Sheena Chestnut Greitens
Nonresident Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Center for East Asia Policy Studies
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She is also an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her work focuses on East Asia, security studies, and the internal politics of authoritarian regimes. Her book "Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence," will be published in summer 2016 by Cambridge University Press.
Greitens’ work on China and North Korea has been published widely in academic, policy, and media outlets in English, Chinese, and Korean. She has previously held positions at the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Oxford University Press, and fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; a master's from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s from Stanford University.
Sheena Chestnut Greitens is a nonresident senior fellow with the Center for East Asia Policy Studies. She is also an assistant professor of political science at the University of Missouri, and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. Her work focuses on East Asia, security studies, and the internal politics of authoritarian regimes. Her book “Dictators and Their Secret Police: Coercive Institutions and State Violence,” will be published in summer 2016 by Cambridge University Press.
Greitens’ work on China and North Korea has been published widely in academic, policy, and media outlets in English, Chinese, and Korean. She has previously held positions at the U.S. Department of State’s Policy Planning Staff, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and Oxford University Press, and fellowships at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.
She holds a doctorate from Harvard University; a master’s from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar; and a bachelor’s from Stanford University.
A [North Korean ballistic missile] test like this serves all three purposes [enhancing its long-range strike capability, gauging a U.S. response, and commemorating the late Kim Jong-il’s birthday] at once.
"[T]he best U.S.-Philippines alliance would be one where the benefits are clearly recognized by the public and the citizens of both countries. [Duterte's transition from local mayor to president and international figure has brought about a] change in the consequences of rhetoric. That shift has been rocky in terms of the effects on U.S.-Philippines relations."
“I think it’s by having this cluster of [illicit] activities and abilities that has helped [North Korea] as sanctions have been applied. With the newest round of sanctions, my guess is that they’re doing the same thing: looking for ways to navigate around them.”
"[North Korea is] highly creative and highly adaptable. They’re always developing new layers of business. If one of their businesses gets busted, they’ve already been testing others."
There are a lot of debates about 'What North Korea wants.' First, what matters are the interests of the very top leadership, which is narrower than 'North Korea' or even 'the North Korean government.' Second, North Korea might use a range of strategies ..but we should remember that they're all aimed at the same underlying, fundamental objective: ensuring Kim's political survival.
The stakes are always higher in the first few years of a dictator's time in power, and the first few years are almost always more [internally] violent. The rules of the game under the new leader are still being established — both inside the country and externally — so it makes uncertainty higher.
It's very possible that the series of U.S. law enforcement actions made the risks and costs too high to North Korea to keep counterfeiting. The first possibility is that they got out of the game. The second is that they got even better at it, and we just haven't caught them yet. [Conducting covert operations with counterfeit U.S. cash] would have the dual benefit of funding North Korea's operations and engaging in economic warfare against the United States. The Secret Service has been unequivocal that the North Korean supernotes are the best in the world.
There's some evidence that in the mid-to-late 2000s, the [North Korean] government decided to close some of the larger, export-oriented, regime-supported manufacturing facilities. When that happened, chemists and others set up private facilities, either repurposing equipment or copying from what they'd learned in the state factories. They then tapped into the existing black market inside North Korea and the cross-border smuggling networks into northeastern China to distribute their products.
Manufacturing methamphetamine requires relatively little in the way of sophisticated equipment; it can be manufactured in a bathtub in someone's home. That's one reason why it was relatively easy to privatize (or partially privatize) production inside North Korea. Evidence from my interviews with people involved in the manufacturing and distribution of methamphetamine made inside North Korea consistently indicates that the precursor chemicals are coming from China via cross-border illicit trading and smuggling networks.