OPINION:
“When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease,” wrote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his 1937 “Quarantine Speech.” He was calling on “peace-loving nations” to oppose the fascist regimes’ “epidemic of world lawlessness” with “positive endeavors to preserve peace.” Today, North Korea’s lawlessness has become the greatest threat to world peace since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Now as then, a naval quarantine would be an endeavor to preserve peace.
North Korea’s goal and strategy are clear: Race at breakneck speed to develop nuclear weapons and missiles; use them to blackmail America into withdrawing from South Korea; then bring the entire Korean Peninsula under communist rule. A similar strategy worked on the Vietnamese Peninsula in the 1970s when the communist North invaded the democratic South after America departed.
But North Korea is miscalculating. The United States will not allow a belligerent and erratic North Korea to hold a nuclear Damocles’ sword over our homeland and allies. And North Korea must also be stopped in its global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Four U.S. administrations and the U.N. have used negotiations and economic incentives to entice North Korea to stop its nuclear program, proliferation and bellicose actions. To no avail. The world community then turned to economic sanctions. But so far, sanctions have not worked, either, partly because North Korea evades them by trading through criminal networks. Still, increasingly harsher economic sanctions, including restrictions on shipping, remain the world’s best hope to convince North Korea to change course and avoid war.
On Sept. 11, the U.N. Security Council imposed new sanctions through Resolution 2375. Through one of its provisions, the resolution empowers member countries to interdict North Korean vessels believed to contain illegal cargo. The measure requires the consent of the countries where the ships are registered for any inspections and it does not authorize the use of force to ensure compliance. Still, the resolution called on all U.N. member states to cooperate with inspections.
President Trump’s Sept. 21 executive order contains yet more sanctions and states that no ship can visit the U.S. for 180 days after it visited North Korea or was involved in a ship-to-ship transfer with a North Korean vessel.
The next step should be a global naval quarantine of North Korea by revitalizing and expanding the Proliferation Security Initiative. The PSI is an international partnership that was launched in 2003 by President George W. Bush to prevent weapons of mass destruction proliferation and has today 105 signatories. President Obama praised it and pledged to turn it into a “durable international effort.” U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan also endorsed it, as did the Group of Eight, including Russia. Just a few countries opposed it, notably China, India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea.
The creation of the PSI was triggered by a frustrating incident. In December 2002, naval forces of the U.S. and Spain intercepted the So San, a Cambodian freighter that was sailing without a flag and attempted evasive action. She had a North Korean crew and was carrying North Korean Scud missiles to Yemen. Because it had violated no international law, it was allowed to proceed. Yemen got its missiles and North Korea its cash.
The PSI was designed to enhance existing export controls rather than to create new law. Its goal is pre-emptive interdiction, which includes detaining and searching ships when they enter a member’s territorial waters. Participating states share intelligence and best practices, and participate in multinational training exercises. Often described as “an activity, not an organization,” the PSI has an executive committee to coordinate activities but no headquarters or secretariat.
The initiative has been a success: Its members have conducted more than 50 interdictions, including the capture of North Korean illicit exports and the forced return to port of ships with suspicious cargo. One such return involved the M/V Light, a Belizean-flagged freighter. She was intercepted in June 2011 by U.S. naval forces on suspicion of transporting ballistic missiles from North Korea to Myanmar and was forced to return to North Korea. The M/V Light was not inspected but the U.S. would have had the legal authority to do so through its shipboarding agreement with Belize, a PSI member state.
The PSI’s focus should be expanded to include all North Korean trade banned by U.N. resolutions and its membership increased for greater reach. A vigorously enforced PSI would significantly reduce North Korea’s ability to evade U.N. sanctions.
This would not be a blockade, which is an act of war, or even an embargo. But it would be one more potent economic blow to the North Korean economy in the hope that they get the message that their current course can only lead to the ruin of their country.
• J. William Middendorf II is a former secretary of the Navy and ambassador. Dan Negrea is a New York private equity investor.
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