Andrew Sullivan has dug up some commentary on the North Korean agreement of 1994 -- the one Carter brokered, where they agreed to be paid not to develop nuclear arms.
A personal note here. I know you consider me an extreme right-winger on foreign policy. But I didn't come to this way of thinking all in a minute. I used to be far more to the left, but several years ago I began a habit of making a mental note any time a pundit made a prediction that would be verifiable or disprovable by the passage of time, for example, a pundit might say "today's agreement will be seen as a major achievement of this administration" or "today's agreement is a nonsensical side-show, which will be forgotten inside a month." I would then try to remember the remark, and see which pundit had been proved right in the event. After doing that for a while, I began to say, boy, Charles Krauthammer is really ahead of the curve, isn't he? because his commentary has been proved right, again and again. So I began listening to him more carefully, and my own way of thinking changed as I did so.
With that in mind, here is some commentary on the 1994 North Korea deal, first from the New York Times editorial page, then from Charles Krauthammer. See how they read today:
The New York Times:
"Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.
The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past." - The New York Times, October 19, 1994
Charles Krauthammer:
(1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility - not very high after Clinton's about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, "It's one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down." Better though, said another, than "falling on our own sword over phony principle." If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president's real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation "very good news." For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.
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