North Korea sanctions

This is why sanctions are a bad idea:

After hearing complaints from factory managers and state economic planners, the scholar said any potential reform of the hyper-socialist economy in North Korea was being hamstrung by a range of sanctions by the United Nations, the United States and other nations. Most of the sanctions have been imposed over the North’s refusal to abandon its nuclear programs.

The foreigner living in Pyongyang also saw the bark and the bite of sanctions among North Koreans.

“Sanctions have not changed behaviors of the elite, nor have they stopped the flow of luxury goods or cars to Pyongyang,” the foreigner said. “But for ordinary people, they have so very little to work with — tools, running water, medicines in clinics. Imports of any kind are just absent.”

The foreigner said political isolation had been effective in shutting off North Koreans to most international commerce, from material goods to cultural influences to political ideas.

“In some ways,” the foreigner said, “people here are so used to being without — without stuff, without validation, without contact to the outside world, without a set of standards about how things happen — that sanctions and isolation are normal. They feed a sense of victimhood, or at least underdog-ness, that justifies both the regime and attacks like the one we’ve just seen. 

Sanctions, which are typically targeted at authoritarian regimes, almost invariably hurt the citizenry while sparing the elites, who are always the last to suffer. We do ourselves no favors by impoverishing the people and cutting them off from outside commerce and ideas, which only make serve to make them more dependent on the government.

Sanctions stupidity

Further evidence of just how counter-productive US efforts to isolate countries like Cuba and North Korea are:

Jin Sun Rak, director of Free North Korea Radio, calls his old country almost every night. His wife and 14-year-old daughter live in North Korea. He decided to defect - telling nobody but his brother - in 2008, after traveling to China and seeing the relative wealth. The first time he went, hoping to sell 80 grams of unrefined gold, he bribed a border guard and carried a dagger, tucked near the lower part of a leg. His first night in China was "beyond imagination." He said he went to a restaurant, had some drinks and ended up at a karaoke bar where he knew none of the songs. Days later, he returned to North Korea with some money and a new frame of reference. 

"Whenever they say something," Jin said of the government, "they're lying. They're as worthless as barking dogs." As for a greater cynicism about the government, Jin said: "I think it's something unstoppable now. People's minds have been changed. Young people know the value of money. They don't want to be party members anymore. They've been exposed to the private markets." 

Once exposed to the charms of capitalism, it's hard to go back.  It should be deeply embarrassing to our government that nominally communist China is doing more to promote dissent in North Korea through exposure to its markets and way of life than the US. A policy of isolation only plays into Pyongyang's hands, it's time to change course.

Cuba travel ban panel

Today I attended a forum on the Cuba travel ban held on Capitol Hill and sponsored by the Cato Institute. The event's highlight was featured speaker Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), while an unintended lowlight was walking by Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) as he prepared to begin a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee, no doubt looking for more ways to increase government regulation and impinge on the free market.

Some notes:

• Flake said there are 178 co-sponsors for legislation to lift the current travel ban. Flake said the bill faced a "tight vote" in the Foreign Affairs committee.

• Flake attributed the current uphill battle for passage to a reluctance on the part of people to concede long-established positions on Cuba or anything to the other side. He also noted that $50-60 million is currently spent enforcing the travel ban here in the U.S., and there are entrenched interests which would like to see this continue.

• Flake's message for Fidel Castro: "We plan on lifting the travel ban, and if the Cuban government doesn't shape up we'll lift the whole embargo." Flake described lifting the travel ban and economic sanctions as the real "get tough" policy in Cuba -- and he's right.

• Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute claimed that a majority of Cuban-Americans favor ending the embargo. (The Obama Administration earlier this year lifted the travel ban for Cuban Americans -- a very smart move) This is welcome news.

• Vasquez opined that Raul Castro will not be able to resist calls for economic liberalization after Fidel goes to the great collective in the sky. This is because very few people in Cuba -- like China -- actually believe in communism (unlike, for example, the U.S. Congress).

• He added that an end to the embargo is unlikely to produce huge changes in the country as Cuba is a poor country and unsafe for investment, thus businesses would likely remain wary of investment. An end to the travel ban, however, would be much more effective as it would increase interactions with Americans and would help support civil society and the informal (black market) economy.

• The current travel ban is inconsistent with U.S. policy as no such prohibitions exist on Americans seeking to visit North Korea, Iran or Libya (when sanctions were in place on that country).

Update: Editorial from the Los Angeles Times on the Cuba sanctions here.

Quote of the day

From Richard Cobden's 1835 pamphlet England, Ireland and America:

...In the present day, commerce is the grand panacea, which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world. Not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligent and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our seats of manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace, and good government -- whilst our steam boats, that now visit every port of Europe, and our miraculous railroads, that are the talk of all nations, are the advertisements and vouchers for the value of our enlightened institutions.

This is, incidentally, why embargoes are such terrible policy for promoting desired changes.

Guilty of capitalism

You know what really strikes fear into the heart of the North Korean government? Capitalism:

North Korea's infamous penal system, which for decades has silenced political dissent with slave labor camps, has evolved into a mechanism for extorting money from citizens trading in private markets, according to surveys of more than 1,600 North Korean refugees.

Reacting to an explosive rise in market activity, North Korea has criminalized everyday market behavior and created a new kind of gulag for those it deems economic criminals, according to a report on the refugee surveys.

...Markets, though, have weakened state influence over daily life, while offering new ways to make money in careers that are not under the control of the government. To rein this in, the government has come up with a matrix of laws that criminalize everyday market behavior, the report says.

A couple of points:

• Pyongyang is quite correct to be scared of independent economic activity. A free people and free markets are inextricably linked.

• Given North Korea's hatred and fear of the free market, why do we seek to punish them with the use of economic sanctions, which simply aid and abet their repression of capitalism?

Quote of the day

Bill Clinton:

"[The embargo on Cuba] is a foolish, pandering failure."

Exactly right.

Journey to the Hermit Kingdom

Two Canadian journalists went to North Korea last month and described the experience in an article for The Globe and Mail. Free of the typical experience of those who visit the country, who are typically shepherded around in tour groups, the Canadians were given an unusually close look at the Stalinist outpost.

Two things stood out to me, the first being the grinding poverty and technological level that can perhaps best be described as medieval:

Some of the scenes we saw as our train rolled through a succession of crumbling towns and farming communities on its way to Pyongyang were startling. An entire village waded in a canal, dredging it with their bare hands. An old woman and a younger woman walked, kilometres from anywhere, carrying jugs of water attached to bamboo poles slung over their shoulders. Weaponless soldiers in mismatching footwear filled sandbags for a war the government insists could start at any time.

In a country with chronic food shortages, rice and corn fields are everywhere. The problem, however, lies in the outdated techniques on which the farmers are forced to rely in the absence of fuel and farm equipment. In the hundreds of fields through which we drove by train and car (there seems to be plenty of fuel for tourists and government officials) during our stay, I saw only two antiquated tractors, only one of which was moving. Even though the fields were many hectares in size, most of the work was done with hoes and spades, or by digging in the soil with bare hands.

There were few cars even on the streets of Pyongyang, and almost none outside of the country's showcase capital city. In the countryside, it was almost as common to see a farm animal in the middle of one of the divided four-lane highways as it was to see a private car.

Though our guides bragged of the city's mass transportation system, which costs just pennies to ride – a standard part of the tour involves showing off a metro system decorated with larger-than-life murals celebrating the achievements of Kim Il-sung – the vast majority of North Koreans seemed to walk wherever they were going, even if they were travelling from one town to the next.

It was obvious that even bicycles were too expensive for many. On the day we left, we saw dozens of uniformed pilots walking the 24-kilometre distance between Pyongyang and the capital's main airport.

The other noteworthy element is the appeal of Western culture and prosperity, which serves both to inspire North Koreans and question the approach taken by their own country:

It was also clear that for all the tanks and missiles deployed in the Korean peninsula, the strongest weapon the United States possesses is still the “soft power” that helped it win the Cold War in Eastern Europe, the lure of a culture that allows complete freedom of expression.

During our five days in North Korea, I repeatedly lent my iPod out to North Koreans I met, watching their reactions as they listened to songs and watched films unknown in a country where Internet access is denied to all but a very few and there's no such thing as a music store or a movie channel.

One Pyongyang resident who borrowed my earphones hummed along to the soft chorus of Nelly Furtado's All Good Things (Come to an End) , and gleefully started the song again as soon as it was over. At another juncture, I was asked to help write out the lyrics to Billy Joel's 1983 hit Uptown Girl .

Hip-hop and alternative rock music proved less popular, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall , the raunchy Judd Apatow comedy that, regrettably, was the only movie I'd downloaded for the trip, drew a slightly mortified thumbs-down. But the excitement generated by these rare glimpses of Western culture was far more revealing than the rote recitations of propaganda we received at stops like the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War – otherwise known as the Korean War – museum, the monument to the foundation of the Workers Party, or the Great Leader's mausoleum.

“Our hatred of American imperialism and our feelings for the American people are not the same thing,” one 20-something woman said after revealing an affection for Britney Spears songs and Harry Potter books. She, too, wore a red Kim Il-sung button over her heart.

After a week of dining in restaurants that had the same five music videos on rotation – all of them melodramatic hymns to the Dear Leader and the mighty North Korean military – it was easy to see how Oops, I Did it Again would be a breath of fresh air.

The appeal of our very way of life is the most effective weapon in the U.S. arsenal, and yet it is one kept tightly sheathed through economic sanctions. Our policy of isolating a country that prides itself on self-reliance and shuns foreign contact is something I do not understand. Beyond being morally bankrupt, depriving the North Koreans of exposure to Western ideas and commerce brings their eventual freedom not one day closer.

You can read about another visit to the country here.

Obama praise

In an effort to remain at least somewhat even handed and not descend into the same reflexive hatred that the radical left so readily dealt out to President Bush I have to give some credit to two Obama Administration initiatives. The first is a shift on Cuba policy where the administration appears set to ease travel and financial restrictions:

"We can expect some relaxation, some changes in terms of the restrictions on family remittances and family travel," said Jeffrey Davidow, the White House adviser for the upcoming Summit of the Americas, which Obama will attend.

Davidow said Monday that the changes - which officials say would allow unlimited visits to Cuba by American families and remove caps on money transfers - are intended not only as a moral step for the estimated 1.5 million Americans who have relatives in Cuba, but also to foster change there.

"Cuban-Americans are the best possible ambassadors of our system and our values," Davidow said. He added, however, that the high hopes that some have for reforms since Fidel Castro ceded power to his brother Raul last year have not yet been realized.

Davidow and other officials say the administration is also looking seriously at calls from some lawmakers to allow all Americans to travel to Cuba, appoint a special envoy to oversee policy toward the island and possibly end U.S. opposition to Cuba's membership in the Organization of American States.

This is the correct move from both a moral and practical standpoint. We do the Cuban people and our own cause no favors by punishing them through this embargo.

The second move worth applauding are the proposed cuts to the Pentagon budget. While defense cuts inspire knee-jerk opposition by many on the political right the reductions proposed by Secretary of Defense Gates make eminent sense. Not every weapons system is necessary or serves a vital purpose, and there is just as much waste at the Pentagon as any other government bureaucracy.

The F-22, for example, has little use in the war on terror, and a dollar spent there is a dollar not available for more effective systems. And don't think it is an accident that production of the airplane is spread across something like 44 states and over 1,000 suppliers to maximize political support. What's more, money is actually being increased for some of the more effective weapons systems according to Fred Kaplan:

• [Defense Secretary Gates] requested a $2 billion increase for drones such as Predators, which have dramatically improved intelligence and counterterrorism efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, increasing their deployed numbers by 62 percent (by 127 percent compared with a year ago).

• He more than doubled the purchase of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters—the smaller, slightly cheaper stealth aircraft—from 14 in 2009 to 30 in 2010 (way too many, in my mind, given the problems with this program, too, but perhaps Gates felt he needed to compensate politically for killing the F-22).

• He boosted the fiscal year 2010 purchase of Littoral Combat Ships, for counterinsurgency operations to coastal regions, from two ships to three.

• He added money for helicopter pilots and maintenance crews, theater missile-defense (against short-range missile attacks on the battlefield), aerial-refueling planes, and the training of more experts in cyberdefense.

• To protect the all-volunteer armed forces, he added $11 billion to fund the expansion of the Army and Marines, $400 million for additional medical research, $300 million for care of the war-wounded, $200 million more for child care and spousal support—and, moreover, he put these sorts of programs in the baseline defense budget. (Before, they were part of ad hoc programs in the war-emergency supplementals and therefore without institutional protection—or, as Gates put it, they were bureaucratically "homeless"—in the political competition for scarce dollars.)

The real shame is that this kind of thinking isn't being applied across the board, with a surge in spending taking place in the rest of government. It's instructive that Obama is ready to demand cuts at the Department of Defense -- one of the core functions of the federal government -- while shoveling additional money at the others.

Rethinking the Cuba embargo

This is good:

"We must recognize the ineffectiveness of our current policy and deal with the Cuban regime in a way that enhances U.S. interests," wrote Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in a report dated Monday.

It would really impress me if Obama were to push for a repeal of the embargo, which is a completely failed policy that has accomplished nothing. If we really want to promote regime change in Cuba the best thing we could do is bombard the country with MTV, McDonald's and Major League Baseball while we send waves of American tourists ashore. This would do more to expose the bankruptcy of the regime's ideology than any other possible move.

Even if it did absolutely nothing to loosen the Castro brothers' grip on power it would still promote economic growth and enhance the welfare of the Cuban people, which should be our first priority anyhow.

One thing for certain is that cutting off people from the outside world and leaving them both ignorant and impoverished is hardly a successful formula for promoting a free and democratic country.

Cuba and the Castros

Henry Louis Gomez, not unreasonably, says that the onus should be on the Cuban government, not the U.S., to shift policy gears:

No, you won’t be reading many columns in the mainstream media espousing the unpopular view that it’s the totalitarian dictatorship 90 miles to our south that should change, must change, before the United States modifies its stance. But then again, by now we should expect no less from them than contempt for our country and total awe and respect for its enemies.

I understand the sentiment. Far too many Americans are willing to look the other way on Cuba's transgressions and its horrible human rights record because the country enjoys high literacy rates and has socialized medicine, which to some people is the ultimate acid tests that separates the civilized from the unenlightened.

That said, waiting for Cuba to change before making a move gets us nowhere and strikes me as a policy more deeply rooted in personal animus against the Castro brothers than helping the Cuban people. We have to set the odious Fidel and Raul aside and instead focus on adopting an approach that will improve the standard of living for the average Cuban, who are forced to live in a de facto prison:

The confining shadow of Fidel’s tropical curtain, on the 50th anniversary of the revolution, was captured in the emptiness before me — of the Malecón, but even more so of the sea. I noticed over subsequent days that Cubans perched on the seafront wall rarely looked outward. When I asked Yoani Sánchez, a dissident blogger (www.desdecuba.com/generaciony), about this, she told me: “We live turned away from the sea because it does not connect us, it encloses us. There is no movement on it. People are not allowed to buy boats because if they had boats, they would go to Florida. We are left, as one of our poets put it, with the unhappy circumstance of water at every turn.”

What Cuba needs is more contact with the outside world, not less. The embargo only succeeds in impoverishing the Cuban people. Rather than undermining the Castros it only strengthens their hand by making the people even more dependent on the government. Worse, it hands the Cuban dictatorship an issue on which they can seize the moral highground and helps promote the sense that the island is locked in an ongoing struggle with the U.S. Perpetual crisis, let us remember, is the lifeblood of the state.

Just before the Obama victory, I lunched in the city’s Little Havana district with Alfredo Durán, a former president of the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association. Inevitably, we ate at the kitschy Versailles Restaurant, long a social hub of the Cuban-American community. Durán, who was imprisoned in Cuba for 18 months after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, is a man mellowed by age. Furious with Kennedy and the Democrats in the invasion’s aftermath — “there was a feeling we were sacrificed, left to eat possum in the swamps around the bay” — he decided after the cold war that anti-Fidel vitriol was a blind alley and the trade embargo counterproductive. Fellow veterans were furious; they stripped his photo from the premises of the veterans’ association.

“I say, ‘Lift the embargo unilaterally, put the onus on Cuba,’ ” Durán told me. “If we negotiate, what do we want from them? They have very little to give.”

Exactly. Imagine what would happen if the embargo was lifted tomorrow. Fidel and Raul would no longer be able to blame the country's ills on the big bad U.S. and would instead be more responsible for their own travails. It would be a huge public relations coup for Washington. More importantly, it could help revive the Cuban economy and improve the sad lot of its people.


Nothing would do more to undermine the Cuban government than Starbucks and MTV. Even if, like China, the Castro brothers hold on to power (which, purely from an actuarial standpoint is unlikely to continue from much longer) that should be a purely secondary concern to the state of the Cuban people. Exposure to Western goods and commerce would also help promote an exchange of ideas and better prepare the Cuban people for democracy when that day comes.

Let's remember who is the archaic socialist outpost here and which side stands for free people and free markets. We're the ones that should have nothing to fear from free exchange, not Havana.

How 'Dallas' Won the Cold War

Great column. I knew as soon as I read the headline what the column was going to be about:

Joseph Stalin is said to have screened the 1940 movie "The Grapes of Wrath" in the Soviet Union to showcase the depredations of life under capitalism. Russian audiences watched the final scenes of the Okies' westward trek aboard overladen, broken-down jalopies -- and marveled that in the United States, even poor people had cars. "Dallas" functioned similarly.

"I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire," Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. "They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, 'Hey, we don't have all this stuff.' I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority."

This is dead on. The best thing we could do to undermine the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea is broadcast an endless stream of U.S. television -- and is another great example of how trade embargoes are counter-productive. Whether it be the struggle against communism or radical Islam, both are fundamentally battles of ideas, and policymakers would be do well to remember that U.S. culture and related soft power are a key part of the U.S. arsenal in this fight.

Anecdotally I knew a guy that lived in Hungary a few years after the end of communism and he said that the streets were absolutely vacant when Dallas aired. Another effect of the show is that plenty of Hungarians were anxious to introduce him to their daughters, figuring that Dallas was representative of the way in which many Americans lived.

North Korea

Kim Jong Il is said to be a huge movie buff, it's therefore somewhat ironic that movies may be playing a huge role in promoting dissent within North Korea:

Watching South Korean soap operas and Hollywood movies inside North Korea, defectors say, is scary, exhilarating and depressing.

"We closed the drapes and turned the volume down low whenever we watched the James Bond videos," said a North Korean woman, who two years ago fled her fishing town in a boat with her husband and son.

"Those movies were how I started to learn what is going on in the world, how people learned the government of Kim Jong Il is not really for their own good," she said.

It's sad that China is effectively doing more to bring down Kim Jong Il's regime than the U.S., which continues to shoot itself in the foot with its sanctions regime.

North Korean defectors

The New York Times had an interesting article this week about North Korean defectors. This part in particular deserves to be highlighted:

Many of the North Koreans interviewed in Thailand said they wanted to go to the United States, even though they were reared in a country that has demonized America for decades. In school in the North, one defector said, she had had been taught that Americans were “inhuman, promiscuous and dictatorial.”

“Even today, I still sometimes refer to the United States as ‘Imperialist America,’ ” she said, laughing.

But as a fourth grader, the woman said, she began to have doubts about that image of America, after she happened upon a photograph in a magazine. As she recalled, it showed a tightrope walker balanced on a wire between high-rise buildings in Washington. The implicit message was that the United States was such an inhumane country that it forced people to perform such jobs, she said.

“But what I remembered about that photo was the tall buildings,” she said. “There was also a beautiful park and clean, wide streets. It was fascinating. There was nothing like that where I grew up.”

North Korea still unleashes daily attacks against the United States through its official media, but the desire of many of the defectors interviewed to go to the United States suggests that the power of ideology is waning.

“After spending a few months in China, they change their minds about the United States,” said a South Korean missionary who regularly visits the North Koreans at the detention center. “In China, they have access to so much information. They look at Web sites and exchange instant messages with people in South Korea.”

This seems to suggest that what the best way to undermine the regime of Kim Jong Il is opening up the country, not subjecting it to further sanctions. If a mere picture could prompt stirrings of doubt, what would North Koreans think after exposure to MTV?

Cuba and sanctions

I was going to use the occasion of the latest goings on in Cuba to write about the stupidity of sanctions on that country and their utter failure, but then I saw that Jacob Weisberg beat me to it. He makes the great point that not only to sanctions fail to bring about their desired result, they're actually counter-productive.

Hitchens on Iran

Chris Hitchens writes a column questioning the usefulness of sanctions on Iran:

But [the Iranian government has] a crucial vulnerability on the inside. The overwhelmingly young population—an ironic result of the mullahs' attempt to increase the birth rate after the calamitous war with Iraq—is fed up with medieval rule. Unlike the hermetic societies of Baathist Iraq and North Korea, Iran has been forced to permit a lot of latitude to its citizens. A huge number of them have relatives in the West, access to satellite dishes and cell phones, and regular contact with neighboring societies. They are appalled at the way that Turkey, for example, has evolved into a near-European state while Iran is still stuck in enforced backwardness and stagnation, competing only in the rug and pistachio markets. Opinion polling is a new science in Iran, but several believable surveys have shown that a huge majority converges on one point: that it is time to resume diplomatic relations with the United States. (The vast American Embassy compound, which I visited, is for now a stupid museum of propaganda. But when one mullah recently asked if he could have a piece of the extensive grounds for a religious school, he was told by the authorities that the place must be kept intact.)

So, picture if you will the landing of Air Force One at Imam Khomeini International Airport. The president emerges, reclaims the U.S. Embassy in return for an equivalent in Washington and the un-freezing of Iran's financial assets, and announces that sanctions have been a waste of time and have mainly hurt Iranian civilians. (He need not add that they have also given some clerics monopoly positions in various black markets; the populace already knows this.) A new era is possible, he goes on to say. America and the Shiite world have a common enemy in al-Qaida, just as they had in Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban, and the Iraqi Baathists. America is home to a large and talented Iranian community. Let the exchange of trade and people and ideas begin! There might perhaps even be a ticklish-to-write paragraph, saying that America is not proud of everything it is has done in the past—most notably Jimmy Carter's criminal decision to permit Saddam to invade Iran.

The aging mullahs might claim this as a capitulation, which would be hard to bear. But how right would they be? The pressure for a new constitution and genuine elections is already building. Within less than a decade, we might be negotiating with a whole new generation of Iranians. Iran would have less incentive to disrupt progress in Iraq (and we should not forget that it has been generally not unhelpful in Afghanistan). Eventually, Iran might have a domestic nuclear program (to which it is fully entitled and which would decrease its oil-dependency) and be ready to sign a nonproliferation agreement with enforceable and verifiable provisions. American technical help would be available for this, since it was we who (in a wonderful moment of Kissingerian "realism") helped them build the Bushehr reactor in the first place.

Just a thought.

Like I've said before, increasing, not decreasing trade may be the better way to go with countries like Iran.

Economic freedom

Last week I wrote about the effectiveness of sanctions, basically saying that they aren't. Recently I came across a Wall Street Journal article from late December that seems to support my thinking.

First some brief background: A few years ago North Korea implemented some limited economic reform measures that included things such as price liberalization and the allowance of small markets to operate. I remember thinking at the time that either the whole thing was a sham or that it wouldn't last. I just couldn't imagine North Korea actually allowing anything remotely resembling free markets to take place inside the country.

Anyway, here's the latest:

[North Korea] is reversing liberalizing steps taken starting in the summer of 2002 that were designed to increase the role of markets in its socialist economy. Wages were increased and state enterprises were instructed to focus on profitability. Decision-making was decentralized and private sales of food and manufactured goods were legalized.

Much of the focus was on agriculture. Collective farms had to deliver a portion of their output to the state-run Public Distribution System for sale to citizens at subsidized prices. But the rest could be sold at higher prices in the market. Farmers also were permitted to till private plots and sell produce in small markets that had sprung up around the country....

But recently, the government abruptly changed course. Soldiers were deployed to guard fields and monitor the harvest to make sure all rice and other grains ended up in government warehouses. Aid workers say the government purchased the grains at prices well below those prevailing in the market.

The apparent goal is to revive the ration system, say aid workers and experts. Instead of going to the market, women now queue up in food-distribution centers, where officials behind a bank teller-like window dispense grain through a chute, aid workers say. People are allowed to purchase a fixed amount of grain at subsidized prices....

The revival of the ration system also gives the government an important tool to control the population. "The government's influence over its people has diminished with the rise of the market," says Lee Young Hoon, an economist who tracks North Korea for South Korea's central bank. "The government doesn't want to stand by and let this happen."

Under the current system, says Mr. Frank, the University of Vienna economist, people who are employed receive larger rations than those who are unemployed, a sign, he says that the government is using food in an effort to prod people to return to state-run factories. Many have largely abandoned their jobs in the centrally planned system in order to earn a living by trading and working in the informal sector. "They're very uncomfortable. They want to have people back in the system," says Mr. Frank.

Taking control of food sales also allows the government to clamp down on flows of money that have created rival power centers. "Some in the elite started making money. And power groups started to form around the flow of cash," says a senior U.S. official involved in North Korea policy. "There is a high level of discomfort with the redistribution of wealth and the new loyalty groupings that have been forming around people with access to money."

The biggest threat to dictatorship is free markets and free trade. It's a virus that I am convinced would absolutely destroy Kim Jong Il if given the chance.

Sanctions

It seems that whenever the international community seeks to punish a pariah state for some misdeed that, after the usual huffing and puffing, the only penalty ever imposed are economic sanctions. Civil war in Yugoslavia? Slap on some sanctions. (You'll recall, by the way, that among the sanctions was a UN-sponsored ban on selling arms to any of the combatants. The result, in typical gun control fashion, was that the better armed Serbs had their way with the Bosnian Muslims for several years). Iraq misbehaving? Impose sanctions. Iran pursuing a nuke? You got it: sanctions.

A report released by a human rights group last month on Burma similarly urges economic penalties to be imposed:

[We recommend that] Governments implement and maintain economic sanctions and withhold development and loan or debt assistance until significant improvement has been made in the human rights situation, particularly as regards arbitrary detention and torture, as independently verified;

Sanctions make everyone feel good, like they're actually doing something to help solve a problem. But are they really? Off the top of my head the only case of broad-based sanctions ever working is South Africa. But even then the effects are ambiguous.

In the South Africa case, however, economic sanctions were applied piecemeal over a number of years, often halfheartedly, and at their height were far from comprehensive. The most significantsanctions , embodied in the U.S. Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) of 1986, were imposed only after Congress overrode a presidential veto, and administrative enforcement was reportedly weak. Even the CAAA, however, affected only some trade and financial relations, and except for the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark), other countries'sanctions were even less stringent. Thus, by the summer of 1991, the UN arms embargo had been in place for over a decade, an OPEC oil embargo for a similar number of years, and expanded U.S.sanctions for over five years. Yet the white government and the two major black opposition groups (the African National Congress and Inkatha)—though closer than previously—were still struggling to find common ground on which to begin constitutional negotiations. Assuming that reform is achieved and thatSouth Africa does not degenerate into bloody civil war, sanctions will have made a modest contribution to the happy result.

South Africa, however, was somewhat unique in that it was at least a quasi-democracy, so that (white) voters could press the government for change. But what about the impact of sanctions on more autocratic governments such as Burma, Iran, Iraq, Cuba or North Korea? Can anyone really call the impact of sanctions on those countries a success?

I think the clear answer is no. Not only have sanctions not proven successful, they have actually helped those rulers maintain a tight grip on power. Saddam's power in Iraq was arguably at its zenith during the 1990s while his country was under UN sanctions. Castro has proven remarkably resilient. Iran and North Korea are battling it out for presidency of the (shrinking) Axis of Evil.

In fact, the biggest threat to such governments is not sanctions but the opposite: contact with the outside world. Look at the case of Japan in which the Tokugawa shogunate, founded in 1603, strictly regulated contact with foreigners. It wasn't until Commodore Perry arrived with his black ships that they country was opened up to trade in 1854. Fourteen years later the Tokugawa regime collapsed. Coincidence?

Despots hate outside influence. Think of the Berlin Wall, and efforts by communist regimes to jam broadcasts of Voice of America and other Western news services. Look at North Korea, which is widely known as the Hermit Kingdom:

Radio and TV sets in North Korea are pre-tuned to government stations that pump out a steady stream of propaganda ... Ordinary North Koreans caught listening to foreign broadcasts risk harsh punishments, such as forced labour.

There is reason to believe that one of the biggest threats facing the regime in Pyongyang is the arrival of DVDs from China. China, in fact, may be the biggest argument against sanctions. In the face of human rights violations by Beijing the U.S. and other countries have not only refused to impose significant sanctions, they have actually sought to more deeply integrate the country in the international trading system. Now, while China's government remains repressive, I think any sane person would say the situation is better now 40 years ago.

Economic prosperity is freedom. We don't help the oppressed by making them poorer and more dependent on their governments.