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  • Seoul's Supporting Role in Pyongyang's Sanctions-Busting Scheme
  • Sung-Yoon Lee (bio)

Sanctions sway with the political wind, and all year the political wind behind sanctions on the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been gathering into a storm—one that threatens to reverse course and derail the enforcement efforts built up over the past two years. For the Republic of Korea (ROK), the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore on June 12 provided a powerful wind to further clear the way for muffling existing sanctions on Pyongyang.

Sanctions, like domestic law, are not self-executing but require constant effort to enforce. For sanctions to bear the intended results, the political will, human resources, and disincentives to subverting enforcement all must be in place, continually, until the target nation's strategic calculations are profoundly affected by the persistent pressure. If the will dissipates—for example, following a sudden change in the diplomatic environment—enforcement can weaken. When sanctions implementation comes undone and third parties return to the business-as-usual mode of nonenforcement, or in some cases even actively subsidize the target nation, the toughest sanctions on the books will be bereft of meaning.

Moreover, in the wake of premature relaxation, sanctions can hardly be reactivated instantly. The resumption of enforcement takes much more time than the re-enforcement of domestic laws, as the process is largely determined by the degree and duration of international cooperation. In short, sanctions are as much dependent on the vagaries of the political wind as the currents at sea are on the natural wind. And South Korea, by virtue of its ethnic affinity and geographic proximity to the North, is a key factor in this meteorological game.

The sanctions on North Korea are precariously close to undergoing an atmospheric shift in the aftermath of the dramatic first-ever summit meeting between the leaders of the United States and the DPRK. The Singapore Summit was an optically gripping political drama, choreographed by North Korea, from which Kim Jong-un walked away [End Page 13] with an overwhelming victory.1 Having made no substantive concession of his own, he won both tangible concessions from President Donald Trump, such as the suspension of the annual combined military exercises between the United States and the ROK, and the less visible, albeit far greater, victory of buying time and money for the DPRK to perfect its own nuclear posture review. The United States' engagement in a drawn-out negotiation process that could end sanctions required considerable help in the production stage, ironically, from the nation that stands to lose the most in the event of Pyongyang's completion of its nuclear strategy—South Korea.2

This essay looks first at the history of sanctions against the DPRK and then at how South Korea has undermined its own and, by extension U.S., efforts at implementing sanctions. The essay concludes by examining the future tenacity of the current sanctions regime after the Trump-Kim summit in June 2018.

A Brief History of Sanctions on the DPRK

U.S. sanctions against North Korea only became meaningful both on paper and in practice with the passage of the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016. In fact, prior to this occasion, with the exception of the U.S. Treasury Department's designation of Banco Delta Asia as a primary money-laundering concern under Section 311 of the U.S. Patriot Act in September 2005, U.S. sanctions against North Korea, contrary to popular perception, had been erratic, defensive, and weak—in both degree and kind—compared with U.S. sanctions against many other states.3

Between the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 and the U.S. designation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism in 1988, the sum of U.S. economic sanctions on the country consisted of trade sanctions pursuant to the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act. However, such sanctions are notoriously ineffective, as the targeted state is almost always able to find alternative trading partners, including U.S. allies. The designation of the DPRK as a state sponsor of terrorism after North Korean agents planted a bomb on a South...

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