Six days after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test, and just hours before President Obama would address the Congress for his final State of the Union speech, the House of Representatives passed the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act (NKSEA) by a vote of 418-2. (Full disclosure: I worked with Foreign Affairs Committee staff to draft the legislation.)
If the NKSEA becomes law, it will greatly strengthen our relatively weak sanctions on North Korea and legislate a return to the only strategy that has ever worked against it — cutting off its access to the global financial system, and stranding its billions of dollars in regime-sustaining slush funds in Chinese and European banks. It would require the Treasury Department to follow and block the money that funds the army, secret police, and elites that keep Kim Jong-un in power; and pays for his luxury cars, ski resorts, dolphin aquariums, waterparks, and copious diet, while the vast majority of his subjects go hungry. Critically, it would also impose secondary sanctions on third-country banks that launder the proceeds of its illicit activities, arms deals, and forced labor, and help sustain its proliferation and human rights abuses.
Senate leaders are now working to merge two versions of the House bill into a bipartisan compromise, which Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expects the Senate to act on soon. In the eleventh hour of his presidency, with his diplomatic efforts stalled, the president has little reason to veto the bill.
The overwhelmingly bipartisan result was the fruit of more than two years of tough negotiation and patient coalition-building by Ed Royce, the California Republican who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee. In the end, Nancy Pelosi directed House Democrats to vote for the bill. (The two dissenting votes came from Justin Amash and Thomas Massie, Republican “non-interventionists” in the Ron Paul mold.) Because President Obama cannot lift legislative sanctions unilaterally, the NKSEA would put strict conditions on any deal with Iran’s main supplier of missile technology, and with Syria’s main supplier of nuclear and chemical weapons technology, for years to come. And because Congress’s rejection of the president’s “strategic patience” was so broad, it cannot be dismissed as party-line posturing.
For years, Royce had seethed at the gullible diplomacy that traded billions of dollars in aid for Pyongyang’s broken promises. So did Korean-American voters in Royce’s Orange County district, who worried about Pyongyang’s growing threat to their ancestral homeland, and its horrific atrocities against their ethnic brethren. Unlike the State Department, Royce could see the incoherence of simultaneously subsidizing and sanctioning the same target at the same time. As the son of a soldier who witnessed the liberation of Dachau, he objected to sidelining North Korea’s crimes against humanity, including its own ghastly concentration camps, from the State Department’s diplomatic agenda. He objected just as strenuously when Republicans did it, calling the policy “a bipartisan failure.” At a 2007 hearing, Royce was among the most outspoken dissenters when the Bush Administration lifted most U.S. sanctions against North Korea to get an agreement strikingly similar to the one President Clinton had signed in 1994, and which Bush had denounced and walked away from in his first term, amid evidence that North Korea was cheating on the deal.
Royce rightly saw an opportunity to unite security hawks from both parties who were concerned about North Korea’s proliferation and support for terrorism, and conservatives and liberals who were equally incensed about its crimes against humanity. The Democratic members and staff who joined this effort were often surprisingly tough in their negotiations with the State Department, and the relative bipartisan comity in the Foreign Affairs Committee improved its efficiency in producing tough legislation. And let no one say that Royce, a strong opponent of the President’s Iran agreement, did so by sacrificing the toughness of his rhetoric, his principles, or his legislation.
After years of appeasement, billions of dollars in aid, broken agreed frameworks, nuclear tests, and unmourned atrocities, Ed Royce led a rebellion by a united House of Representatives — I repeat, a united House of Representatives — against ten years of soft-line North Korea policies, driven from the State Department’s East Asia Bureau, that had spanned two presidencies of both parties.
There was no special wizardry behind this, other than the competent practice of old-fashioned political coalition-building. Tended carefully, that coalition could last for years to come, and make the difference between an ephemeral and symbolic victory, and a decisive and enduring one. That is how politics is done right.
Joshua Stanton blogs at www.freekorea.us. He has advised the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the drafting of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, and is the author of “Arsenal of Terror: North Korea, State Sponsor of Terrorism.” The views expressed are his own.
