By sheer coincidence I happened to be reading through Ian Bremmer’s The J Curve when this story broke today. The U.S. is banning exports of some entertainment products to North Korea.

The move mirrors Bremmer’s assessment quite well: The U.S. tries to scold North Korea by isolating it. However, North Korea is a successful, stable communist state precisely because it is isolated. The more contact North Koreans have with the outside world, the more dissatisfied with their lives they’ll be, so ideas like this hurt the populace while entrenching the leader.

The special (and amusing) thing with this law, though, is that it particulary target products Kim Jong-Il wants:

“The U.S. government’s first-ever effort to use trade sanctions to personally aggravate a foreign president expressly targets items believed to be favored by Kim Jong Il or presented by him as gifts to the roughly 600 loyalist families who run the communist government.”Kim, who engineered a secret nuclear weapons program, has other options for obtaining the high-end consumer electronics and other items he wants.

“But the list of proposed luxury sanctions, obtained by The Associated Press, aims to make Kim’s swanky life harder: No more cognac, Rolex watches, cigarettes, artwork, expensive cars, Harley Davidson motorcycles or even personal watercraft, such as Jet Skis.”

I’m not quite sure the guy will trade his nuclear program for an iPod, and like I said, by Bremmer’s analysis this will only serve to further isolate a society that thrives on isolation. Not a smart move.

I argued that trade sanctions on North Korea are generally a bad idea here.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.