Andrea Berger Talks UNSC 2321

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

Have you considered doing your research this way? Meeting a North Korean diplomat in the transit lounge? You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and nonproliferation. I'm Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog, and a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in the foggy bit of California.

Andrea Berger 0:30

And I'm Andrea Berger. I'm the Deputy Director of the Proliferation and Nuclear Policy Team at the Royal United Services Institute in London. Hey, you're not Aaron. I'm not Aaron.

Jeffrey 0:42

Aaron is away dealing with some family issues. We're thinking about him and sending him some positive thoughts. Andrea, you're joining us from Wilton Park. That's sort of like Downton Abbey meets Dr. Strangelove.

Andrea 0:54

It is a little bit like Downton Abbey. It's a non-proliferation... Conference here that they host annually. But as the UK community knows it, we call it Nukes at Christmas.

Jeffrey 1:07

Yeah. Have you sampled the warden's scotches?

Andrea 1:10

Not yet. It's night one and the night is yet young, Jeff, so we've got some time.

Jeffrey 1:16

Oh, I see. So we finish the podcast and then you go scotch. Exactly. So I've invited Andrea on the show to discuss the new UN Security Council sanctions on North Korea. Well, actually, you kind of invited yourself on the show, but that's okay. I sort of did, yeah. We love our favorite Austro-Canadian. I have a question. Do you put maple syrup on schnitzel?

Andrea 1:39

Not yet, but Canada puts maple syrup on pretty much everything, so it's probably only a matter of time.

Jeffrey 1:47

Do you wish Molson made a sweet white wine?

Andrea 1:49

I don't wish Molson made anything, really, to be perfectly honest.

Jeffrey 1:54

That's where I draw the line. Do you regret the Von Trapp family never sang backup for Celine Dion? Oh my goodness. We had to haze you a little bit.

Andrea 2:07

That wasn't what I expected when I came on the podcast to talk about DPRK sanctions.

Jeffrey 2:13

Confess. I just had to have a little Von Trapp family joke. Okay. Let's talk about UN Security Council Resolution. I can never even remember the numbers anymore. 2321. 2321. Yeah. Another round of sanctions. Why? So the short answer is that...

Andrea 2:37

New nuclear tests give us the political opportunity to push through new sanctions at the UN, and the North Koreans gave us two nuclear tests this year, so two opportunities. But broader than that, there was just general frustration with some of the ways that the sanctions that were passed in March pursuant to the fourth nuclear test were either being implemented or evaded.

State Department in particular was pretty keen to plug some of the holes and try to get the Chinese especially to tighten up some of the language that was left pretty vague in the earlier resolution.

Jeffrey 3:18

Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things I think is interesting about this conversation is that we are constantly passing new sanctions resolutions. And I think that there is some We'll discuss it. I don't know if there's actually a sincere hope that it will make any difference. But, I mean, I do think that we, beyond the big headline of sanctions resolution, we almost never delve into What the new resolution actually adds.

And so I was wondering, since that is the thing that you are the world's great expert on, if you wanted to walk me through what you think the most important new things are that get added, and then whether or not we can discuss whether you think that that's actually going to have much of an impact. Keeping in mind that our theory is we try to end on a happy note,

Andrea 4:05

Okay.

Jeffrey 4:06

I don't think we're going to get there.

Andrea 4:08

We'll see. We'll see. The new resolution, basically, I'll put the provisions in kind of three categories, which are fairly general and imperfect, but bear with me. The first one is clarification provisions or provisions that are designed specifically to tweak measures that are already there. And those are kind of interesting to read, even though they're not the most exciting of the bunch for proliferation geeks.

They're interesting because in the process of making those clarifications, you get hints about the types of evasive activity that's been happening or the lack of implementation of earlier measures. So there's a reference at one point to the fact that states that the definition of transit in previous resolutions includes Airport transit lounges, irrespective of whether you clear customs, which one might take to mean that there's been dodgy North Korean diplomats doing things in the transit areas of international airports.

Jeffrey 5:11

Wait, wait, wait, wait. So they're like in the transit lounge? They're like sitting at the United Club in Beijing?

Andrea 5:23

Good question. I'm not sure, to be honest, but there's a specific... Provision for it. So it's usually not something that's done, you know, without a case that sits behind it. So I'm sure we'll hear more about it in due course.

Jeffrey 5:38

Yeah. No, I mean, I think that's really fascinating. So, I mean, the idea is that like you could take a flight someplace and you could go into the transit lounge and you could do business in that country, but not in that country because you haven't cleared customs and then you get back on your plane and go on your way or even go home.

Andrea 5:58

Yeah, or briefcase switch, a possibility too. So there's, you know, there's airports where arriving and departing passengers are still able to interact with each other. And, you know, those kind of airports, I guess, would create the possibility that there's a movie style briefcase switch between DPRK diplomats transiting the world. So, you know, there's still all of these kind of Really in the weeds possibilities that the North Koreans exploit to facilitate illicit activity.

Jeffrey 6:28

Have you considered doing your research this way? Being a North Korean diplomat in the transit lounge?

Andrea 6:35

I think that would probably be unwise, and I'm sure someone at OFAC would be giving me a call pretty quickly if I tried that.

Jeffrey 6:41

I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just think that's amazingly cool. I guess not least because there were the documents that showed that the British Intelligence Services pitched a North Korean diplomat who was working for COMID, selling missiles in Africa, and they pitched him in the transit area of... The airport in, I guess it was Johannesburg?

Andrea 7:07

Yeah, I think it was South Africa.

Jeffrey 7:08

Somewhere in South Africa, anyway. Yeah, so I guess it occurred to me you can do that, but I think that is really interesting that they've gone out of their way to clarify that that's covered. Sorry, I interrupted you. Exactly. No, no, no.

Andrea 7:21

So moral of the story, geeks still read the clarification provisions. They're interesting. The second category is... Well, I'll put coal in its own category because I think it deserves it. So really the centerpiece of the new resolution is a quantitative cap on member states importing coal from North Korea. And here we're really talking about China. So the previous resolution, 2270, said that thou shalt not import coal or iron ore from North Korea.

Unless you can confirm that it's definitely not connected to nuclear missile programs and it's strictly for livelihood purposes. So this is the famous livelihood exemption loophole, whatever you want to call it, that everyone's talking about. And what it basically meant is that all the Chinese had to do to purport that they were in compliance with the provision was get importing companies involved.

To just sign a little declaration saying, we really swear that this is just for livelihood purposes, and whose livelihood was never mentioned. So major grievance between Washington and Beijing in the period between March and last week when the new resolution was passed.

Jeffrey 8:45

I have a serious question about that.

Andrea 8:47

Yeah.

Jeffrey 8:49

Almost immediately, you pointed out that the livelihood provision was a really significant exception, and that It seemed, I mean, I guess you didn't, you weren't, you were careful in how you said it. I'm always less careful. But, you know, reading your comments when that resolution came out, it seemed clear to me that this was going to be a huge problem.

And, you know, like, lo and behold, it's a huge problem. And now they've come back and clarified it to close it. That's right. Like, did they know that it was going to be a problem and they just couldn't get there? Or, you know, were they like not listening and shooting themselves in the foot and now they're having to come back and fix it?

Andrea 9:33

I have no idea, to be honest. I would love to be able to answer that question because at the time it seemed just such an obvious thing. And maybe it's my pessimism, but often when I read these resolutions, I read them either pretending to be A Chinese official who's patently uninterested in implementing most of the stuff or a North Korean trying to evade it.

And you're sitting there with like a cigarette and a little couple of like by Joe or something that, that would in actor methodology, that might be one way to approach it. But if you work enough on, on nonproliferation, you don't even need to go there.

Jeffrey 10:09

Oh, you can channel it without the props.

Andrea 10:11

Yeah, exactly. So yeah. You know, and I, I, I take the same kind of lens on the new coal provision. So the new coal provision says you're only allowed to import up to 7.5 million tons of North Korean coal annually. And they put a value cap on that as well at around 400 million U.S. dollars. So that's your limit.

Now, if you're China, that's about, in terms of the volume of coal, that's give or take a 50% cut. So, on paper, massive. Now, they still kept the livelihood language in, saying that basically everything within that cap that you import, you've still got to declare it's not connected to prohibited programs and it's only for livelihood purposes of the North Korean people.

So, That's really interesting in and of itself, because on paper, China has agreed to cut quite substantially, both in terms of volume and in terms of the value and therefore the revenue that the North Koreans could earn. So taking a skeptical lens to this, you might suggest that this suggests a greater appetite than the Chinese actually have for sanctions implementation.

First of all, I think it's worth noting that this is basically the Iran playbook, where the US said the way that we're going to try to squeeze the Iranians is by closing some of its foreign markets for its major export commodity. In the case of Iran, that was energy products. This is them trying to apply the same kind of approach, though with slightly different technical avenues, on North Korea's primary export commodity.

And the two are really different situations, not least because talking countries out of buying oil is easier because there's, you know, in the case of Iran, there was only about 10 buyers, if you will, and it was a state level conversation. Now we've got, you know, 500 plus companies in the border areas trading North Korean coal and it's not a state directed activity.

So from an implementation perspective, China, if it wanted to enforce this, would have to do a lot. And I'm not convinced that Chinese thinking on North Korea has really changed enough to make them prepared to do that. Again, this is just me being skeptical, but.

Jeffrey 13:00

No, I'm interested in the differences because, I mean, in the case of Iran, you know, there was the elaborate arrangement by which Iran could sell the oil, but the funds, right, had to go into restricted accounts. And so Iran had access to those funds, but only for certain purposes. Right. While in our American political debate, which is always stupid, that got presented as like we were giving the money back to Iran.

But in fact, Iran always had the money. It's just there were restrictions on how they could use it. But it doesn't seem like they've done something similar here. It seems like they're trying to instead go with a numerical cap, which strikes me as being a lot harder to monitor and enforce. I mean, it's one thing to say, sure, you can trade as much as you want, but the money needs to go into this account.

That's fairly straightforward to deal with, whereas otherwise, if you're trying a numerical cap, it seems like you're trying to count cars of coal coming across the border, which I think is a nightmare. Do you think it's a nightmare?

Andrea 14:02

I think it's a nightmare. In the Iranian case, they did try to basically get bilateral agreements with individual countries to reduce by a certain approximate percentage. So in the Chinese case, I think the Chinese had agreed to about a 25% reduction in imports of Iranian crude oil. So that's a 25% case in the case of Iran, which I would argue the Chinese care far less about.

And here we're thinking we're going to get away with 50% reduction in coal imports from a country that China does actually quite care a lot about in terms of the situation and its objection to sanctions. As having a role in it.

Jeffrey 14:46

Are there other interesting provisions that we should talk about before I ask you the probably really depressing question about whether you think this will make one bit of difference?

Andrea 14:58

Sure. So I think the other interesting provisions are kind of the bundle that's new measures, but... Is this the statues? So there's a restriction on buying North Korean statues. I love it! And this comes part and parcel with the fact that the U.S. has just unilaterally designated the Mansudae Overseas Group, which is the conglomerate, basically, that does those statue exports and monument building.

Jeffrey 15:29

So I think you probably need to explain this for people who don't follow North Korea full-time, because I don't think... Normal people have any idea about the scale of statue building in North Korea, nor do they understand how popular North Korean statue building is in other countries that well, I, you know, that's right. Yeah. So once one for outside of Trump, it's distinctly possible.

So the North Koreans have his hand raised in the air and maybe his, his coat fluttering a little bit.

Andrea 16:05

I think they could do a really good stylized hair actually. But yeah, the North Koreans have been pretty active statue builders and exporters as a source of foreign revenue. And so Africa is a really popular destination for North Korean statues. And it's, you know, it's, State customers. You've got building of revolutionary monuments in places like Senegal. I saw the one in Namibia, which was an utterly bizarre experience.

Zimbabwe, Uganda.

Jeffrey 16:42

Were you in Namibia?

Andrea 16:44

Yeah. The North Korean monument that they built there in 2006 was Completely, completely empty, except for hundreds of baboons that were just crawling all over these North Korean statues is the weirdest experience I did. Yeah, yeah. can we put this up on the blog? You sure can. I'll send it over. We'll put it up on the... maybe we'll put it up on the Slack channel too. but yeah, so, so they have earned revenue through statue building..

I would argue it's probably not that much anymore and has been declining because what Mansa Day Overseas has really gotten good at doing is getting contracts together with business partners in Africa, Southeast Asia for like big construction projects, housing complexes, et cetera, in like the Gambia and Angola and you name it. Yeah. And that, I suspect, for Mensa Day is probably a bigger earner than statues these days.

Jeffrey 17:43

So these are like North Korean guest workers who go hang out in Africa.

Andrea 17:47

That's right. So that's a feature of the new resolution, the ban on statue imports from North Korea. They've got bans as well on things like silver and copper. There's some more specific restrictions on transit. So states are now meant to not Give a flag to any vessel that's under controlled by the North Koreans. So there's this kind of package of other measures that got thrown in there, but coal is really the centerpiece.

Now, I think it's worth talking about North Korean evasion briefly, because that comes to your earlier question about whether or not this is all gonna make a difference. And I think the unfortunate thing is The North Koreans are already at the point where their overseas networks, licit and illicit, are so complex and their evasive capabilities so sophisticated that they're going to be able to get around a lot of this stuff quite quickly, if not are already doing it.

So as an example, one of the measures says North Korean diplomats stationed abroad are not going to be able to have more than one bank account. Okay. Sounds reasonable on paper, but if I'm a North Korean sitting in Pretoria and I really badly want multiple bank accounts, I can do one of the following. I can set up a company, get some local nationals to be the directors on paper, or I can put the account under my wife's name.

Or I can simply open one account with Bank A in South Africa and another account with Bank B in Namibia. And those banks are never going to talk to each other. And chances are the Namibian and South African financial intelligence units won't talk to each other ever. So basically, in order to check and try to enforce this pretty expansive resolution, It's going to be a massive monitoring task.

And some of that burden has been shifted to the UN. The poor guys at the panel of experts are going to have their hands absolutely full with like pricing North Korean coal while also checking ballistic missile sensitive shipments and ensuring that the North Koreans aren't selling statues. But it's also going to be a US monitoring task. Burden to a large extent, because really, you are the only country that has these sort of resources.

So it will be an interesting one to watch.

Jeffrey 20:37

You don't need to worry about that. We're going to be winning so much, you're going to be tired of how much we win. It's going to be tremendous.

Andrea 20:45

I suspect Donald Trump's not going to take that much interest in North Korean statue building.

Jeffrey 20:49

Oh, no, he's going to have Kim Jong-un over for hamburgers. You didn't see this? Hamburgers. He's not going to do a state dinner. Kim is welcome to come to the United States, he said. He won't go there. And if Kim comes, he won't get a state dinner like China does and other countries, he said, were ripping us off.

It's going to be in a conference room, and they're going to serve them hamburgers. By the way, I'm not making any of that up. That is exactly what he said. We'll see.

Andrea 21:13

I know. So, yeah, we've got an interesting time going ahead.

Jeffrey 21:19

But I know your next book is going to be, you know, Burger. I mean, your name is Burger. It's going to be, you know, Burger on the success of hamburger diplomacy.

Andrea 21:30

My title is already written for me. There you go.

Jeffrey 21:33

Yeah, there you go. Sorry. Things are a little dark over here on this side of the pond right now.

Andrea 21:41

You've got to find humor where it exists.

Jeffrey 21:43

Yeah. So just to close out the sanctions discussion, though, you mentioned there were also some sanctions on Air Koryo. Is that right?

Andrea 21:51

Yeah, the US announced, so Treasury announced unilateral sanctions. That's right. So this is not at the UN level. I suspect there was probably an attempt to get Air Koryo designated at the UN level, and the Chinese probably said, you've got to be kidding. But Treasury did it at At the U S level. And we've got designations now on air choreo.

So the North Korean national airline on man today overseas, that, that group of companies that, that does monument and, you know, apartment building, et cetera.

Jeffrey 22:28

So this is, if you're hoping to move your air choreo frequent flyer miles over to like your, your star Alliance account, you're no chance, right?

Andrea 22:36

Yeah, that's probably unlikely. It might create some challenges for diplomats, basically, who want to cooperate with US sanctions and who do use Air Koryo. I mean, Air Koryo was one of the more frequent routes in and out of DPRK. So if you didn't want to rely on Air China's less frequent traffic from Beijing to Pyongyang, you could go on the world's only one-star airline.

Jeffrey 23:06

But that's a really interesting question. So if you're like a US citizen in China who plans to do one of these North Korea tours because you think that it's a good idea to run the risk of being kidnapped and sent to a forced labor camp, you can't take Air Koryo in. Is that right? Or it's just complex?

Andrea 23:29

As far as I can tell, that's right. As a US national bound by that law, You shouldn't be engaging with a designated entity. But maybe we'll have an Office of Foreign Assets Control advisory on this point yet when the first tourist tries their luck.

Jeffrey 23:49

Interesting to note, some of the tourism companies, like I think Uri Tours, are claiming that this will not affect U.S. tourists and that they can. Not to say that that's actually correct, but the tourism companies are claiming this isn't going to have an effect. Scott, are you thinking about defecting?

Andrea 24:08

I think it's interesting.

Jeffrey 24:10

I mean, I've flown air choreo before. I was sad if I can't get another one of their classic hand bow bows while going over the Amnok River. Why is it that you people live such exciting lives? Looking at North Korean statues in Namibia and flying air choreo? Come on. Okay. Different type of excitement. Right, well, I have the beach and dolphins.

Okay, so... The big question is, I mean, it seems like we've got an elaboration of the existing U.N. sanctions regime plus these new sets of sanctions that the U.S. is putting on. And, you know, I know the answer to this question, but do you think this makes any difference at all? And I suspect that you will say no, but maybe we can then have a conversation about why we're doing this.

Because I was just in Japan and I had a fascinating interaction about this. But I'm interested in your views.

Andrea 25:08

So I think this partly comes down to a discussion of the objective of sanctions. Because at a high level, we say that sanctions are to compel the North Koreans to come back to the negotiating table to discuss denuclearization. And if that's your metric, then I doubt very much that This is going to help in that effort primarily because I also doubt that China is gonna be willing to take the ax to its imports of North Korea's major export commodity, et cetera.

But in terms of some of the finer points, like giving countries around the world who want to be able to participate in an interdiction or who want to take a cash, Cash a suitcase off a North Korean diplomat but can't get their national law to facilitate basically that action, this will help some of that. Now, those are the individual cases, but they're important.

If we're going to try to stop, as a last resort, North Korea being able to ship things to Syria and parts of Africa and whatnot, we've got to be able to have the active and real-time cooperation of countries along the route. So this will help, I think, in that more limited objective of basically stopping things that are flowing that shouldn't flow.

Jeffrey 26:45

Well, I'm sorry to stay at 10,000 feet, but I just had this really frustrating set of interactions in Japan that has left me sour on the role that sanctions play, which is not the role that they play in terms of providing legal authority to stop illicit activity, because that part's fine, right? Like, it is great that they have clarified that you can't do the briefcase switch in the transit lounge, and if you find the guy with the briefcase, then you should be able to take the briefcase.

But, you know, so I was in Japan and we had these discussions with Japanese officials. And the big push I was making was how quickly North Korea is moving toward a deployed nuclear force. You know, we spent a lot of time looking at satellite photographs of facilities. So we can see them recapitalizing the infrastructure to produce missiles and nuclear weapons.

Yeah. And we can see the uptick in testing. And I think something that we haven't really talked about on the podcast but that's important is the type of testing the North Koreans have done has changed. They've gone from testing missiles to develop them to having the units that operate the missiles test them. So it's more like unit training, right, which is a sign that we're moving toward a deployed force.

And so I was making the point to these Japanese officials that, like, You don't have a lot of time. If you do nothing, and it may be that there is nothing you can do, but you're going to move into this point where there are nuclear weapons deployed in the field for use with missiles that can hit you, married to war plans that involve hitting you relatively early.

And those will probably be followed by missiles that can hit us, and those will probably be followed by nuclear weapons that are larger in yield, including, I think, eventually thermonuclear weapons. And I kind of got this reaction of like, well, You know, this is not the time to negotiate. This is the time to be tough. And, you know, we have to put these sanctions in place and we have to give them time to work.

And it almost seemed like sanctions were a way of not doing anything, right? It's like sanctions played the role of giving the diplomat something to say so that the diplomat didn't have to admit that he didn't have the slightest idea what to do. And I found that really frustrating. But I don't know, maybe I'm too cynical and negative about it.

Andrea 29:04

No, I think that's a really fair view, actually. And you're not alone in having that view of the political or bureaucratic role that sanctions are playing right now. I agree with that. And the difficulty that I see is really twofold. That, you know, at a broader level, a strategic patients policy only makes sense in whatever label you use.

You put on it, it only makes sense if time is, if you will, going to be with you, if it's going to be on your side. And I just, I don't think that's the case with the pace of North Korean technical developments, nor with the type of political situation that we have in North Korea. But the other issue as well is that in terms of actually Looking at the effectiveness of sanctions in potentially getting you to a negotiating position with North Korea.

You can only say that sanctions are for effecting negotiations if there's a negotiating table for the North Koreans to come back to. And I think that's why you're having so many more voices and louder voices now calling for some kind of openness to engage with the North Koreans On crisis management dialogue or the prospect of a freeze and doing so without the traditional preconditions that we've talked about attaching to that engagement activity.

Jeffrey 30:41

Well, that's the painful question that I want to push on because I think one of the reasons I'm so pessimistic about the situation is that I think our problem is that It's not merely that we want denuclearization as an objective and that that's hard to get. It's that I suspect there's approximately zero chance that in the near or medium term the North Koreans are interested in that outcome.

And so any deal we get, a little bit like the Iran deal, we'll have to admit that we had a better deal in the past and we blew it. And whatever deal we get now is not going to be as good as the agreed framework. And so it's not merely an issue of settling for something that's not as good as we could have had.

It's going to implicitly indict the people who have been running things for the past 20 years. I suspect that will be really hard to swallow. Am I too pessimistic?

Andrea 31:50

It's difficult to say because at the same time, there's also I think the political change in North Korea is important and the fact that Kim Jong-un is running the show also changes from the North Korean side what the nature of the conversation would be because here's a guy who's really not had the chance to build his legitimacy before he took leadership of the country and in order to build that legitimacy now while he is in power has really rested on the nuclear and missile programs and Demonstrating success in those programs.

So if you have prohibited programs in North Korea that are such an integral part, not only of the domestic political narrative generally, but of his personal legitimacy specifically, how do you talk about unwinding that? There's a whole lot of other issues that get wrapped up in that. So it's not necessarily that Any kind of move towards a lesser objective in negotiations would be indicting of previous administrations on the US side.

I think the fact of the matter is we've had change all around this picture.

Jeffrey 33:11

Yeah, I mean, I think that that's... I was uncharacteristically trying not to be super blunt. Yeah, like, I don't think there's any chance they give up the bomb. And I think it's because it is, as you say, completely central to the narrative that Kim Jong-un has told. And that means that any deal we strike with them is going to be really, really disappointing because they're just not, I think, going to give up.

I mean, the way I would say it is this. In the past, they've always been willing to give up things they haven't done yet. They're willing to not do things in exchange for promises of better relations, but we've had not great luck getting them to give things up. And so the more stuff they do, the more stuff we have to choose to live with.

And so it just it seems to me that we're in this impossible position where we've told ourselves the story that we're like holding out for a good deal. But in fact, every day the available deal gets worse. Did you see the country I saw? It was this North Korean propaganda movie. Actually, it's for North Korean propaganda movies.

Andrea 34:18

I saw clips of it, I think, because if I remember correctly, you and your colleagues had done a piece on it at the time. Yeah.

Jeffrey 34:26

It's fascinating. Right. I mean, it it's this four part sequel to this movie from the mid 80s. And it is about it's about a Japanese international relations professor, which is like the perfect setup for these incredibly turgid North Korean lectures. Right. Because she's literally lecturing her students, except for you in the audience are getting the lecture on like how great North Korea is.

But like the central theme of the movie is that it's North Korea's missile and nuclear tests that force Bill Clinton to come to North Korea and give the government the legitimacy that it deserves. Right. They sort of leave out the fact that they were to, you know, kidnap journalists. That's right. Yeah. And it just – it seems to me it's so impossible to imagine that having made that argument, right, and been really vocal that the reason that Saddam and Gaddafi went down was that they gave up their nuclear weapons.

I just – I can't see us getting to denuclearization, which I think is – it puts us in this position where, like, we're not going to get much of a deal. And I just don't think – and we should talk about this. I mean – It's that bigger point you made. While individual sanctions might be useful for stopping certain activities, it's unclear to me that sanctions are going to generate the kind of pressure that would change a calculation like that.

And in fact, I am prepared to argue that sanctions actually strengthen regimes like this, and it's based entirely on Albert Camus' The Plague.

Andrea 36:02

Continue.

Jeffrey 36:05

I knew I would get silenced. You're half Canadian. You must have took French?

Andrea 36:15

We call it cereal box French. So we get enough in school to read the back of bilingual cereal boxes. So don't hold me too much to that.

Jeffrey 36:24

OK, well, you know, there is a French author, Albert Camus. He's somewhat famous. I'm teasing. I know I'm just you can't see me smiling as I joke. OK, so in the book, The Plague, a.k.a. La Peste. There's a character called Kotard. And he is a miserable and unhappy person prior to the plague. And when the plague comes, his life changes for the better.

Everybody around him is miserable and unhappy and wants the plague to end. But he's... A winner, right? Like, I think he gets involved, if I remember this, he sells contraband cigarettes and liquor, he becomes easygoing, you know, and there's this whole discussion that all of these demons he had that plagued him in the days before the plague don't seem so bad to him now that everyone else is suffering equally, right?

And so he's a winner, and he regrets the end of the plague. And I think just like he exists in that book, I suspect that there are all kinds of people in North Korea who get rich off the sanctions, right? Because they're the people who smuggle and they're the people who can use force to get their way.

And so in a weird way, right, sanctions empower those people just like Prohibition empowered the mafia. You know, the mafia was heartbroken when Prohibition hit. And so I suspect... Sanctions are really valuable at first because they are threatening to destroy legitimate businesses, and those people have an incentive to try to prevent their businesses from being destroyed. But if you wait long enough and you end up with a situation like North Korea, all those businesses have been destroyed, and so you're no longer punishing a group of people who can act politically in the way, say, they did in Iran, where you elect Hassan Rouhani on a campaign of getting sanctions relief.

In North Korea... I think the people you're punishing are essentially powerless, and the people who are in power have adjusted to those sanctions and, in fact, live on them. So I don't think the people who control the coal and the iron trade, I don't think they want a North Korean free market.

Andrea 38:49

Yeah, it's interesting as well, because I think one of the other aspects are that sanctions... In terms of their effect on North Koreans that are sitting outside of North Korea and are conducting illicit and illicit trade on behalf of the country, have, as a consequence of sanctions, really started to cooperate more with local nationals. So this is where the kind of driving underground effect comes into play.

And those local nationals who act as facilitators are in part brought Brought on to this arrangement because the North Koreans can't operate as North Korea when they're abroad. So, you know, there's not only North Koreans potentially that are profiting off of the existence of sanctions, but there's definitely non-North Koreans who are profiting. So there's that aspect to it, too.

And, you know, that creates a compliance and due diligence challenge more generally for sanctions. But we'll leave that to another day.

Jeffrey 39:47

Okay, one last question. I think we have to address this because I hear this all the time in the United States. I think... In our domestic political debates here, as I've just said, people don't know what to do. And so one thing they latch on to are sanctions because it's something to say. The other thing people say is they imagine that there is some magic Chinese wand that can be waved.

And if only we convince the Chinese to wave it hard enough, the North Korea problem will go away.

Andrea 40:22

Yeah, it's a popular narrative, a really popular one.

Jeffrey 40:25

You know a lot about China and not just knowing where the best Chinese restaurants are in London. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see what's actually feasible with China that doesn't fall into this kind of trap of imagining that there are a magic wand or a unicorn or some incantation that can fix our problem.

Andrea 40:52

Yeah, so the core of it, I think, is that even with all the North Korean activity, the developments in the threat, at the end of the day, we still don't seem to really have a solid basis of agreement with China on what the directness of the threat is to everyone. So you've probably heard this too, but when you talk to Chinese officials or experts sometimes in You say, oh, well, North Korea is a really big concern for us.

They'll say, oh, yes, we're concerned about North Korea, too, because when they conduct nuclear testing in the border areas, there's a risk of an earthquake or material could leak from a facility. And that's just a totally different type of threat discussion than we have with North Korea. But broader than that, I also haven't seen a change in Chinese thinking about the merits of economic interdependency With its neighbors, and particularly in terms of creating a stable, comparatively stable and predictable environment.

You know, you look at their one belt run road strategy, and the entire idea is that when you weave relations in economic terms, you're more likely to be able to predict the behavior around you, or they're less likely to go off on a tilt. And I think the Chinese still think the same way about North Korea and sanctions fit into that thinking for them.

I don't know if you'd agree.

Jeffrey 42:25

No, I actually do. And in fact, I think this is kind of one of the big differences I notice in interactions between Americans and Chinese. I mean, we were just... Slightly making fun of people for treating sanctions as a kind of cure-all, right? Yeah. But it is actually an article of faith in the United States that sanctions have this amazing power.

And, you know, we talk about why. I mean, I think sometimes there's just a blatant kind of, you know, sanctions is something Congress can do. Congress wants to be seen as doing something, so they put some sanctions on. Right. But I think the idea that it's an article of faith, which is something that's not truly examined or something that's based on evidence, opens us up to the possibility that I actually think in China, the article of faith is the opposite.

In China, the article of faith is that sanctions don't work. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think it's impossible to have this argument because you're arguing with someone about Implementing a policy that I think they quite sincerely believe is pointless.

Andrea 43:34

That's totally correct. And not only that, we're asking them to basically take on an enormous burden. You think about the fact that they're going to have to communicate potentially with hundreds of individual trading companies in the border area to affect any of the things they've agreed to at the UN. And those are the Communities as well that they really don't want to disturb.

Those are the gateways to the neighborhood policy. Those are the internal communities that China is always concerned about. And really taking aim at their business is something I can't see Beijing having a really strong appetite for, no matter the level of the North Korean threat.

Jeffrey 44:24

Well, and I think particularly if they think that the consequence of enforcing the sanctions is actually to reduce their ability to control the North Koreans. I mean, to me, that's such an interesting difference. And I guess, you know, Americans forget that I think the North Koreans or the Chinese rather felt that they had. A pretty decent amount of influence in North Korea in the person of Jang Song-taek, which was an avenue of influence that they discovered could be cut off quite quickly.

Andrea 44:56

That's exactly it. And you touch on an interesting point because the whole purpose of sanctions is that you Take the things that are valuable to the target and you remove it and that's your lever. But the thing is, you can only really pull that lever once. And, you know, we're talking about telling China to pull it now on all these fronts when it seems to be unprepared to do that for so many reasons.

Jeffrey 45:25

So not having Aaron here means we did not end on a happy note. He is dogged in trying to get us there. Hey, Andrea, thank you for joining me on the podcast. Thank you. This has been great. And thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, please consider leaving us a review on iTunes. And if you really like the podcast, please consider making a donation through Patreon.

Scott, do you want to say anything about our subscriber benefits? Yeah, for people who support the Arms Control Wong podcast via Patreon at the $3 or more tier, you get access to our Slack channel where we hang out and share documents, declassified documents, imagery of systems we're talking about and other sort of Media about recent episodes. It's a growing community and is a lot of fun, and we're about to introduce a small art project that we'll be putting pictures up of soon. I don't want to reveal it too early. that dead very dedicated donors can get access to standing. Hey, thanks, Scott. Thanks, Andrea. And thank you.