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China-Japan-Koreas
U.N.S.C.R. 1718: Who Won, Who Lost
2006-10-16
H/T GIKorea
Long article with sources. Really explains just what Bolton did accomplish at the UN! Excepts below... it's an easy read so go forth

John Bolton: Winner. IÂ’d like to hear John BoltonÂ’s critics deny that, as with Resolution 1695, he has wrung far more effectiveness from the U.N. than we had come to expect. Not only should we confirm this man, pronto, we should clone him. Madeleine Albright never got results like these.

The United States: Winner. We got everything we really wanted here:

* help constricting Kim Jong IlÂ’s financial arteries
* the right to search his ships and planes.
* an embargo on the purchase and sale of heavy weapons and WMD components.
* something to hurt Kim Jong Il and his loyalists — the ban on luxury goods.
* the real capacity to investigate, monitor, and enforce all of the above, including pursing them to Iran.

The United Nations: Winner (With a Caveat). Every time we go back to the U.N., we reenforce the expectation that weÂ’ll go back next time. Bush made that decision, and by passing something fairly tough, the U.N. preserves this as a plausible policy option.

Japan: Big Winner. Japan seems to have had almost as much pull as one of the P-5. Key provisions, such as the compliance monitoring committee, appear to have been put in pursuant to its demand. Its navy will play a major role here, and under a cloak of U.N. legitimacy, which will make South KoreaÂ’s predictably silly comparisons to the Rape of Nanking seem even sillier. In fact, the South Koreans have only North Korea to blame for JapanÂ’s reemergence as a world power.

South Korea: Loser. It will now be required to “ensure” that its Kaesong and Kumgang funds aren’t being spent on WMD’s, which it can’t do unless Kim Jong Il opens Bureau 39’s books to South Korean auditors. Not a chance. And already, South Korea is trying to lie its way out of complying:

China: Big Loser. China has historically seen itself as the motherland of all surrounding states in Asia, and thatÂ’s particularly so for North Korea, which depends on China for its survival. Many analysts have already noted how North KoreaÂ’s missile and nuke tests have humiliated China, and the fact that so many of them have said it makes it all the more true.

So what will this cost the North Koreans? According to the CIA World Fact Book, North Korea exported $1.275 billion in 2004, and imported $2.819 billion worth, in the same year. In South Dakota, this is known as “eating like a sparrow and shitting like a goose.” It’s either unsustainable or inaccurate.

Breaking this down further, citing both Asher and Balbina Hwang (from 2003, using figures for 2001), who put North KoreaÂ’s total GNP at $15.7 billion in 2001. Remember, these are just estimates:

* Missile sales — approximately $560 million. Gone. Missiles are not easy things to hide.
* Legit exports — $650 milion. Scratch the substantial percentage of this that was with Japan ($200M?), and remember that the North Koreans won’t have legitimate trade to cover for the $300 million worth of dope they sell in Japan each year.
* Dope — probably $500 million. Asher’s figures are more current than Hwang’s. Asher doesn’t give a precise estimate for North Korea’s dope income, but if you add the estimate of $300 million it makes that way in Japan alone to the Pong Su seizure in Australia ($150M), you can conservatively estimate $400-$500 million per year. That’s not far off from Hwang’s estimate of $500 million to $1 billion. Expect that to be curtailed sharply.
* Cigarette smuggling — $500 to $700 million.
* No estimate is available for what North Korea earns through conflict diamond and ivory smuggling, but that will probably also fall.
* Remittances, mainly from Japan — $100 million. Gone.
* Counterfeiting — $15 million or so. This will be somewhat harder to stop, although most customs services have dogs that can smell currency. Usually, the movement of bulk cash is an indicator of money laundering, tax evasion, or the evasion of transaction reporting requirements.

If we find any of that on the ships we search, we certainly arenÂ’t going to just let it go. In a matter of days, the regime has lost several major sources of income. ItÂ’s hard to say exactly how much, but it could easily be half, and it could be more. Then, consider that North Korea also will have much more trouble recouping its earnings, because of growing financial restrictions on its bank accounts, which tend to be dual-use (legal and otherwise).

How will we enforce this in practice? Bolton is probably right that we would prefer to do most of the interdiction of North KoreaÂ’s traffic in port. Incidents like this seizure in a Taiwanese port will become more common. What if the North Koreans decide to go non-stop from Nampo to Bandar-e-Abbas? Then we can expect to see a series of naval skirmishes on the high seas.

The big crisis will come when the North Koreans try to fly non-stop from Pyongyang to Tehran. Would we really shoot down the airplane that might be carrying fissile plutonium, and might have had its cargo switched to schoolkids under cover of darkness or weather?

The ban on luxury items will certainly not mean a coup in the short term. The regime can weather this for a while. The gifts are probably a way of buying the loyalty of party members over the longer term, as they rise through the ranks. ItÂ’s unlikely that weÂ’ll see much tangible effect from it for a few years. Over the long haul, Kim Jong Il, like any other Machiavellian prince, would rather be loved than feared. This will make it much harder for him to be loved.
Posted by:Sherry

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