Experts Agree that Sanctions Have Forced North Korea to Negotiate

How many people over the years have claimed that sanctions against North Korea won’t work?  Sanctions against North Korea work if everyone enforces them.  Now that the North Koreans are back to negotiate what we will see next is whether the ROK and the US will relieve the Kim regime of the economic pressure they are facing with some kind of nuclear agreement:

The economic pinch is almost certainly why Kim Jong Un is suddenly so eager to talk to the outside world, traveling to Beijing in March and then crossing the demilitarized zone to meet Moon.

“Why would he be doing this unless he was being constrained by sanctions,” said Stephan Haggard, professor of Korea-Pacific studies at the University of California at San Diego and a close monitor of sanctions. “I think he’s sweating.”  (….)

But analysts generally agree that the sanctions must be inflicting serious pain on North Korea, a desperately poor country with a highly inefficient economy.  (….)

The sanctions are probably putting a chill through both these economies. That has to be a huge concern for Kim, who once declared that North Korean people “would never have to tighten their belts again.”

“If I were Kim, I’d be much more worried about textile workers out of work, milling around doing nothing, than I would be about an American attack,” said William Brown, a former intelligence analyst focused on North Korea who now teaches at Georgetown University. Citing the kind of discontent that brought down communist regimes in Eastern Europe, he said, “The real dangers to the regime are internal.”

But Moon could pursue very little economic engagement without sanctions relief.

Not only has the U.N. Security Council imposed waves of sanctions on North Korea, but South Korea imposed its own direct punishment following two deadly North Korean attacks on South Korea in 2010.

Those measures are still in place, and conservative politicians are urging Moon to leave them there. Even if Moon overturned his predecessor’s order to close the Kaesong industrial park, an inter-Korean factory complex on the northern side of the border, transferring money or equipment to it would be almost impossible in the current sanctions environment.  [Washington Post]

This all goes back to why the Moon administration is buttering up Trump with promises of a Nobel Peace Prize by getting on the peace train and believing that North Korea is really going to denuclearize this time.