But the Korean peninsula is really not a major strategic interest of the United States, except to secure the economy of S. Korea… where exactly is N. Korea going to go? Will he take on all the major superpowers on earth?
The danger does not lie in who the N. Koreans might decide to “take on”. I see no reason to believe that they are planning to attack anyone, and it looks like deterrence is their primary motivation for going nuclear. The risk lies more in what might happen if one of their bombs were to show up elsewhere.
There's nothing wrong with all the regional powers getting together and dealing with this situation, rather than permitting Kim Jong Il to continue playing his games.
I’ve been saying this all along. I think, though, that some active move has to be taken in pursuit of this goal. We may like to see the current American position as refusal to waver, but to others it looks like we just haven’t got any moves to make. It won’t help us to look like we are going to cave in, but the appearance of paralysis doesn’t look good either.
It is NOT in our interest to permit China and Russia to "tweak" our noses by ignoring their shared responsibilities.
We have to understand that we are not in a position to decide what we will permit and what we will not permit. We recently engaged in a fair bit of nose-tweaking ourselves in Iraq, less because of what we did than because of the way we did it. The natural consequence will be that many of the nations we tweaked are going to be reluctant to cooperate on other issues. This is no surprise, we knew all along that there was a price to be paid internationally for the domestically advantageous indulgence in tough talk. There are contrary interests at work: neither Russia nor China has any interest in seeing N. Korea expand its nuclear capacity, but both know that the US want their cooperation, and both want to use that desire to their benefit, just as we would in their place.
The situation can be managed, but it will require adroitness, subtlety, and a willingness to ditch the red-white-and-blue colored glasses and reacquaint ourselves with the world as it looks to others. I’m not sure that it is a task to which our current administration is well suited. |
