I am stunned that Carpenter has sunk this low:
It is undoubtedly distasteful and worrisome to accept an odious regime like North Korea’s into the global nuclear weapons club. But it is time to face reality, however unpleasant it is. The strategy of trying to isolate that country has not worked, and there is almost no prospect that it will work in the future. North Korea is not about to return to nuclear virginity, and no rational person suggests launching a preemptive war to prevent the country’s emergence as a nuclear power. Consequently, we must learn to make the best of a bad situation.
Because we haven't stopped North Korea with attempts to isolate them we should welcome them to their nuclear-armed future? What kind of message does that send to other despots? If you can't beat them, join them?
And this strange thinking confuses our attempts to stop North Korea from going nuclear because they are an aggressive, hostile, and despotic regime by seeming to assume that our efforts to stop North Korea have caused them to be aggressive and hostile.
If North Korea goes fully nuclear (and they are now close to mating nuclear warheads to a working missile), our efforts to contain and isolate North Korea have to be intensified. Slowing the expansion of that new nuclear arsenal to buy time for our thin missile defenses to cope longer must be a priority. And we have to raise the stakes to trying to collapse the regime from the costs of pursuing nuclear weapons at the expense of feeding their own people.
Who says we can't beat them? We have no need to join them! And they have no interest in joining us! We'd be more than happy to leave North Korea alone if they weren't a threat, but North Korea needs to call us a threat to stay in power and justify their murderous rule.
Carpenter's solution would simply make it easier for North Korea to build nukes without facing consequences to their regime security. He says North Korea will have their nuclear cake and eat it, too--so we might as well bake the cake and send it to them with a lovely note saying all is forgiven.
Carpenter's foreign policy advice--any of it, really--is just a joke. He was probably disappointed to find out that The Onion wasn't reporting the truth about The Un. Really, it's the regime, stupid. Crush it.
