An economic reckoning for North Korea
By Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), Opinion Contributor — 10/06/17 01:30 PM EDT If insanity, as the saying has it, means doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then U.S. efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear weapons program have been madness. For more than two decades, foreign aid and half-hearted sanctions have been deployed in vain to thwart Pyongyang’s ambitions, a wait-it-out strategy based on the premise that the North Korean regime is simply too fragile to survive much longer.
With the country’s sixth nuclear test on Sept. 3, along with the July launching of two intercontinental ballistic missiles and the discovery that Pyongyang can now equip them with nuclear warheads, we must take the Kim regime seriously and squeeze North Korea’s economy before military confrontation becomes inevitable.
Existing U.S. and UN sanctions are falling short for two main reasons. First, and counterintuitively, they have concentrated mostly on North Korean actors. According to research by Harvard’s John Park and MIT’s Jim Walsh, North Korea has masked much of its trading activity by moving it beyond its borders, particularly through the use of Chinese middlemen and front companies. This means that effectively sanctioning North Korea must entail sanctioning non-North Korean nationals.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/foreign-policy/354258-an-economic-reckoning-for-north-korea
