I think the Sanctions/No Sanctions debate is mostly moot. North Korea has been in the status of pariah state for decades and hasn't bent an inch. Compare that to China for whom we gladly swept the Tiananman Massacre under the rug, respected their sovereignty, made them a top trading partner and they have also not bent an inch. And we have hosted thousands of Chinese grad students at our universities. They are also watching the events in Ukraine right now and thinking "Why not Taiwan?" Modern dictators have learned very well the propaganda game. "We're rich because our enemies fear us" or "We're poor because our enemies are mistreating us" both work pretty well.
North Korea has definitely bent. Their nuclear program is moving slowly. Their cruise missile program is moving slowly. Without the sanctions they would have had missiles to carry out a global nuclear strike decades ago. South Korea launched satellites in the 90s!
China also bent. But in a way that is very different from what people expected. There was this idea that economic freedom must lead to political freedom. It was the cornerstone of political calculations for a century in the west. But it turns out China bent on the economic side without bending on the political side. This wasn't preordained, if hardliners in China had won their battle against reformers China would still be trapped. But by the time that it became clear that this was the greatest miscalculation of the last half century, it was too late. China became too entrenched economically in the global order for any sanctions to be possible.
But sanctions have worked. Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons because of sanctions.
What sanctions don't do is they don't lead to regime change. But they absolutely lead to massive behavioral changes.
"Bent" meaning in their intentions. Opening up to China was always meant to show them that capitalism was to everyone's advantage and that in a few decades they'd trend away from authoritarianism naturally. That absolutely hasn't happened. They are not the same country as they were 30 years ago but in many ways they are much worse.
> North Korea has been in the status of pariah state for decades and hasn't bent an inch.
There are sanctions on the NK leadership and you have to convert them and their children into the Western way of thinking before they can even give open information to regular people. Right now Russia just started to censor its internet and Western values together with Western media cat still freely flow to Russia's people. This window of opportunity is closing rapidly, over though.
> Compare that to China for whom we gladly swept the Tiananman Massacre under the rug, respected their sovereignty, made them a top trading partner and they have also not bent an inch.
Because China has ~ 1B people and it heavily censors its media from the start. You cannot change mentality of so many people so fast.
Yeah China censors media. So does Russia. So long as the control media they can make the population believe nonsense. Even countries with statutory freedom of speech are getting bombarded with propaganda very effectively. It's never been easier to get huge swaths of a national population to believe abject lies. Once they believe that government abuses are necessary for security they will get away with them forever.
