financial entities from future dollar-denominated transactions. For many globalized entities, such “secondary sanctions” would amount to a financial death blow. To restore credibility to the sanctions campaign, the U.S. will probably have to make examples of some important Chinese and Russian companies.
• Treat Pyongyang like the criminal enterprise it is. No other regime games its national sovereignty and converts its diplomatic immunity into criminal revenue like North Korea. Cybercrime, drug running, currency counterfeiting, human trafficking, nuclear proliferation—the gangster state in North Korea profits from all of these and more.
The U.S. needs a sustained diplomatic and law-enforcement initiative to name, shame and blacklist malefactors. The North’s money trails lead through familiar terror bazaars in the Middle East, and rolling these back would be a twofer. And don’t forget the illicit activities North Korean embassies routinely run in countries with which the U.S. has friendly relations—including ivory and rhino-horn smuggling by its diplomats in various African capitals.
And remember Otto Warmbier. A U.S. court has awarded his family a $500 million judgment against Pyongyang for his death. Washington should aggressively enforce it. Until it’s satisfied, nothing owned by the Kim regime should enjoy free passage—anywhere in the world.
While we’re at it, why not purchase on the secondary debt market a few hundred million dollars’ worth of bank loans from the 1970s on which North Korea has since defaulted? These could be had at a very steep discount. Holding such debt would give Washington the sovereign right to hunt down and seize hidden North Korean bank accounts and other loot stashed abroad.
• Prepare for the next North Korean food crisis. The first external sign that economic pressure is crippling the North Korean economy will likely be a spiraling of cereal prices and a collapse of the exchange rate of the North Korean won in domestic markets. The second could be a hunger crisis. Pyongyang will have no compunction about starving hostages from disfavored classes to loosen the sanctions noose. The U.S. and its allies must be prepared to offer “intrusive aid”—a program designed and administered by impartial outsiders, not North Korean apparatchiks—to feed the needy directly. This is the path to breaking the country’s war economy.
If a U.S.-led North Korean threat-reduction effort looks likely to succeed, Pyongyang will use every menacing gambit it can muster to get America’s leaders to desist. They must not be unnerved. Mr. Kim intends to threaten the U.S. with nuclear weapons. America has to stop him before his leverage grows.
Mr. Eberstadt is a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute.
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