UN Votes Wednesday on Tough New North Korea Sanctions … The U.N. Security Council votes Wednesday on a resolution that would impose the toughest sanctions on North Korea in two decades. –AP

North Korea is the target of yet more negotiated sanctions and the mainstream media won't provide many articles that question them.

The propaganda is thick here. North Korea fights no wars with its adversaries (though it is still technically at war with South Korea) and doesn't target enemies with the sanctions it regularly undergoes.

Nonetheless, it is convenient to point fingers at North Korea, and in doing so distract the gaze of Western populations from the increasingly authoritarian positions of their own nation-states.

These latest sanctions are actually the result of North Korea's determination to continue developing nuclear weapons, but given the world's hostility, who can blame them?

In some sense the sanctions are a kind of carefully modulated dance. For instance, while these new sanctions are apparently broad and deep, AP informs us that, "China, Pyongyang's neighbor, was reluctant to impose measures that could threaten the stability of North Korea and cause its economy to collapse."

This is in part the reason North Korea exists at all. China ensures the viability of the regime so that 20 million Koreans don't begin to destabilize its Western flank. If China didn't want North Korea, there probably would no North Korea.

How well will these sanctions work? Probably no better than previous sanctions, which have been circumvented as a matter of course.

The country is already subject "to four rounds of U.N. sanctions imposed since the country's first nuclear test in 2006." Now North Korea will not be able to import or export "expensive watches, snowmobiles, recreational water vehicles and lead crystal."

What's the catch? "As with previous resolutions, the test will be whether U.N. member states enforce the sanctions."

And no doubt they won't. Why should they? North Korea's nuclear weapons, if they actually exist, aren't aimed at them in particular. They are seemingly defensive from a strategic standpoint.

What is certain is that the dance continues.

Refreshingly, the Guardian yesterday carried a report from writer Monisha Rajesh who states, "I wanted to witness first-hand what North Korea was like and finally went last year."

She concludes:

We never felt unsafe. Not once … We abided by the rules which are few and simple: don't deface photos of the Kims; don't fold a magazine in half if Kim Jong-un's face is on the front; include the whole body when photographing the Kims; wear a tie to the mausoleum; don't take photos of the public without asking; and don't leave Bibles behind in the country.