Captain Ed penned two posts early this morning that prompted some though on my part. The posts (here and here) detail the reactions in Gaza and North Korea to existing sanctions and impending sanctions. Put bluntly, sanctions aren't working well for either.

First in Gaza

The Western embargo on aid and the suspension of tax receipts by the Israelis have forced the Palestinians into a crisis of ideology. None of the factions involved want to make a lasting peace with Israel, but that's no longer the primary issue at hand in the territories. Hamas and Fatah have finally found their way to the basic power struggle that their shared hatred of Israel has always masked. This conflict pits the older, secular Arab terrorists against the newer, Islamist Arab terrorists -- and this time it will be all of the Arabs in the area that pay for the conflict.

The Palestinians can't blame Israel for this. Shootings such as the one that took Rafiq Siam have their origins in a divide that war alone can address now. In the end, neither side can win, because both are essentially nihilistic and will not stop. The Palestinians have created a death cult in two different flavors, and both sides value martyrdom so much that both will fight until everyone is dead in order to keep power in their own hands, once the fighting starts.

Unrelenting economic pressure has put the unstable Hamas ruling group on the knife's edge. In North Korea, that kind of pressure has recently been felt, and it only serves to get worse.

The sanctions that Japan has imposed have teeth. North Korea can no longer dock its ships in Japanese ports, stripping them of a vital lifeline to hard currency. They normally export clams and mushrooms to the Japanese, who will look elsewhere for their cuisine needs now. North Koreans are barred from entering Japan except for a narrow set of circumstances. Essentially, Japan has closed its doors entirely to North Korea, which leaves the Kim regime with a big gap in its exports -- a problem for a country whose economy is already in free-fall.

How will Kim respond? He might force a naval confrontation with Japan, attempting to dock his ships in defiance of their orders, in the hope that Japan will start a war. A few more missiles might overfly Japan to the same purpose. I doubt that he would overtly attack Japan, an act that would push his only ally, China, even further away diplomatically. The stakes are going up for Kim Jong-Il, though, and one has to wonder what he thinks he's holding.

This harkens back to the often touted and entirely accurate Josh Manchester piece from a week ago.

This pressure has slowly been tightening a multi-lateral, multi-pronged grip on North Korean power. And it's about to get even tighter. The International Herald Tribune notes that "since last September, the U.S. Treasury Department has persuaded 24 banks in China, Mongolia, Singapore, Vietnam and other countries to shut down North Korean accounts. Last month, Australia and Japan ordered their financial institutions to block transactions by companies suspected of having links to North Korea's weapons programs."

The North Korean regime will soon be looking at the kind of economic stranglehold that is fomenting civil war in Gaza. And Dear Leader's response has been to rattle his non-nuclear saber at Japan for imposing stricter sanctions. The risk inherent in Japan's unilateral action is that Kim Jong-il will send over some missiles. It is very likely we will see some military exchanges this weekend. South Korea is playing things more coolly, waiting and seeing what will happen.
The only deterrence at this juncture is that North Korea risks the swift, strong retaliation of the United States. But with a force deployment of only 65,000 or so soldiers in the region, initial US reciprocity will necessarily be air strikes, cruise missiles and other naval bombardments. Since Eisenhower contemplated using nuclear devices on the Korean peninsula 53 years ago, it is entirely possible that will be a consideration should North Korea use WMDs against either of our allies.

Will that be enough to stop Kim? It is impossible to know his intentions. In 1941, Japan attacked the United States after the US embargoed oil to Japan following Japan's incursion into southern Indochina. The economic sanctions prompted a shooting war. In Gaza, economic sanctions are showing the weakness of the Palestinian terror regime. In North Korea, a nation with a large standing army and no shortage of munitions, the exportation of war is more probable.

President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld both emphasized that the US goal is to resolve this situation through diplomatic means. That goal however, can only be reached if North Korea intransigence fades. The likelihood of that is decreasing hourly.

Maybe I am being paranoid, but Iran seems awfully quiet right now.

Reprinted from Ennuipundit.  All this and much much more.