Here’s a sobering paragraph from a New York Times report on North Korea:

When North Korea set off a nuclear test last year just months after Mr. Obama took office, the United States won passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution that imposed far harsher sanctions. The sanctions gave countries the right, and responsibility, to board North Korean ships and planes that landed at ports around the world and to inspect them for weapons. The effort seemed partly successful — but the equipment in the centrifuge plant is so new that it is clear that the trade restrictions did not stop the North from building what Siegfried S. Hecker, the visiting scientist, called an “ultramodern” nuclear complex.

We should keep this in mind when considering the prospect of “biting sanctions” on Iran. North Korea is a starved and isolated gulag state run by a family of delusional paranoids, and it managed to find willing international nuclear collaborators and elude the eyes of an international sanctions regime. Iran boasts of trading partners around the globe, and its regional rise incentivizes still more alliances and state-clients. If the malfunctional Kim regime can evade the kind of intrusive sanctions that were slapped on Pyongyang, what hope is there that Tehran will break under the weight of inconsistent trade and banking embargoes?