President Trump’s pressure campaign against North Korea has received a most unusual kind of reinforcement: the novel coronavirus.
“With the measures that North Korea and China have imposed because of COVID, it indirectly improved sanctions enforcement,” the Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner, a former CIA analyst who specializes in North Korea issues, told the Washington Examiner. “As opposed to the U.S. sanctioning someone for smuggling, the North Korean regime is shutting down the smuggling.”
It is difficult for outside observers to gauge the state of North Korea’s economy, analysts and officials caution, given the regime’s dependence on black market revenue streams. Yet satellite imagery and public admissions from North Korean officials suggest that the pandemic has deprived Kim of the economic lifelines that historically have protected the regime from the full blast of international sanctions.
“For example, we heard that North Korea locked their border in the initial stage of coronavirus spread from Wuhan, China,” an Asian official who follows such issues told the Washington Examiner. “Since North Korea’s economy is heavily dependent on China, so-called ‘self-quarantine’ measures by North Korea itself could result in huge damage to North Korea.”
Those policies include tightened border controls at the overland routes between North Korea and China, which regards the pariah communist regime as a vassal state. Many of the tankers involved in the “ship-to-ship” transfer of oil on the high seas, a tactic that North Korea uses to circumvent the United Nations-mandated cap on oil imports, have been photographed “sitting idle in port,” Klingner added.
Such a compound of economic constraints makes North Korea more dependent on cybercrime, the one source of revenue that need not involve human contact overseas. U.S. officials released a new advisory to international partners and the private sector warning that, even before the emergence of the new coronavirus in China, North Korea cyber attackers had tried to steal about $2 billion through online operations.
“The DPRK’s malicious cyber activities threaten the United States and the broader international community and, in particular, pose a significant threat to the integrity and stability of the international financial system,” the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned Wednesday in a bulletin released along with the State Department and other federal government agencies.
North Korean cyber attackers are likely to get even more aggressive as revenue streams in the physical economy dry up. “Due to coronavirus pandemic, NK revenue decreased, [and so] they naturally come to be dependent on other ways to make money, like activities in the cyber area,” the Asian official surmised.
What remains less clear is how North Korea will respond to this intensified economic pressure. Trump’s administration has hoped that Kim would strike a deal to dismantle the regime’s nuclear weapons program in exchange for economic relief, but those negotiations have been stalled out since October, despite two high-profile summits between the two leaders. North Korean officials haven’t acknowledged any confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, but regime officials did tout a letter from Trump to Kim focused on “cooperation in the anti-epidemic work” last month.
“It’s got to be hurting the regime’s finances,” Klingner said. “When the pressure is building, as it is now, you don’t know, is it going to be, they raise a white flag and say, ‘Okay, fine how much will you give us if we start throwing nukes overboard into the ocean?’ Or, will it make them lash out or make them do provocations? We don’t know.”
