The Myth of Maximum Pressure: Why Trump’s North Korea sanctions strategy must change or fail

If you’re a journalist or scholar who writes about North Korea, you’re apt to think that the Trump administration really did impose more-or-less “maximum” pressure on Kim Jong-un, although this was never really true. If your understanding of sanctions is based on a 1980s concept of sanctions as trade blockades that require the cooperation of every customs inspector at the country’s border, you’re also apt to harbor several other misunderstandings about how sanctions work, and consequently, to add to the torrent of flawed journalism and commentary about North Korea and sanctions. You’re apt to measure sanctions’ effectiveness in terms of cross-border trade. You’re apt to think that the bordering nation is more-or-less free to cooperate as much or as little as its political and economic interests dictate. You’re apt to think that sanctions are an indiscriminate tool that affects the poor as much as the state, if not more.

In fact, if you think those things about the Trump administration’s sanctions strategy, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong. By all external indicators, Trump’s strategy has always focused primarily on shipping and cross-border trade, while eschewing the deadlier and more discriminate strategy enshrined in our two North Korea sanctions laws (1 | 2) ” the targeting of Pyongyang regime’s finances and slush funds. I’ve previously explained why a trade-based strategy is flawed, plays into the hands of our critics and enemies, and ultimately costs us the support of the North Korean people whose empowerment is the only path to a lasting peace in Korea. That’s because cross-border trade also fuels markets in food, consumer goods, and information that can help us break the dependency of the poor on the state, and host an environment in which political resistance can survive, organize, and propagate itself. And as a matter of diplomacy and enforcement, a trade-based strategy puts relatively more power into the hands of the Chinese, Russian, and South Korean governments, thus reducing U.S. leverage over them.

This is not to deny that the coal, iron, and seafood trades are important income sources for Pyongyang ” and specifically, for its security forces and proliferators ” that must be cut off. It’s just that shipping is only the second-most effective way to cut those income sources. That’s why our strategy was never really maximum pressure. In fact, we’ve been fighting an economic war with our dominant hand tied behind our back. Even this may overstate matters. After all, if we were really serious about shipping sanctions, we’d impose stricter customs inspection requirements on the Russian and Chinese ports that are helping Pyongyang smuggle its coal, oil, and weapons, starting with Kholmsk, Nakhodka, and Dandong.

If, five years from now, we ask ourselves why our sanctions strategy failed, and why we went to war in North Korea over a reactor in Iran, a chemical attack in South Korea or Japan, or another cyberattack on our own country, it will be because our President was hoodwinked by Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in into relaxing them; because we let China, Russia, and South Korea get away with violating them; and because our Treasury Secretary was unwilling to execute the laws that mandate financial sanctions on Pyongyang’s enablers. I can only speculate that this was because the banking industry put more political pressure on Trump and Mnuchin than the Chamber of Commerce put on Trump and Wilbur Ross over tariffs on Chinese imports.

But unlike trade sanctions, financial sanctions can selectively target a regime’s finances and force banks to cut their ties to the target whether Beijing or Moscow want those banks to cut those ties or not. Unlike trade sanctions, which rely on the good faith of Chinese customs inspectors, we can enforce financial sanctions in New York, as Pyongyang tries to sneak dollars through correspondent banks that clear its transactions. Unlike trade sanctions, financial sanctions are measured in terms of whether the state continues to pay the salaries of civil servants, scientists, soldiers, and police; whether it has cash to finance priority projects; and how it is performing macroeconomically. Under a trade sanctions strategy, spikes in the price of rice and fuel are indicators of success; under a more nuanced political-financial sanctions strategy, they are indicators of bad targeting, and thus, of failure.

How will we know that the Trump administration has finally decided to apply maximum pressure? As I’ve said all along, when the Treasury Department begins to level nine-digit civil penalties against big Chinese banks that continue to launder Pyongyang’s money. That was the key to the effectiveness of Obama’s sanctions against Iran, and contrary to the panic-mongering of the banking industry, civil penalties against Europe’s financial industry (which is collectively much larger than China’s) did not collapse the global economy.¹

Unlike trade sanctions, financial sanctions can be targeted at the regime’s finances in foreign banks to trap them there. This certainly does not mean that the North Koreans who work in coal mines and weapons factories will be spared from the pain of sanctions, any more than Germans who worked in ball bearing plants or Romanians who worked in refineries could be spared from the physical destruction of strategic bombing in World War II. A financial strategy does, however, allow and even strengthen the partially free markets that can absorb some of those displaced state workers and shift North Korea’s internal balance of economic power away from the state and toward the poor. In some cases, it can even lower food prices by denying the state the means to export food for cash.

And as I’ve also argued all along, our sanctions strategy must be pursued in tandem with a propaganda campaign that targets North Korea’s poor by talking up North Korea’s divides of wealth, class, and songbun, and by telling them the truth about the state’s corruption, torture, murder, and rape. That is why talking about human rights directly to the North Korean people is essential to the success of a broader strategy, of which sanctions, deterrence, and diplomacy are also essential components. If regime survival is the only thing Kim Jong-un values more than nuclear weapons, it follows that we will only separate him from those weapons if he’s convinced that his regime will not survive otherwise.

So far, Trump and Mnuchin have pursued a small-ball strategy based on the idea that appealing to Kim Jong-un’s greed, and causing enough GDP decline in North Korea, will eventually pressure him to make a strategic choice to disarm. We see that assumption behind Treasury’s actions this week and last week, which attacked tiny Russian banks and played whack-a-mole with individual North Korean money launderers. But before Singapore, Trump chose to “hold off on implementing a major new sanctions push against North Korea,” and still hasn’t funded or staffed the enforcement agencies adequately. Meanwhile, Glocom is still running a multi-million-dollar arms smuggling and money laundering operation from Singapore, Malaysia, and China. Russia and China are bringing back thousands of North Korean workers, and even our self-described ally in South Korea has been outed for committing large-scale and flagrant violations of U.N. sanctions. China is preparing to reopen the North Korean restaurants that were probable fronts for Pyongyang’s money laundering. Russia and China are even trying to collaborate with each other to undermine the U.N. sanctions they both voted for at the Security Council.

Why do they do this? Because they’re opposed to (or put a very low priority on) Trump’s goal of disarming North Korea, because they’re opposed to the use of sanctions as a tool of American power broadly, and because they’re confident that Trump will let them get away with those violations. All of them, including South Korea’s current government, seem to be more sympathetic to Pyongyang’s goals than they are to ours. Let’s not forget greed, either. If North Korea has taught us anything, it has taught us how easily you can convince almost anyone to dig his own grave if you tell him there’s a treasure chest six feet underground. And if you can so easily talk a man into digging his own grave, it’s even easier to use discredited and self-serving appeals to “constructive engagement” to get him to dig a mass grave for expendable North Koreans. Just don’t imagine that if Trump abandons sanctions and opts for war, that China, Russia, or South Korea will escape the horrific consequences of that.

Treasury’s recent actions are not completely useless in showing the low characters of the financial ecosystem that the risks of dealing with Pyongyang are still high. If nothing else, they cause those low characters to charge Pyongyang higher risk premiums. And yes, our best evidence says that the Trump administration’s strategy caused Pyongyang’s GDP to decline steeply for the first time in years. No doubt, that has contributed to Kim Jong-un’s decision to reach out to Trump to stay his hand on sanctions, and to reach out to Moon Jae-in to get Moon to violate them outright. I suppose it should no longer surprise me that Pyongyang succeeded in both goals. Let it never be said again that sanctions are bad for diplomacy, if the goal of diplomacy is to have photo ops. But if our goal is security, this level of pressure won’t be enough to neutralize Pyongyang as a direct threat to South Korea, Japan, the United States, or to any unexpected collateral targets like Kuala Lumpur or Aleppo.

I find myself in rare agreement with both the left-of-center commentariat and the intelligence community that the assumption behind Trump’s trade-based sanctions strategy is flawed. Of course, the commentariat harbors an even more dangerous assumption ” that we can use sanctions to force Kim to sign an agreement to coexist with Seoul, then let him refill his state coffers and live happily ever after. And on what basis should we accept their assumption that this will be the first agreement Pyongyang will actually comply with? Or that we can trade another set of North Korean promises for economic leverage that took years to build, and that would take even more years to rebuild? Or that we can continue to overlook Pyongyang’s professed intention to reunify Korea under its own domination, when that strategy seems to be progressing even faster than I had predicted?

At some point in the next few months, Trump will finally grasp the first inviolable rule of North Korea diplomacy ” that Pyongyang is never true to its promises, but eternally true to its demands. When he realizes how thoroughly he was conned by the leaders of both Koreas, his overreaction is apt to be terrifying. But when I say that there are intelligent people in this administration who can offer him better strategies, I speak from first-hand experience. Let’s hope that these people manage to prevail on our Government-of-One over the counsel of his inner cabinet of neuroreceptors.

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1. It is true that China’s four biggest banks are the world’s largest, because the Chinese government favors concentration in the financial industry. Collectively, however, the U.S. and European banking industries are larger than China’s, and Japan’s is also a serious contender. I don’t advocate measures like blocking or 311 actions against big banks. As Obama’s sanctions against Iran showed us, we don’t have to destroy big banks to deter them.