North Korea’s inexorable march toward nuclear weapons has been treated as something akin to a malign meteorological phenomenon. Sure, it’s bad. But there’s also nothing we can do to stop it, the standard line has gone. After all, by the time Barack Obama took office, the “heavily isolated” country was already sanctioned to the hilt. Short of a sure-to-be-disastrous military strike, what could the prior administration have done?
Yet for the eight years that Barack Obama served as president—years in which America’s North Korea policy was described as “strategic patience,” i.e. waiting around and hoping that North Korea would unilaterally disarm—North Korea was in fact not sanctioned all that heavily. Indeed, it was only toward the end of Obama’s presidency that Pyongyang was sanctioned even as heavily as Moscow. (Sanctions aside, David Sanger has suggested in the New York Times that the Obama administration was semi-successful in undermining North Korea’s missile program through cyber sabotage. Experts I’ve spoken with in Seoul are highly dubious of this self-serving narrative.)
More proof of the Obama administration’s baleful negligence regarding the North Korean menace is that the Trump administration has been able to ratchet up sanctions significantly in just a few months. After all, were North Korea already maximally sanctioned, there would have been little for Trump to do.
So, the Trump administration has banned all but humanitarian and journalistic travel to North Korea (a position this magazine has advocated for years). The president also issued an executive order punishing companies that do business with the North Korean regime. The administration has also been successful in pushing the United Nations to sanction North Korea (albeit at a fairly gentle level): The Security Council voted to end North Korean textile exports, cap oil imports, and crack down on North Korean overseas labor, for example. Most significantly, the Wall Street Journal notes, thanks to the U.S.’s efforts, the global campaign to isolate North Korea is finally paying off. Many countries are now kicking out the gangsters known euphemistically as North Korean “diplomats,” a most welcome development.
None of this has stopped North Korea’s push for a nuclear-equipped ICBM that could hit the United States, of course. That isn’t shocking—it’s still early days. But what is shocking is that all of those actions mentioned above had not been taken years ago.
