Why sanctions have entrenched conflict with North Korea, not resolved it |
Sanctions on North Korea have neither halted its nuclear program nor produced stability, while imposing heavy costs on civilians and regional security.
The sanctions imposed on North Korea by the US, Australia, New Zealand and others have already resulted in the deaths of thousands of North Korean civilians. Are they still worth continuing to force North Korea to comply with the demand to roll back its nuclear and ballistic weapons program? Has the West deployed the appropriate ends, ways and means to achieve this goal?
US Ambassador (ret) Chas Freeman told me this week:
“I consider policies of maximum pressure that created a nuclear threat to my country where there had been none to be definitive proof of the imbecility of those policies. Quite aside from that, human decency would not countenance the denial of medical assistance to Koreans in the north regardless of how vile the regime they must live under may be. I fear that similar policies directed at Iran will also drive it to build the nuclear weapons it has heretofore declined to build and to mount them on ICBMs aimed at its American tormentors.”
I recently listened to former UK diplomat Ian Proud interview Commodore (ret) Steve Jermy on_ The Peacemonger_. Jermy, who commanded the UK’s Fleet Air Arm, and is undoubtedly a master strategist, pointed out the abysmal performance of the West in recent years.
“We’ve seen failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and now the Russia- Ukraine war,” Jermy says.
Foremost, he says, what failed was the ability to think strategically and that prompted him to write _Strategy for Action: Using Force Wisely in the 21st Century_
“The evidence of effective strategic thinking is that operations........