«The US believed that the North Korean regime would simply fall apart,» Rodger Baker, the director of Stratfor, said.
US and UN sanctions on North Korea have sought to cripple the regime through restricting access to commerce and banking, but despite limited successes here and there, North Korea now regularly demonstrates a variety of potent and expensive nuclear arms in open defiance of the international community at large.
«The pace of North Korean testing, particularly on the ballistic-missile front, has really accelerated over the past year,» Kelsey Davenport, the nonproliferation director at the Arms Control Association, told Business Insider.
North Korea has tested not only a greater number but also a greater range of missile types meant to diversify its arsenal and defeat US and allied missile defenses.
In spite of the US and UN’s best efforts, «North Korea has demonstrated its ability to domestically produce technologies that it’s denied by the sanctions regime,» said Davenport, who added that, overall, «compliance with UN sanctions on North Korea is quite poor. »
Some smaller Asian countries simply don’t have the means to enforce sanctions on North Korea, like searching cargo on ships headed to North Korea or tracking dual-use technologies, which have both civilian and military applications.
This results in a North Korean state that has covertly become a large supplier of military goods to small nations in the region that can’t afford Chinese military goods or can’t get access to US or European arms, which are tightly regulated.
A recent joint report from Arms Control Wonk and Reuters detailed how North Korea had used a network of falsified addresses and names to simply confuse countries into doing business with it. North Korean businessmen may take the same name as South Korean businessmen, or they may list their addresses as being in the «Korean Republic» or «PY city,» (Pyongyang) according to the report.
«The reality is that the UN only works if everyone agrees to make it work,» Rodger Baker, the director of Stratfor, a geopolitical analysis firm, told Business Insider.
