Joel Brinkley, American Voices

New American sanctions against North Korea are intended to deprive its leaders of an amazing array of luxury goods that allow Kim Jong-il and his mandarins to feast on pate and caviar, and drink fine wine from lead-crystal glasses — while reclining on the decks of their yachts.

China supplies the ruling clique with all of this and more, cost-free, year after year, government reports from the U.S. and several other nations say. The problem is, the United Nations already tried to attack this problem with sanctions passed in 1996, to little effect.

The Obama administration says its new sanctions are more targeted — aimed at a special party organization known as Office 39 that acquires the furs, alcohol and Cuban cigars for the elite. Well, just suppose it works this time. That still won’t matter. If Kim and his overstuffed minions cannot acquire all of this abundance from China any longer, they can turn to their best friend forever — the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Even half a world apart, the two states have so much in common. To begin with, both are the objects of intense animosity from almost everyone. Suspicion and rancor suffuse North Korea’s relations with nearly all of the world’s nations — except Iran. The same is true in reverse, for Iran. That’s the main reason they are the best of friends.

Iran’s mullahs, for all their pious talk, are among the most corrupt rulers in the world. Transparency International lists only eight nations (out of 180) that are more venal. So you know that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, has plenty of pate, caviar and crystalware to share. Kim already does so many things for him. For one, Iranian experts and government-intelligence reports say, North Korean technicians are helping Iran build nuclear weapons. After all, North Korea has already carried out two underground nuclear tests.

By many accounts, North Korea has a close working relationship with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. “The IRG reportedly directs Iran’s Nuclear Control Center” and reports directly to Khamenei, a recent Congressional Research Service report noted. The guard, it added, was therefore “in a position to bring North Korea into the Iranian nuclear program.”

You can be sure, can’t you, that North Korea is interested only in helping its best friend develop peaceful nuclear energy? Not surprisingly, Iran denies that North Korea has any involvement with its nuclear program. But then, Iranian protestations are about as credible as, well, North Korea’s.

Already it’s well known that North Korea is helping Iran assemble its fleet of medium- and long-range ballistic missiles. “There is some talk that the two or three missiles Iran tested, including one a month ago, were virtually the same as North Korea uses,” Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University, told me. Jane’s, the weapons intelligence service, found that the configuration and dimensions of most missile parts were virtually identical.

Late last week, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, an exile opposition group, made public intelligence it had gathered that showed Iran building a new series of fortified underground tunnels, presumably for its nuclear program.

Well, who are the world’s foremost secret underground bunker builders? The North Koreans, of course. They are said to have built tunnels that snake under the demilitarized zone toward South Korea, and they have a history of helping Iran hide its questionable activities. A few years ago, the Congressional report said, North Korea helped Iran with another “huge project to develop underground bunkers and tunnels for Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The North Koreans have still another talent that Iran cherishes. They are master counterfeiters. Bush administration sanctions crippled a bank in Macao because it was laundering Kim’s counterfeit dollars. Now Iran has been observed using North Korea to carry suitcases full of these dollars to its allies, the Hezbollah terrorist group in Lebanon.

“It’s very sophisticated counterfeiting,” Abbas noted.

What does all of this mean? Earlier this summer, Kim put on the North Korea-Iran Friendship Week in Pyongyang. Several senior Iranian officials stood smiling on the podium as Jon Yong Jin, vice chairman of the Iran friendship committee, cheerily declared his state’s “firm support and solidarity” with Iran “in its just struggle to foil the U.S.”

The more sanctions the West piles on Iran and North Korea, the closer these two nations will draw. With all that oil, Iran has the cash North Korea needs, while North Korea can draw from its surfeit of cunning and sinister expertise.

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times.