North Korea Hotline: 1800-UNR-1718

As North Korea prepares for some sort of launch, the United States is determining possible responses.   In addition to discussions of Japanese and/or U.S. missile interception, the U.S. has brought up pursuing action under United Nations Resolution 1718, an action mentioned again yesterday in statements from North Korea envoy Stephen Bosworth.  There are a couple of important considerations to evaluate with regards to Resolution 1718: 1. What constitutes a violation of 1718?  North Korea continues to hold they are just preparing for launch of a satellite as opposed to a ballistic missile.  The State Department said Friday the distinction between what is launched is irrelevant:

[A] further missile test by the D.P.R.K. would violate UNSC Resolution 1718, even if the D.P.R.K. seeks to characterize it as a satellite launch. Ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles used to launch satellites derive from nearly identical and interchangeable technologies

Will the rest of the Security Council, however, agree to State's characterization should North Korea actually launch a satellite?  There is certainly a good degree of technological overlap between the two but at the same time a host of technologies could play a role in aiding a ballistic missile program.  Furthermore, it is difficult to argue that a state should not be allowed to simply launch a satellite. The U.S. may be hard pressed to get the four votes it needs if North Korea can sufficiently defend the launch as a satellite. 2. How effective is turning to 1718?  U.N. Resolution 1718 was adopted in the wake of North Korea's October 2006 test.  The primary purpose was to prevent the sale or transfer of various military items and luxury goods to North Korea.  It also gives U.N. states the option to search cargo coming in and out of North Korea.  While sanctions connote a strong economic force, particularly against an economy as weak as North Korea's, that is not automatically the case.  The military sanctions in 1718 are meant to prevent additional aid to North Korea's military ambitions which is important but begs the question of how much heat that actually puts on the regime?  Withholding military technology, particularly given North Korea's emphasis on self-sufficiency and ability to acquire a weapons program in the past couple decades, may not be enough to change the current regime's decisionmaking.  Michael Horowitz wrote an excellent article on this question a few years ago  that provides some interesting ideas for sanctions policy.  His argument is that the U.S., in concert with much-needed cooperation with other countries, must focus on limiting the hard currency the regime earns,

The trick with economic leverage is to take care to threaten the economic prosperity of Kim Jong Il and the regime elites but not bluntly damage the North Korean economy as a whole, harming its already undernourished population. To accomplish this, attempts to wield economic leverage should target North Korean means of acquiring hard currency. It will require establishing new multilateral initiatives focused on restricting North Korean profits from drug smuggling and counterfeit operations to complement existing, successful efforts to cut into North Korea's arms export profits, such as the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Cutting the flow of remittances-wages from relatives of North Koreans living abroad-to North Korea will also help target regime elites. The goal is to convince North Korea that its previous methods of generating hard currency are no longer sustainable, thus making the country's only option for economic survival the receipt of benefits if it irreversibly dismantles its nuclear program.

While the sanctions called for in 1718 could be considered as dealing with arms exports (although it still requires countries to actually decide to search ships and may be not an effective method to curb arms exports), the same cannot be said for the rest of the list of hard currency profit makers.  As the Obama administration seeks to define how it will approach North Korea, it should seek innovative strategies that go beyond the standard sanctions strategy of tit-for-tat penalties on reciprocal items seen in the language of many sections of UNR 1718 to find solutions that can truly put pressure on the regime without causing public backlash inside of North Korea.