Wallet on a String

Austin Bay notes this good commentary on the North Korea agreement recently penned.

The bottom line is that this is significantly different than the 1994 agreement despite the cries of administration foes and even friends who belittle it as Clinton II and wonder why we didn't make this agreement years ago or ask we would repeat failure.

And given that many steps have to be taken to put it into effect, it is too soon to even tell if it is an agreement at all. But that is good since it took us 8 years to figure out the 1994 agreement wasn't worth the paper it was written on. We need time to see if Pyongyang is even remotely sincere.

A lot depends on what North Korea does in the coming months. And as these new talks to implement this proto-agreement drag on, North Korea continues to crumble. The oil we will provide initially is really just a token amount and not enough to save them and allow them to get all North Koreany again, confident that they've bought some more time. The Pillsbury Nuke Boy still needs to play by our rules to save himself. And by signing on to this agreement, the North Koreans have committed to playing along with this route a little longer. Long enough to die? We'll see.

Even if this agreement was 1994 version 2.0, we'd have the advantage of North Korea being far more feeble and four allies with us. But even this minimalist position is not true. This is--or could be--a better agreement. I'm getting a little more confident in judging this a reasonable agreement. Assuming we don't put somebody like Albright or Carter in charge of implementing or negotiating it, of course. And that can't happen for a couple years, at worst.