In the days since North Korea’s third nuclear test on February 12th, the international media has been steeped in rumors about what the United States, South Korea and the international community plan to do in response.
One of the recurring themes has been to embark on a new round of Banco Delta Asia(BDA)-style financial sanctions, meaning sanctions targeted at real, identifiable North Korean financial resources held with international banks.
[imText1]However, some experts caution that circumstances have changed, and that this path won’t be easy to follow. One, Dr. John Park, a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at MIT in Boston, told Daily NK on the 19th, “North Korea is doing all its transactions in cash via trading companies inside China, so even BDA-style sanctions will not be able to really harm them.”
According to Park, North Korea stopped conducting its financial dealings through such banks following the 2005 BDA affair, making it much harder to find practical ways to stop Pyongyang using “bulk cash” to evade sanctions, a problem cited in UN Resolution 2087.
Due to the changing financial methods employed by North Korea, China’s role in implementing restrictions is now greater than ever before, he added. However, China is not prepared to approach the issue in the way the United States would like, for the oft-cited reason that Beijing continues to place the emphasis more on North Korean systemic stability than on denuclearization.
Last year also saw the death of the last vestiges of the Obama government’s “strategic patience” policy, Park went on, saying, “The United States hoped that a mixture of strategic patience and financial sanctions would bring North Korea back to the Six-Party Talks, but when last year’s Leap Day Agreement broke down, the power in the Obama administration’s North Korea policy vanished.”
Stating that the goal of the February 12th nuclear test was to “achieve miniaturization and warhead weight reduction,” Park noted pessimistically that when these goals are achieved, “There will be no way for the Obama administration to stop North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons,” and that North Korea will neither return to the Six-Party Talks nor actively seek further discussion with the United States.
“There is almost nobody left in the United States who thinks this problem can be solved through dialogue. For the time being, there will be no attempt to start one,” he concluded.
