On the effectiveness of sanctions

Late Sunday, North Korea issued an announcement that it had conducted a successful nuclear weapons test. Unlike the many other times that North Korea has bragged about its military strength and abilities, this time, every nation on the United Nations Security Council (including China, the North’s biggest supporter) quickly denounced it as a dangerous act that could destabilize the entire region.

Theoretically, with such unilateral international support against the country, it should be easy to levy the full force of the U.N. to resolve the situation and disarm North Korea’s nuclear program. Realistically, however, I believe that this situation will expose the ineffectiveness of the economic sanctions that are often the U.N.’s favorite punishment for misbehaving countries like North Korea.

With the support of China and Russia, the U.N. Security Council will most likely be able to quickly create a resolution to enact a tough set of additional sanctions and frozen assets on North Korea, a punishment that most of the foremost leaders on the Council and in the region seem to be pushing for right now.

However, no matter how much trade the international community cuts off from North Korea, it will not force them to disarm. Let’s refer back to one of my favorite historical examples:

At the beginning of the 19th century, during the Presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the Napoleonic Wars were being fought in Europe. Because the U.S. was trading with both France and Great Britain at the time and the British had won control of the sea, they decided to start taking American trading vessels as prizes, reasoning that we were supplying the enemy, and therefore deserved to lose our ships.

The U.S. had no navy to guard our trading vessels (because Jefferson had decommissioned our frigates in favor of small gunboats that could barely sail out of a harbor), but Jefferson the idealist decided that a military presence wasn’t necessary to defend our trade; democratic states fought using sanctions, not guns.

So Jefferson issued an embargo on trade with both France and Britain, hoping to starve both of them out until they realized how much they needed America’s supply shipments and crawled back and apologized. Unfortunately, neither did, and our food exports rotted on the docks and the trade freeze destroyed the American economy.

Now, back to the present. I’m not implying the world economy will be destroyed by not trading with North Korea. On the contrary, I don’t believe anyone’s economy will be destroyed, including North Korea’s. They already receive all of their food from international aid shipments, which wouldn’t be cut off by sanctions, and whatever else Kim Jong Il might desire could probably be manufactured at home.

U.N. sanctions won’t cut off his supply of fissile material for nuclear bombs either. He couldn’t have gotten it through legitimate means to begin with. In the end, I’m not sure what sanctions could really do to slow North Korea’s nuclear program down.

I don’t want to say that a military campaign would be the right solution to the problem either - the last time we got bogged down in a war on the Korean Peninsula, we barely got away with a cease fire, plus our country can’t handle another war right now.

It looks like there is no easy answer for this situation. However, I do believe that the U.N. will open its efforts to punish North Korea with sanctions that will be executed by every major country in the world, meaning that they will be as potent as any set of sanctions could possibly be.

And like the Embargo Act created by Thomas Jefferson 200 years ago, the sanctions will fail to produce any desired result. And when they do, the U.N.’s number one play in its playbook will be proven useless, even when every nation possible is supporting them. At that time, U.N. will have some major rethinking to do about how it will approach dangerous nations in the future, and meanwhile, North Korea will continue to pursue nuclear weapons.