Mere hours after North Korea seemingly carried out an underground nuclear test Tuesday morning, our UN ambassador, Susan Rice, vowed to take “swift” and “significant action” against Pyongyang’s rogue regime at the Security Council.
To bolster her efforts, new Secretary of State John Kerry picked up the phone Wednesday to consult with his counterparts in all relevant capitals.
Well, almost all: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was unavailable, apparently too busy.
After the phone sessions, Kerry announced, “The international community now needs to come together with a swift and clear, strong, credible response.” And added, “What our response is with respect to this will have an impact on all other nonproliferation efforts,” including Iran’s.
So Turtle Bay diplomats are sharpening their resolution-drafting pencils, as higher-ups in Washington, Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and (when available) Moscow work to coordinate the response to the latest provocation by “Dear Respected” Kim Jong-un. (“Dear Respected” is the regime’s term for the new tyrant, after “Dear Leader” for his dad and “Eternal Leader” for his grandpop.)
Expect the council to impose a new set of sanctions soon. As Rice vowed Tuesday, the council “will not only tighten the existing measures, but we aim to augment the sanctions regime.”
But what does the tough talk mean?
The United Nations has already sanctioned pretty much everything that moves in Pyongyang. The best it’ll be able to do now is add new hard-to-pronounce names to its sanction lists and designate more North Korean banks and companies (which change names faster than UN bureaucrats can identify their designation) for embargo. Oh, and maybe add more materials of possible use to North Korea’s nuclear programs to the no-commerce lists.
Later, America and others may follow by adding some names to our own additional-sanctions lists.
All this may slow down North Korea somewhat. But very little of Pyongyang’s business with the outside world is done formally (or legally). Instead, it deals with other sanctioned regimes, like Iran’s, and with rogue Russian, Pakistani and other nuclear and ballistic technicians.
This kind of shadowy business is financed by bagfuls of cash, rather than banking systems. To seriously limit it, America and its allies have to aggressively intercept deliveries of illicit materials and funds.
The good news: Such interceptions are largely already authorized by past UN resolutions. Also, the Bush administration created a treaty, the Proliferation Security Initiative, which authorizes its nearly 100 members (including Russia) to search and seize vessels suspected of illicitly proliferating WMD-related items.
The bad news: China isn’t a PSI member and it takes its Security Council obligations quite lightly. Aircrafts carrying nuclear- and missile-related items between, say, Iran and North Korea feel quite safe flying through Chinese airspace, where they’re virtually immune from interception.
So even if America and our allies manage to hermetically seal traffic at sea (a huge if, when our president compares costly aircraft carriers to “horses and bayonets”), North Korea and its partners in crime can safely do business via air and land.
Beijing, you see, would rather ignore the behavior of Pyongyang’s erratic and ever-annoying regime — even as Kim tests a nuclear device mere 62 miles away from the Chinese border — than let it collapse. And this calculation seems to stand despite Beijing’s recent change, with Xi Jinping now Communist Party chairman.
So no amount of “international community” pressure is going to impress young Kim.
To start changing the equation, America must signal to Xi that the West can no longer live with it. Start by talking publicly and often about the need to rid the world of its most evil regime and to reunify the Korean peninsula. Mr. Kim, tear down this DMZ!
But for that, much more than mere “consultation with allies” will be needed.
Unless America shows bold leadership in the current crisis, President Obama’s “global zero” dreams of a nuclear-free world will (as Kerry so astutely observed) quickly turn into a nightmare world, filled with nuclear-empowered rogues.
Twitter: @bennyavni