Part Two of Two Parts (Please read Part One first)
Impose tougher U.N. sanctions
N.K. currently makes about five hundred million a year by supplying cheap labor to other nations. The U.S. is seeking tougher sanctions for all trade with N.K. to cut off the flow of revenue from international contracts. Some analysts believe that the U.S. should seek explicit sanctions on N.K. “slave” labor to deprive the N.K. regime of money that could be used for their weapons programs. It would be very difficult to impose sanctions tougher than those already imposed. In addition, many of the sanctions imposed have not been honored by other nations who trade with N.K. Having sanction in place that are not actually applied in practice would make the U.S. and the U.N. look weak. Increase failing sanctions may be difficult of not impossible.
Impose U.S.-coalition sanctions
There are calls for the U.S. to form a coalition of nations with the express purpose of applying harsher sanctions to N.K. that have been or could be approved by the U.N. Security Council. This could include issuing warrants for individuals and companies in China who are known to have broken sanctions by trading with N.K. The problem with this approach is that it could offend China to the point where we would lose their cooperation in trying to reign in N.K. weapons development. How would the U.S. respond to another nation issuing warrants for prominent U.S. businessmen?
Cut Access to U.S. banks
The U.S. could cut off access to U.S. banks for any company or individual anywhere in the world that does business with N.K. companies. This would cripple the N.K. weapons sales which represent forty percent of the N.K. economy. While this might seem to be an attractive move against N.K., the unanswered question is what sort of impact such a ban would have on world trade? Such an action by the U.S. against many international companies could result in a tsunami of lawsuits and diplomatic turbulence. Cutting off bank access for a company that only did a small part of their business with N.K. might cause economic and political turbulence that could cause problems for the U.S. far beyond the Korean Peninsula.
While some of the ideas on this list may be useful in our struggle with N.K., a great deal of study would be required to insure that the U.S. does not cause more problems than it is solving. As the severity of sanction mounts, international resistance to sanctions increases. There is a term from chess, "zugzwang" which means that a player has to make a more but no move that he can make will improve his position on the chessboard. We must be very careful in crafting our policy toward N.K. to insure that we do not make the international situation any worse than it already is.
Emblem of North Korea:
