Hell if I Know
That’s my response, in a nutshell, to a question posed on email by Duffy regarding what to do about North Korea. Like Iraq, North Korea is an absolute dictatorship ruled by a brutal lunatic. There the similarity ends. For one thing, North Korea is a genuine threat to its neighbors and us. They really have WMDs of the very worst sort: nukes mounted on ICBMs. They have demonstrated a willingness to aid terrorist organizations and terrorist states, and there are more than iffy scraps of evidence to prove it. Most of all, the North Korea situation is not going to yield to the swift application of force – at least, not without a very high price to be paid by South Koreans and, quite possibly, American civilians.
The complexity and seriousness of the problem are enough to cause anyone headaches, and it must be especially infuriating to those who believe there is a simple, straightforward, American-based, preferably military, solution to every world crisis. In this case, we may simply have to let the long, slow, invisible process of diplomacy, economic pressure, covert operations and anticipatory defense work, even if it’s not as spectacular and satisfying as an F-14 strike. For once, Bush and his crew are doing exactly the right thing by sitting tight, acting friendly, keeping their big mouths shut, and squeezing nuts under the table.
Unfortunately, our position is needlessly complicated by the fact that few in the world feel inclined to do our current government any favors in the international arena. China and Russia (along with South Korea and Japan) are the ones in the best position to bring pressure to bear on North Korea, and they are among those most pissed off by Bush’s “unilateralist-until-we-need-a-favor” foreign policy. That said, Bush once again benefits from the soft cruelty of low expectations: whatever he may be, he and his regime are still preferable in the eyes of the world to that of the highly combustible Kim Jong Il, whom practically everyone to the right of Ramsay Clark agrees we would all be better off without.
Even the saber-rattlers at the Wall Street Journal editorial page have their purpose. It doesn’t hurt Bush’s negotiating position for Kim to know that the same people who cheerlead us into the Iraqi adventure are already twitching menacingly in their direction (and Syria’s, and Iran’s, but that’s beside the point…) Good use of credible threats could be very helpful in this situation, so long as we don’t accidentally set fire to the curtains.
This is a tough one, to be sure. Success in the short term is avoiding a catastrophic exchange of high-powered weapons and preventing North Korean technology from falling into the hands of terrorists. Let’s achieve that first, by whatever means necessary, then worry about where to go from there.
12:32:47 PM 
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