Why we must break the Syria-North Korea WMD trade, and how we can

By Joshua Stanton

Last night, the U.N. Panel of Experts published its latest report. There is sufficient material in it for several posts, but some of the most alarming facts in it have to do with North Korea’s assistance to Syria with its ballistic missiles and chemical weapons, so that’s where I’ll begin.

That North Korea is helping Bashar Assad gas his own people isn’t news to readers of this blog. The Panel confirms that the trade includes not only conventional arms, but also technology transfers, spare parts, machinery, and servicing of ballistic missiles and chemical weapon production facilities.

Most of the WMD-related commerce is among North Korean and Syrian entities that are already designated by the U.N. Security Council — Syria’s Scientific Studies Research Council (SSRC) and North Korea’s KOMID and Academy of National Defense Sciences. The latter is a subsidiary of North Korea’s State Academy of Sciences (which isn’t designated but should be). Syria is also buying equipment from Glocom, the Malaysia-based front company for the U.N.-designated Reconnaissance General Bureau, which carries out most of North Korea’s terrorist attacks.

Syria, of course, denies everything. In some cases (see paragraphs 135 through 138), the shipments were brokered by North Korean agents based in China. China also denied everything and so far, refused to cooperate with the Panel’s investigation.

The bright spot in this generally bleak situation is that the Panel appears to be uncovering a wealth of new information about this trade and pursuing new leads. But information is useless unless we’re willing to act on it, and this information calls for as forceful a response as necessary to cut the technological and financial links between Pyongyang and Damascus, two shameless regimes that won’t be shamed into changing their behavior. The arms trade with Syria is clearly one of the largest sources of income that’s helping Pyongyang undermine sanctions designed to disarm it. It helps Pyongyang arm itself and denies us leverage to disarm it. And that trade is killing innocent people in Syria now.

Also, by not acting, we’re teaching Pyongyang that we’re all talk and that our threats of deterrence are empty. Lately, we’ve heard a lot of talk from academics who urge us to resign ourselves to accepting North Korea as a nuclear power and fall back on deterrence to protect our core interests. But in practice, few of these people ever quite advocate deterring Pyongyang from crossing whatever red line it’s crossing in any given week. Of all of the “red lines” that Pyongyang has leapt over in recent years — sinking the warships of our allies, cyberattacking the U.S., committing global bank fraud, murdering people with weapons of mass destruction in crowded airport terminals — supplying weapons of mass destruction for use in an active conflict to commit war crimes by killing large numbers of civilians, and to test the effects on those weapons on live human subjects, is surely the most alarming of all. It compels a strong response.

For these reasons, North Korea’s proliferation to Syria is dangerous enough to justify a multi-layered strategy that includes everything from quiet diplomacy to congressional action to the use of force. Given Assad’s desperation for arms and Kim’s desperation for cash, that’s probably what breaking this extremely dangerous relationship will require. Here are some options that are available to us, in escalating order of risk.

First, a consistent theme in the Panel’s report is that Kim is trying to evade sanctions by shifting to the euro economy. For example, some of the payments were laundered to U.N.-designated Tanchon Commercial Bank (of Nigel Cowie infamy) through European banks. Treasury must redouble its efforts to work with the European Central Bank to crack down on banks that fail to do due diligence before clearing those payments. (I’ll discuss the Panel’s findings on money laundering in a future post.) Banks that fail to respond to those efforts must be investigated for civil penalties or money laundering charges, although the enforcement of the Syria sanctions regulations may be a more lucrative strategy than the enforcement of North Korea sanctions regulations and executive orders (which may be too recent to capture most of the transactions that concern us).

Congress can also help to make the sanctions more effective. The North Korean scientists and technicians who visit Syria are using Syria’s national airline, which continues to operate despite being sanctioned. Here is a strong case to give the President legal authority to override the “incident to travel” exception in section 203(b)(4) of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, if only for those cases in which the person or entity sanctioned is directly involved in the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. That would hasten the bankruptcy of the Syrian and North Korean national airlines, both of which are facilitating WMD proliferation.

The resolutions also provide us more forceful options for breaking this trade. Here is a compelling case for invoking the board-search-sink authority under existing U.N. resolutions, against the ships that are carrying machine tools and WMD materiel to Tartous and Latakia. The legal conditions on that authority are that the ships or their owners must be designated, and that the flag state must consent. True, flag states can refuse consent, but we can publicly implicate and shame those that refuse. We can also consider other, more costly, legal options that would attack their ports and flags of convenience.

Finally, for those in the White House who seem eager to bomb something, I’m completely fine with the idea of bombing the offices, workshops, bases, or living quarters of the North Korean scientists and technicians working in WMD programs in Syria. Israel has bombed SSRC facilities before, and recently, U.S. forces went so far as to kill large numbers of Russian mercenaries who were advancing on a U.S. base in Syria. If these risks were deemed acceptable, it stands to reason that the targeting of North Korean scientists and technicians who are actively engaged in proliferation and the killing of innocent civilians is both well-justified and (given the denials of both Damascus and Pyongyang) unlikely to result in direct and immediate retaliation. No, the resolutions don’t authorize this, but hardly anyone complained when Israel bombed Al-Kibar.

Not only would killing these people slow the rate at which Assad can kill Syrian kids, it would attack a source of Pyongyang’s sanctions-busting income. It would destroy the knowledge Pyongyang needs to keep earning that income, and it would erase lessons North Korea’s scientists are learning right now about how to kill as many people as possible in Seoul or Pyongtaek. It’s difficult to imagine how removing these minds and their knowledge from this earth would be bad for humankind as a whole.