In a previous post I made the point that countries go nuclear because either (A) they’ll get money for abandoning the program or (B) they’ll get nuclear weapons. I argued that both of these outcomes reward (and thus create more of) the behavior of seeking nukes.

The only real way to avoid this, I further argued, was an invasion, which has its own slew of problems. The U.S. has already blown off this possibility.

One thing I didn’t pay much lip service to was economic sanctions, now in effect from Japan. The reasons for this were that such sanctions rarely work, and unlike North Korea’s free-trading neighbor to the south, Kim Jong-Il’s country has established little dependence on the outside world for economic stability. According to the CIA World Factbook, the country has “one of the world’s most centrally planned and isolated economies.”

Even in cases where a country operates on a free market (or at least high-trade) basis, sanctions need to be almost universally applied to do serious damage. One or two friendly countries can provide the regime with enough supplies to get by.

Also, sanctions rarely hurt the regime itself. Case in point Iraq, where thousands starved due to economic barriers while Saddam Hussein remained firmly in power. One thing North Korea does rely on the outside world for is aid for food — exploiting this dependence could just as likely lead to a repeat of Iraq as it could to a weakened regime.

That’s why I doubt that Japan’s economic sanctions (cutting off trade and banning North Korean ships from its ports) will do much to stop North Korea, and indeed North Korea is actually threatening additional tests if more sanctions are applied. Japan is North Korea’s trading partner for only 13 percent of the latter country’s exports and 5 percent of the imports, again according to the World Factbook.

Same goes for the U.S., as the CIA doesn’t even see fit to mention our trade in its profile of North Korea. And remember, trade in general isn’t a big part of North Korea’s “isolated” economy.

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