1. Sanctions are undoing the regime’s financial bindings;

2. The regime is incapable of duct-taping those bindings together with resources from other state organs, possibly because those organs are functioning as semi-independent and competing feifdoms;

3. If the financial bindings come undone, loyalty and ideology aren’t enough to hold people;

4. At least some members of the core class — indeed, some of its most visible members — are disgruntled;

5. Disgruntled members of the core class are willing to share and conspire about their disgruntlement with each other, including the guy whose job it was to “manage” them, and act on it;

6. The South Korean government is willing to help North Koreans act on their disgruntlement; and

7. The South Korean government is willing to talk about all of this publicly, and thus inflict severe wounds to the regime’s morale, and possibly encourage other defections.