North Korea Goes Nuclear—Now What?

:-)  This makes me chuckle.  Where has Mr. Evans been for the past two decades?  Not like anything he is proposing is really new.  But maybe he will be successful in getting people to pay attention to the problem.

V/R
Dave

North Korea Goes Nuclear—Now What?

By EVAN MOORE

February 20, 2013 RSS Feed Print

Evan Moore is a senior policy Analyst at the Foreign Policy Initiative.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/02/20/after-nuclear-test-obama-needs-a-new-north-korea-strategy

North Korea's nuclear test last week and its warnings of more tests dramatically illustrate that the past two decades of U.S. policy towards Pyongyang have failed. The Obama, Bush, and Clinton administrations all have used international diplomacy—and at times promises of food, fuel, and technological assistance—to persuade the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to abandon its nuclear program. However, with the brief exception of the 2007 freezing of Pyongyang's financial assets in Banco Delta Asia, Washington has not advanced truly serious forms of coercive pressure against the Hermit Kingdom. If the United States has any hope of reversing North Korea's expanding nuclear ambitions, this must change.

It's time for the Obama administration to craft a new North Korea strategy around a new objective. At the heart of this approach would be the recognition that the dynastic Kim dictatorship is not only the underlying cause of the ongoing nuclear crisis, but also unlikely to voluntarily denuclearize. Armed with this recognition, the United States would work with allies and partners to exert truly crippling diplomatic, financial, and moral pressure against Pyongyang, with the aim of fundamentally undermining the Kim regime.

[See a collection of political cartoons on North Korea.]

This new strategy would feature six main components:

• Aggressively target North Korea's financial assets and proliferation activities. The Democratic People's Republic's sale of conventional arms, ballistic missiles, and nuclear technology to rogue nations is a critical financial life-line. The United States should lead a coordinated multilateral campaign to stop these transfers, freeze the assets of North Korean elites in international banks, and strangle the the government's other illicit income generators so as to place a vise on the Kim regime's ability to support itself.

• Work to get refugees out and radios in.  North Korea's regime continues to exist, in part, because it has prevented its own people from learning about the outside world. Indeed, the free flow of information and people across the border is a direct threat to the Hermit Kingdom. It is therefore not surprising that the Kim regime recently instituted a crackdown on foreign-origin radios and cell phones within the country, and also reduced the flow of refugees escaping across the Chinese border by nearly half in 2012. The United States should make common cause with the suffering people of North Korea, and find ways to provide them with the means to receive foreign radio broadcasts, just as America did with the captive nations of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In addition, it should bring greater world attention to dissidents who have escaped North Korea, like Shin Dong-hyuk.

(Continued at the link below)
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/02/20/after-nuclear-test-obama-needs-a-new-north-korea-strategy