I was actually wondering that too.
The pages you reference aren’t nearly as gloomy or absolute as you make out, and there were some gains even though negotiation was aborted. You’re right that nothing much much came of it in the end and it wasn’t perfect, but it was moving forward, and wasn’t finished before Clinton left office and policy changed.
There’s no way to know whether it would have ultimately worked or not, because Bush Jr. stopped it cold, and antagonized the North Koreans into an entirely predictable reaction – it was easy to predict events would come to the current head the moment Bush first opened his mouth on the issue, and many you didn’t buy into the absurd “you’re with us or against us” rhetoric did just that. At least negotiation had a chance of working, with nothing to lose. Bush spent the oppurtunity just so he could scare of domestic fear of the “Axis of Evil” and use the resulting quivering to further his Unilateral Executive agenda.
Your suggesting that serious diplomacy is a bit of theater so you can bring out the toys?
Funny how diplomacy used only as casus belli always leads to war.
Are you guys trolling? The defining feature of serious diplomacy is that there are real consequences if the diplomacy fails. Otherwise it’s just bullshit.
This is the sort of twisted-brain talk I hear from leftist ideologues. It’s always just about to work right before it totally fails, as if the nothing that’s happening is progress. I wish you’d behave with your money like you do with your politics. I’d take a nice fat loan from you and then “be paying you back real soon” for your entire life, and you wouldn’t do a thing about it because the deal was “working.”
Right?
If you forced me to pay you back, you’d be admitting that negociations have an endpoint after which there must be physical enforcement. You wouldn’t do that, right? RIGHT?
Come on, you damned hypocrites. It’s all good on paper so long as it’s not your ass on the line. Typical.
No Dong.
Since China is the lynch-pin to any peaceful resolution it seems logical to start pressuring them. I don’t know how that might play out since I understand they hold a vast amount of our foreign debt. I don’t know the extent to which our economies are mutually dependant, but they are a rational actor.
The gyst of this threads seems to be that we either engage in some rehash of 1990s diplomacy or we bitch-slap NK. I would like to bitch-slap North Korea and the consequences be damned. I would also like to invade China since we will probably be at war with them in 50 years over oil. It would feel good, but, then what? Even if we had the manpower to send troops in sufficient numbers, I am not at all confident such schemes would be competently executed by our current leaders.
Throwing our hands up and walking away is not an option. As mentioned above, NK will happily sell its wares on the black market. I am also uncomfortable with the idea of an aid-for-nukes agreement. Wouldn’t they simply continue the illicit manufacture of nukes, forcing us to continue buying them, lest they end up in Anti-American hands? We can’t trust the North Koreans.
Also, if we start smacking NK around and SK takes a beating, and Japan re-militarizes, it seems to me China could easily slip into Taiwan with no one either paying attention or in the position to do anything other than issue strong statements.
So, why not leverage China, hard, using our economic interdepency as the fulcrum? We would have to get the WTO behind the project to acheive maximum efficacy, and be willing to follow thorugh, but it beats the alternatives.
O_o
Are you serious, or am I missing some sarcasm here?
I just wanted to see what jingoism felt like. It was nice. A lot easier. Not a lot of that effete thinking stuff to clutter up my simplistic, John Wayne worldview. It felt a lot like the 6th grade playground.
America’s main diplomatic failure was not with North Korea, which has proven to always be untrustworthy and always willing to make threats to try and extort more concessions. I don’t see what combination of carrots and sticks would have made NK more compliant and trustworthy.
The diplomatic failure has been with SOUTH Korea (and China to a lesser extent). Even without the Iraq war, how would the U.S. possibly present a credible deterrent to NK without having SK completely on board? (By deterrent I mean the capability to knock out NK’s government before it can do too much damage to its neighbors.) I’m sure it was comforting for SK to think that the sunshine policy would lead to a safer border with NK, and instead NK’s regime has only been prolonged and its threat magnified. NK should be worried about invasion – from its Asian neighbors. If it’s going to present a constant threat of shelling Seoul, firing missiles at Tokyo or flooding China with refugees, shouldn’t those countries present a credible threat of applying a knockout donkey-punch to NK?
The reason we can’t settle on a course of action for the U.S. is that it’s not really our fight (even though I know NK presents the threat of selling nukes to America-hating terrorists). Japan is the linchpin IMO – they must say to China: “Do what you can to defuse the NK threat ASAP, or we’ll have no choice but to militarize.” (Or China should be inferring that message.) China will either comply or dither – if the second, then Japan will amend its constitution and start amassing forces. Then South Korea is the key – will it present a united front with Japan, or also dither? A military response from the U.S. would be regarded as bullying and illegitimate by a lot of the world. The correct U.S. response is to quietly back Japan’s militarization and try to get Japan, SK, and China and Russia if possible to present a united Asian front. (And of course use espionage/satellites/etc as much as possible to try and track to whom NK is trading nuclear materials.)
And a quote from the latest NYTimes piece on the subject:
But foreign policy, as Mr. Nunn says, is “all about priorities,” and until Monday the closest Mr. Bush came to drawing a red line for the North was in May 2003, when he declared that the United States and South Korea “will not tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea.”
The Central Intelligence Agency’s estimates in the years since have been that the United States has been tolerating exactly that — a small arsenal of nuclear fuel sufficient to produce six or more weapons.
Notably, Mr. Bush did not repeat that threat on Monday morning. Instead, he drew a new red line, one that appeared to tacitly acknowledge the North’s possession of weapons. The United States would regard as a “grave threat,” he said, any transfer by North Korea of nuclear material to other countries or terrorist groups, and would hold Mr. Kim’s government “fully accountable for the consequences of such actions.”
Unbelieveable. Bush and The Republicans let all this happen and this will be the keystone for their ability to maintain power. “Do you trust the wimpy Democrats to protect you?!” Oi!
Anyhow, interesting analysis from the WP:
The deteriorating situation in Iraq has undermined U.S. diplomatic credibility and limited the administration’s military options, making rogue countries increasingly confident that they can act without serious consequences. Iran, meanwhile, will be watching closely the diplomatic fallout from North Korea’s apparent test as a clue to how far it might go with its own nuclear program.
“Iran will follow very carefully what happens in the U.N. Security Council after the North Korean test,” said Robert J. Einhorn, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “If the United Nations is not able to act forcefully, then Iran will think the path is clear to act with impunity.”
Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Brookings Institution scholar and co-author of the new book “Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security,” said the U.S. response to North Korea will have ripple effects. “Iran will certainly watch what happens. North Korea watched what happened with Pakistan and decided that the world didn’t punish Pakistan too hard or too long,” he said. “Iran will certainly notice if North Korea gets treated with kid gloves.”
Political strategists debated the domestic implications of the North Korean test with midterm elections four weeks away. Some Republicans predicted it would take the focus off the Mark Foley congressional page scandal and remind voters that it is a dangerous world best confronted by tough-minded leaders. Some Democrats argued it would be seen as another failure of Bush’s foreign policy and moved quickly to try to pin blame on the Republicans. “Is this going to help Republicans?” asked Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). “The answer to that is absolutely not. This is another significant foreign policy failure for the administration.”
In Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address, a speech designed to shift the political debate from a battle against al-Qaeda to a possible confrontation with Iraq, the president mentioned North Korea, Iraq and Iran and declared: “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. . . . In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
All three issues came to a head in 2003: The United States invaded Iraq and discovered no weapons of mass destruction; North Korea began to obtain weapons-grade plutonium from fuel rods that had been under international observation; and Iran disclosed that it had made rapid progress with a previously secret uranium-enrichment program.
James B. Steinberg, President Bill Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and now dean of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said the North Korea test will raise a larger question that echoes Ronald Reagan’s most famous 1980 campaign line – “With respect to the axis of evil,” Steinberg said, “are you better off today than you were four years ago? . . . It’s clear that the answer is we’re worse off with respect to the nuclear proliferation problem in both North Korea and Iran than four to six years ago, and I would argue we’re worse off in our overall security because of the situation in Iraq.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/09/AR2006100901130.html
North Korea is “on the road” to multiple-stage intercontinental missile delivery of nuclear payloads sort of in the same way that the US is on the road to colonizing the stars. Which is to say, they are nowhere close to it, nor are they likely to be in our lifetimes. We’ll ignore for the moment the fact that their recent test of the Taepodong-2 missile was a failure, and that they are most likely decades away from being able to build a long-range missile that actually works.
And while that may be a small comfort to Tokyo, a bigger comfort is the fact that they don’t have a nuclear weapon that will fit on any missile. In fact, their air force doesn’t even have bombers large enough to carry the sort of bomb that they are capable of building. They can’t just strap it to the bottom of an Il-28–it would weigh half again as much as the aircraft. I don’t think people understand how enormously large and inefficient crude atomic weapons are, or how what a difficult feat of engineering it is to miniaturize them. It took the US military-industrial complex, in the height of cold war spending, 20 years to put a nuclear weapon on a missile. During that time, we poured almost as much money (more, in some years) annually into nuclear weapons development as North Korea spends on its entire military, and we had a huge pool of scientific minds and an industrial infrastructure to draw on that they simply lack. Weapon miniaturization also requires a lot of testing; NK has, what was the estimate? Six bombs’ worth of fissile material?
I’m not saying that the world should just sit back and let them work on this stuff. But let’s be realistic: it is not likely that NK will ever develop the technology to drop an atomic bomb on the US, or even Tokyo.
They only really need to sell the bomb to your average terrorist joe for container shipment and you can say goodbye to a port city.
It was always the plan for Bush to allow North Korea to get the bomb, in order to justify the missile defense boondoggle.
Wait a second…Bush has been planning this since the beginning of the CLINTON administration? Damn…he’s NOT stupid then, is he?
OMG…Bush-haters can’t have it both ways; he’s not an absolute idiot with the genius to construct a conspiracy that spans eight years of a PRIOR administration. That’s just so damn stupid.
They don’t need to deliver a nuclear weapon via ballistic missile…it would be MUCH easier to sell radioactive material, or even a complete device, to be used as a dirty bomb. That would actually be just as bad…exploding a radioactive dirty bomb in Manhattan, for example, would have an incredibly horrible effect upon our economy and ruin the heart of our financial district (#1 area for banking, etc) for decades to come…it would be uninhabitable.
That’s what scares me…not a missile, but a dirty bomb or the sale of the material or technology.
No matter how much you guys try to lower the bar our dear leader manages to stumble over it:
Q Mr. President, if I could follow up, you say diplomacy takes time –
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, it does.Q — but it was four years ago that you labeled North Korea a member of the “axis of evil.” And since then it’s increased its nuclear arsenal, it’s abandoned six-party talks and now these missile launches –
THE PRESIDENT: Let me ask you a question. It’s increased it’s — that’s an interesting statement: “North Korea has increased its nuclear arsenal.” Can you verify that?
Q Well, intelligence sources say — if you can — if you’d like to dispute that, that’s fine.
THE PRESIDENT: No, I’m not going to dispute, I’m just curious.
Q Our intelligence sources say that it’s increased the number — its nuclear capability –
THE PRESIDENT: — dangerous — it has potential danger.
Q It’s increased is nuclear capabilities. It’s abandoned six-party talks, and it’s launched these missiles.
THE PRESIDENT: Yes.
Q Why shouldn’t Americans see the U.S. policy regarding North Korea as a failed one?
THE PRESIDENT: Because it takes time to get things done.
Q What objective has the U.S. government achieved when it comes to North Korea? And why does the administration continue to go back to the same platform process if it’s not effective in changing North Korea’s behavior? Thank you.
THE PRESIDENT: Suzanne, these problems didn’t arise overnight, and they don’t get solved overnight. It takes a while. Again, I think if you look at the history of the North Korean weapons program, it started probably in the ’80s. We don’t know — maybe you know more than I do — about increasing the number of nuclear weapons. My view is we ought to treat North Korea as a danger, take them seriously. No question that he has signed agreements and didn’t stick by them. But that was done during — when we had bilateral negotiations with him, and it’s done during the six-party talks.
You’ve asked what we’ve done. We’ve created a framework that will be successful. I don’t — my judgment is, you can’t be successful if the United States is sitting at the table alone with North Korea. You run out of options very quickly if that’s the case. In order to be successful diplomatically, it’s best to have other partners at the table. You ask what we’ve done. We got the six-party talks started. And that’s a positive development. It’s a way to solve this problem diplomatically.
Watching the video adds the tone of aggressive condescension combined with a lack of fundamental understanding that is the hallmark of this administration.
Accountability, Flexibility, Effectiveness. Our leadership has none of these qualities.
Looking back, would Gore have been so bad? Fools, fools all of you! =D