Regarding your initial point about sanctions being a panacea, I would agree with your assessment, to the extent to which sanctions are becoming a tool that's deployed more frequently for a range of international security and threats, whether it's a human rights issue, or it's Russia meddling in Crimea, or it's nuclear proliferation, or it's terrorism. Sanctions are simply part of our lexicon to respond to those threats.

At the same time, I don't think our view of the utility of sanctions has changed, in the sense that we still understand that sanctions are nothing if not a tool for behavioural change. If they're not there to change the behaviour of a target, or an entity, or an individual, then really, they're just there to make ourselves feel good and that's not useful from a policy perspective.

Regarding how North Korea gets around these types of restrictions, I'll come back to the point about their ability to create a facade when they act overseas, which is really at the heart of all North Korean illicit activity in their approach. They are very good at being able to create a veil to suggest that they are foreign in nature, so non-North Korean in nature. If it's a North Korean network in Singapore, they will involve Singaporeans, who will create companies with completely generic names, who will open bank accounts with fairly reputable banks. Unless you spend a lot of time doing your due diligence on those companies and entities and the nature of their business, you may never realize that actually there's a North Korean puppet master sitting behind the scenes probably in a very nice apartment somewhere in Singapore.

This comes back to my point about the importance of intelligence and monitoring. We have to get collectively much better at monitoring North Korea's ability to create those facades. That may be something we do in partnership with financial institutions or between countries, but it does require a lot more co-operation and activity on our part.

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