Democrats reduce North Korea to political soundbites.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
North Korea's apparent test Sunday of a nuclear device raises large questions with which the United States and the world must now grapple in the months and years ahead. But it may also have finally settled the question of how much time this and future Administrations will have available to deal with genuine foreign policy crises before they become merely political. The answer, it seems, can be measured in milliseconds.
Sen. Bob Menendez was not formerly known as an expert on nuclear proliferation or the politics of Northeast Asia. But there was the New Jersey Democrat on Monday delivering the view that Kim Jong-Il's latest demonstration of aggressive intent "illustrates just how much the Bush Administration's incompetence has endangered our nation." Not to be outdone, Majority Leader-in-waiting Harry Reid insisted the Administration appoint a "senior official to conduct a full review of \[its\] failed North Korea policy." Mr. Reid performed the rare feat of making Nancy Pelosi sound statesmanlike. Ms. Pelosi at least acknowledged that countries such as China might have played a negative role here.
As best as we can tell, the critique of the Bush Administration boils down to three points. First, as former Sen. Sam Nunn told the New York Times, "we started at the wrong end of the 'axis of evil,'" his point being the Administration should have somehow "dealt with" Pyongyang first and Baghdad later.
Next, say the critics, the Bush Administration has wrongly tried to engage North Korea diplomatically through the "six party" framework, when only the bilateral talks demanded by Kim Jong-Il will do. "Bush aided and abetted the outsourcing of American jobs," says Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean in one of his cheaper jabs, "and now he's outsourced our diplomacy as well." Finally, the President is said to have actually provoked North Korea into building a bomb by naming it to the axis of evil.
But since when does the Democratic Party, to say nothing of Dr. Dean, advocate U.S. unilateralism when unending multilateral approaches are available? And how does Mr. Nunn's suggestion that President Bush should have dealt with North Korea first among the axis of evil square with the idea that it was terribly bad form to describe such an "axis" in the first place?
In fact, the more closely one examines these claims the more disingenuous they become. The CIA strongly suspected North Korea had developed nuclear weapons as far back as the early 1990s. Gordon Corera, the security correspondent for BBC News, has amassed significant evidence that North Korea may have already tested a nuclear device--in 1998, as the sixth in a set of Pakistani tests that year.
As for the idea that direct talks between Washington and Pyongyang might open the way toward a settlement, this flatly ignores North Korea's cheating on the last such settlement, the so-called "Yongbyong Agreed Framework" of 1994. American diplomats have never lacked for opportunities to talk to the North Koreans, formally or privately. What they lack are interlocutors who can be trusted to honor their commitments or cajoled into abandoning their weapons.
It is not necessary to defend every jot and tittle of the Administration's North Korean diplomacy. But the Democrats' instant, soundbite criticism is unserious to the point that it calls into question their sincerity in contributing to a solution. Are Messrs. Reid, Dean, Menendez et al. concerned about nuclear weapons getting into terrorist hands and U.S. ports? They tell us they are. Then perhaps they might publicly call on China and Russia to join the Proliferation Security Initiative, the most successful effort yet to interdict the transfer of illicit weapons.
Are they seriously interested in bringing about North Korea's internal collapse? It would be good to see the kind of rhetorical energy the Democrats invested in Darfur go into publicizing the plight of North Korean refugees. Would they like to see the U.N. contribute positively to managing the crisis? Then send a message of solidarity to our adversaries by confirming as U.N. ambassador John Bolton, one of the world's leading experts on proliferation.
None of these steps alone is going to resolve a crisis in which U.S. options are limited or problematic. But it would help if just once public discourse on the subject did not instantly degrade into an exercise in cynical political point-scoring. Fat chance.
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