The unserious quarantine of North Korean nukes

NY Times:

The Obama administration will order the Navy to hail and request permission to inspect North Korean ships at sea suspected of carrying arms or nuclear technology, but will not board them by force, senior administration officials said Monday.

The new effort to intercept North Korean ships, and track them to their next port, where Washington will press for the inspections they refused at sea, is part of what the officials described as “vigorous enforcement” of the United Nations Security Council resolution approved Friday.

The planned American action stops just short of the forced inspections that North Korea has said that it would regard as an act of war. Still, the administration’s plans, if fully executed, would amount to the most confrontational approach taken by the United States in dealing with North Korea in years, and carries a risk of escalating tensions at a time when North Korea has been carrying out missile and nuclear tests.

...

The North Koreans are driving this escalator and they show no sense of backing down, much less cooperating. They can easily escalate further. There is also the problem of getting cooperation from the parties to their proliferation. Do we really think Syria is going to permit inspection of off loaded nuclear material? Ditto for Iran?

This looks like a very ineffective device forced on us by a multilateral approach which limits action to the minimum that China and Russia will go for.