Groundhog Day in Pyongyang

Our man at Turtle Bay: Bill Murray.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is said to be a film buff, so perhaps he's familiar with the classic "Groundhog Day," in which Bill Murray plays a TV reporter who is condemned to relive February 2 over and over again. Kim must figure the members of the U.N. Security Council have seen it too, since they insist on reliving the same hopeless diplomacy toward his nuclear provocations.

A week ago, North Korea launched a long-range multistage rocket, the most recent step in its missile program that could one day deliver weapons of mass destruction to just about any place on Earth. Yesterday, the 15 members of the Security Council finally agreed on their united response: a "presidential statement" condemning the launch and promising tougher U.N. sanctions.

But didn't the U.N. already sanction Pyongyang for such activities? In 2006, in the wake of another missile launch and an underground nuclear test, the U.N. passed a resolution ordering Pyongyang to suspend all ballistic missile activities and also ordering it to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner."

Resolution 1718 requires member states to refrain from trading in weapons, weapons parts and luxury goods. Had it been enforced, that resolution might have had an impact. The ban on luxury goods, aimed at subverting Kim's ability to pay off his military, could have undermined his political control. Instead, the U.N. sanctions were applied weakly, if at all, and eventually were all but abandoned when Kim promised once again to give up his nuclear weapons in return for more aid and recognition.

Yesterday's U.N. statement lacks even the legally binding nature of a resolution. It is a promise by the 15 members of the Security Council to enforce sanctions they have already pledged to enforce but so far haven't, in the name of getting the North to agree to abide by promises it has already made but hasn't kept. This time, no doubt, everyone really, really means it.

Maybe if the U.S. re-imposed the financial sanctions that President Bush abandoned and China cut off energy supplies, the six-party talks on the North's nuclear program might have a chance of success. Tokyo has shown some backbone by refusing to give any aid until the North provides information on the Japanese citizens it abducted in the 1970s and 1980s. And in South Korea, President Lee Myung-bak has ended his predecessors' open-checkbook policy and made aid conditional on tracking where it's going. On Monday, his government indicated that it may finally join the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative to halt trafficking in WMD.

But none of the five parties appears to have any appetite for tougher measures. They're too afraid the North will collapse -- which is what they should want and is the only way the North will give up its nuclear weapons. The likelihood is that, after a decent interval of pretending to enforce the sanctions, the five parties will repeat the Bush-Clinton cycle of more concessions and more aid in return for more promises that Pyongyang won't keep.

With this wrist slap for Kim, the Obama Administration has now had its first experience with the limits of the U.N. as the enforcer of global order and nonproliferation. It won't be the last. See Darfur (feckless denunciation of), and Iran, which just announced it has 7,000 nuclear centrifuges and counting. Those are also U.N. movie classics.