Category: Sanctions

Former Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen on N. Korea, China, and secondary sanctions

A recurring theme in the North Korea sanctions debate is that most of those who really understand what our sanctions on North Korea do and don’t do, and how they work, think they can work against North Korea, if we ever bother to enforce them (see, e.g., Juan Zarate, Anthony Ruggiero, Peter Harrell, George A. Lopez, and Bill Newcomb). Unfortunately, the actual experts are at variance with another group, consisting mostly of academics, retired politicians, retired diplomats, and experts in other...

전쟁이 아닌 법으로 북한의 핵무기를 어떻게 멈출 수 있는가?

안녕하세요, 한국의 친구들. 저는 워싱턴 DC에있는 미국 변호사입니다. 1998 년부터 2002 년까지 저는 한국에서 군인이었습니다. 저는 아름다운 문화와 사람들로 인해 한국에서의 생활을 사랑했습니다. 1999 년에, 저는 가장 정직하고, 아름다운 사람을 만났고, 그래서 저는 그녀와 결혼했습니다.  오늘 우리에게는 두 명의 자녀가 있습니다. 한국은 제가 사는 한 제 삶의 일부가 될 것입니다. 그래서 저는 북한에 대해 걱정하고 있습니다. 우리는 전쟁을 피해야만 하지만 우리는 또한 대한민국을 자유롭게 해야 합니다. 1998년 젊은 군인으로 처음 한국에 도착했을 때, 한국은 재통일에 대한 희망으로 들떠 있었습니다. 김대중이 대통령이었고, 북한의 경제를 변화시키고 개방하기 위해...

What North Korea sanctions? Busting the myths in five charts and one long essay.

Bruce Klingner, Professor Lee, and I have a new piece out in Foreign Affairs, in which we continue to ask the question, “What North Korea sanctions?” As regular readers know, I’ve spent the last several years waging | a jihad | against junk analysis and fake expertise about North Korea and sanctions, usually from people who don’t bother to read or research them, and who often flat-out misrepresent what they are and do. These people feel compelled to argue that sanctions can’t work because the possibility | that...

The MKP Group’s website is a feast of mendacity, quackery, possible illegality, and web design hilarity

The aftermath of Kim Jong-nam’s assassination, and the attention it has drawn to North Korea’s connections to Malaysia, continues to yield new revelations about Pyongyang’s illicit finances overseas. Reuters, having already exposed Glocom as a front for the Reconnaissance General Bureau, now adds to what the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks ago about the MKP Group. To summarize Reuters’s extensive and detailed report on MKP: it was founded by a North Korean named Han Hun-il and a Malaysian named Yong Kok-yeap in 1996. According...

Sens. Gardner & Markey call on Trump administration to enforce North Korea sanctions law

Here’s the kind of story you hear too seldom in Washington today: A conservative Republican (Cory Gardner of Colorado) has joined forces with a liberal Democrat (Ed Markey of Massachusetts) to write a letter to the new secretaries of State and Treasury, asking them to fully enforce the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act (NKSPEA), which passed Congress with the overwhelming support of both parties last year. (Even Bernie Sanders would have voted for it had he not been campaigning...

What the Trump administration’s first North Korea sanctions designations tell us

Last Friday’s designations of 11 individuals and one company by the Treasury Department are the first North Korea designations of the new Trump administration. So what do they tell us about the direction of the administration’s North Korea policy? On the positive side, the designation of a North Korean coal company affiliated with the military should, in theory, send a strong message to its Chinese clients, although they don’t seem to have taken the last hint. Also on the positive side,...

Congress is marking up North Korea bills faster than I can write about them

Congress’s sentiment about Pyongyang today equates roughly to Cato the Elder’s sentiment about Carthage. (I mean this figuratively, for now, although I increasingly fear that sanctions are our last plausible strategy to prevent war.) It’s now moving more North Korea legislation than it has in the entire decade leading up to the passage of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act just over one year ago. I can no longer keep up with all of the bills, amendments, markups, and resolutions...

Investigative journalists expose North Korean front companies in Malaysia

The coincidence of the Panel of Experts report’s release and the assassination of Kim Jong-nam continues to focus some of the finest investigative journalism I’ve seen in years on North Korea’s front companies in Malaysia. First up, the MKP Group, a Malaysian-North Korean joint venture that earned “tens of millions of dollars” through construction projects in Zambia, Angola, and elsewhere in Africa. To further reinforce Bill Newcomb’s comments about the links between slave labor, money laundering, and proliferation, MKP often uses...

UN report shows China, others are still havens for North Korean money laundering

Due to a convergence of other commitments, it took me longer than I’d hoped to digest the U.N. Panel of Experts‘s latest findings about North Korea and financial sanctions. If you only read the bottom line and stop there, you’ll either be discouraged or find support for an argument that sanctions are futile. 210. Despite expanded financial sanctions adopted by the Security Council in resolutions 2270 (2016) and 2321 (2016), the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has continued to access...

Royce introduces bill to toughen sanctions on N. Korea; subcommittee holds hearing

The big news yesterday was that Ed Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has introduced a sequel to the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, or NKSPEA. You can read the full text here, but briefly, the bill — Expands the mandatory and discretionary sanctions in NKSPEA 104 to match the sanctions added by UNSCR 2270 and UNSCR 2321. It also adds a few more, like authorizing Treasury to sanction anyone who imports food from North Korea — a...

Will China cooperate on North Korea sanctions? That depends on which “China” you mean.

I often talk about the importance of pressuring China to pressure North Korea. When I do, people sometimes cock their heads like my dog would do when he heard a new sound, and ask me whether China would cooperate with that. I answer this question with a question of my own: “Which China?” China, for all its top-down authoritarianism, isn’t a monolith. Like most societies, it has different constituencies with different views that fear different risks and pursue different interests....

N. Korea, Lazarus & SWIFT: Are the white hats closing in? (Update: SWIFT cuts off remaining N. Korean banks)

In the last month, major news stories about North Korea have bombarded my batting cage faster than I’ve been able to swing at them. I’d wondered when I’d have a chance to cover Katy Burne’s detailed story in the Wall Street Journal about the empty half of the SWIFT glass ” that despite its recent decision to disconnect three U.N.-designated North Korean banks, it’s still messaging for banks that are sanctioned by the Treasury Department, but not by the U.N.:...

Another North Korean ship sinks, this time off the Chinese coast

In an effort to hide their sanctions violations from the prying eyes of the U.N. Panel of Experts — and from Leo Byrne and the sharp-eyed investigators at C4ADS — North Korean ships have taken to turning off the transponders and navigational devices that allow others to know where they are. Now that I’ve explained the advantages of that, let’s talk about one big possible disadvantage: other ships might crash into you and sink you. That’s the best explanation I...

Malaysia holds the upper hand in its hostage dispute with North Korea

Three weeks ago, Malaysia was one of North Korea’s most important trading partners — a haven, hub, and way station for its arms trafficking, money laundering, and slave labor. Money has long been the limiting reagent in Pyongyang’s experiment with phobocracy. It’s now clear that Kim Jong-un will soon pay a heavy financial and diplomatic price for the badly botched murder of his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam with a persistent nerve agent in a crowded airport terminal in Kuala Lumpur last month....

Yay, it happened! Jim Rogers got burned by hyping North Korea!

And just like that, crackpot investment advisor Jim Rogers joins the distinguished company of Hyundai Asan, Volvo, Yang Bin, David Chang and Robert Torricelli, Chung Mong-Hun, Roh Jeong-ho, and Orascom’s Naguib Sawaris, all of whom won Darwin Awards in North Korea. I’ve previously written about Rogers and his enthusiasm for North Korea and its worthless currency. That OFK post caught the eye of a New York Times reporter, who has just published a story on the relationship between Rogers and his self-described business...

U.N. report: SWIFT banking network violated North Korea asset freeze

Since last year, this blog has covered SWIFT’s continued provision of financial messaging services to North Korean banks, despite suspicions that North Korea was involved in stealing almost $100 million from the Bangladesh Bank by hacking into SWIFT’s messaging software. Later, I wrote about an effort in the last Congress to ban North Korean banks from SWIFT, mirroring a sanction that was one of our most effective measures against Iran. SWIFT is effectively the postal service of the financial system, sending...

Malaysia’s lax enforcement of North Korea sanctions has finally come home

Over the weekend, Malaysian authorities painstakingly decontaminated a terminal of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport where North Korean agents ” including a diplomat ” carried out a lethal attack with the nerve agent VX, a substance so deadly that a tiny droplet can kill an adult. The authorities are clearly concerned that the use of a persistent chemical weapon of mass destruction in a crowded airport terminal will cause panic among Malaysian citizens and members of the traveling public, as well they should...

GOP heavyweights push for secondary boycott of North Korea

Six Republican senators — Ted Cruz (TX), Cory Gardner (CO), Thom Tillis (NC), Marco Rubio (FL), Pat Toomey (PA) and David Perdue (GA) — have signed a letter to newly confirmed Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin* calling for improved implementation and enforcement of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhnancement Act (NKSPEA). As Kim Jung-un has exposed his willingness to increase ballistic missile testing with the ultimate goal of achieving nuclear breakout, the potential for this regime to attain...