country’s bargaining position relative to the sanctioned nation. By implementing these sanctions, is the U.S. likely to be in a stronger position to achieve a better eventual settlement with North Korea? In weighing U.S. interests vis-à-vis North Korea, deterrence as well as denuclearization becomes a critical consideration. Thus, the utility of financial sanctions as a credible deterrent to Pyongyang’s further nuclear and missile development and proliferation, at least in the short term, is a necessary condition to achieving the ultimate goal of denuclearization.
In sum, these financial regulatory measures are the best way to present the Kim regime with a non-lethal-but-existential threat. On principle, too, they are the right thing to do. Such credible threats also have the best chance of achieving secondary or even tertiary objectives goals in any sanctions regime: protecting the integrity of the international system and symbolically enhancing the prestige of the sanctioning nation by making a moral statement. These measures also have the advantage of having the best chance of modifying the Kim regime’s brutal treatment of its own people, even if change is incremental and sporadic.
On the point of the North Korean regime’s other major pressure point: The three democracies in Northeast Asia should recognize the unfeasibility of operating in perpetuity a prison camp nation through extreme repression and information blockade. Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo should highlight the acute North Korean humanitarian crisis through drawing world public attention to the issue and increasing support of radio broadcasts and other information transmission efforts into North Korea. The Republic of Korea, as the sole legitimate representative government in the Korean peninsula, should take the leading role in this global human rights campaign. The U.S. and Japan also have a mandate to improve human rights in North Korea. They could and should cooperate with South Korea to sponsor—if necessary, through third parties—reports, publications, international conventions, transmissions and dissemination of information related to North Korea's multifarious nefarious human-rights abuses throughout their respective countries and the world. The more people in democratic societies think about the North Korean regime as a threat to humanity and less as an idiosyncratic abstraction, the more they will be resolved not to allow their leaders to resort to politically expedient measures with each future provocation by Pyongyang or defer Korean reunification.
South Korean President Park Geun Hye should make raising the North Korean human rights issue a high priority, even a centerpiece of her presidency. The Park administration should take the initiative and redouble efforts currently in place—which are woefully underfunded and undermanned—to transmit information into North Korea and facilitate North Korean defectors to resettle in the South. In particular, the Park administration should drastically increase support of radio broadcasts into North Korea. Nearly 50% of North Koreans who have defected to the South say that they came into contact with outside information primarily through South Korean TV shows on DVD and radio broadcasts, which served as an incentive to escape their nation. In this effort, the U.S. can provide South Korea with moral, financial, technical, and logistical support. Citizens in free societies would do well to remember that sending information into North Korea is not merely a defense of the principle of the freedom of information; it is an act that saves real
