The U. S. president trashed the Iran nuclear deal because of Tehran’s bad behavior. But Pyongyang is little better, says a confidential U. N. report.
U. S. President Donald Trump heads off to his second high-stakes summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un next week amid concerns that Kim has not taken enough action to dismantle his nuclear weapons program, even as the Trump administration has been hinting at a comprehensive peace deal with Pyongyang.
Yet in its push to make a deal with North Korea, the administration has consistently ignored Pyongyang’s ongoing weapons proliferation around the world, including in the Middle East. That stands in stark contrast to its rejection of the Iran nuclear accord, which Trump denounced as a “disaster” in part because it didn’t address the Iranian regime’s destabilizing activities throughout the Middle East.
“North Korea behaves very differently. They’re not destabilizing Yemen. They’re not destabilizing Syria. They’re not conducting enormous assassination campaigns. These countries’ behaviors are different,” U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told CBS News in an interview on Feb. 13.
But a forthcoming confidential 350-page report by a panel of United Nations experts tells a different story, one in which Syria has emerged as one of Pyongyang’s largest conduits for the sale of military equipment throughout the Middle East and Africa, as well as chemical weapons materials. Operating through a Syrian arms dealer, North Korea has supplied arms to Yemen’s Houthi rebels, as well as clients in Libya and Sudan, according to a diplomatic source who detailed the report’s findings for Foreign Policy.
“As far as weapons proliferation goes, I know nothing that has stopped,” said Bruce Bechtol, a former U. S. military intelligence officer who has studied previous versions of the U. N. report and is the author of the 2018 book North Korean Military Proliferation in the Middle East and Africa.
Bechtol said that based on an earlier version of the U. N. report and other evidence he has seen, North Korea’s sale of missiles, conventional weapons, and chemical weapons material to Syria continues unabated. He said North Korea also sends weapons to Iran and assists Tehran with its missile program, and that some of these weapons have been supplied to Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. “North Korea also continues to proliferate weapons and to train government forces for several nations in Africa,” he said.
The U. N. panel of experts is conducting numerous investigations into banned activities by North Korean officials in Syria, noting that North Korean technicians linked to Pyongyang’s ballistic missile program and other prohibited operations have made regular visits to Syria, indicating that cooperation on banned activities continues. The panel cites a report by an unnamed U. N. member state that North Korea continues its cooperation with Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Center, which is linked to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
Pyongyang also has conducted a well-documented program of assassination abroad for many years, allegedly including the 2017 killing of Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Un’s half-brother, using VX, a deadly nerve agent, in Malaysia.
Yet the Trump administration has not called North Korea to task for this behavior, at least not publicly, despite Trump’s fierce criticism of former President Barack Obama for allegedly making that very mistake with Iran. On the contrary, Pompeo, who was for a time head of the CIA, publicly excused North Korea’s role in Middle Eastern conflicts, and Trump has repeatedly expressed his fondness for Kim.
