The most dangerous failure of U.S. policy these days is in North Korea. President Bush has been startlingly passive as North Korea has begun churning out nuclear weapons like hot cakes.
Kristof's suggestion for solving the problem?
The other option is the path that Richard Nixon pursued with Maoist China: resolute engagement, leading toward a new "grand bargain" in which Kim Jong Il would give up his nuclear program in exchange for political and economic ties with the international community. This has the advantage that the best bet to bring down Mr. Kim, the Dear Leader, isn't isolation, but contacts with the outside world.
Using the word "resolute" to describe a policy of caving in does not make it actually resolute. Rosett describes the problem with Kristof's thinking nicely:
The classic answer is to send aid. Unfortunately, there is a mountain of evidence that this serves chiefly to sustain the Kim regime, which à la Saddam finds ways to divert relief to its own uses--one of those uses being to keep control over a horribly oppressed citizenry. When President Clinton cut a deal with Pyongyang in 1994 meant to produce a nuclear freeze while feeding the people of North Korea, Pyongyang predictably cheated on the freeze, starved the people anyway, and Kim Jong Il, who had just inherited the regime from his father, seized the chance to consolidate his grip.
But the idea that we are doing nothing is just wrong. What are we supposed to do? Nuke them? Invade them? Really, anything forceful would require us to do just that. Otherwise, if you want to "see" a solution, we really are limited to Kristoff's "classic" solution of bribing North Korea.
But instead, we are working quietly to solve the problem. We are placing ships with anti-missile capabilities off on North Korea. We are building anti-missile sites in Alaska and California. We are pulling our troops off the front line of the DMZ. We are adding air and naval power to the region. And we are prepared to intercept any North Korean shipments of nuclear materials that might be sold by the nutballs in Pyongyang.
By getting our troops off the DMZ, we end the main threat North Korea has over us--to kill our soldiers by attacking south. Instead, we can deflect North Korea's missiles and strike them with our air power. If North Korea attacks south, all North Korea does is make sure South Korea will join us in destroying North Korea. South Korea doesn't want to fight. Seoul really thinks the most likely bad thing that the North could do is collapse:
The vision routinely offered in seminars and lectures on such matters as East Asian security is one of a North Korean population that, if ever set free, would have no idea what to do except perhaps pivot as one, swarm South Korea and devour its bounty like a colony of army ants--upsetting all sorts of cozy regional habits in the process.
But if North Korea attacks, Seoul will be destroyed unless we go on the offensive and push the North Koreans back. That would require US air power and South Korean ground forces backed by US ground units. And once we go north of the DMZ, we can't stop before taking Pyongyang.
So we are squeezing North Korea and maneuvering South Korea into the position of absorbing a North Korean military response and compelling South Korea to insist on an offensive to save themselves from a North Korean death spasm. But to prevent war, we talk to the North Koreans, stringing them along so they never think that they face a stark choice of collapsing and losing it all or attacking southward to win it all. As I've noted recently, we are doing fine to boil the frog slowly.
Ideally, there will be no war and North Korea will collapse without even realizing it before it is too late. South Korea may not want to absorb North Korean refugees after such a collapse, but that's tough. That's better than a nuclear-armed North Korea surviving for another 5 years to threaten us with long-range nuclear missiles.
