Part 1 of the weekly round up has more North Korea lovin’ than you can poke a nuke at. Part 2 and the rest in the (Australian) morning.
So point your missiles in the air and launch ‘em like you just don’t care!
Jonah Goldberg in the National Review: Multilateralism Falls Short: Exceptions and reality.
Kim Jong Il would seem unrealistic even as a comic-book villain. In a world full of strange and exotic cultures, North Korea’s neo-Stalinist experiment ranks as otherworldly. Try to imagine what a North Korea exhibit at Epcot Center would display: emaciated, out-of-work actors (no shortage there) eating fake tree bark while guarding a giant concentration camp where prisoners are forced to worship a guy who should be wearing a tinfoil hat at the local library. Don’t forget to try the sawdust kimchi!
Proof that North Korea is a hard case can be found in the fact that the Democrats and Republicans have switched sides. Ordinarily multilateralist Democrats are now unalloyed champions of unilateralism, in the form of face-to-face negotiations with North Korea, while President Bush - that infamous go-it-alone “cowboy” - has embraced international teamwork. Both approaches are flawed for a simple reason: North Korea wants a nuclear weapon because it wants a nuclear weapon.
William F. Buckley on RealClearPolitics.com (Universal Press Syndicate): Diplomacy Hits Kim
We have been told for many years that Kim is obsessively vain. But I had not remembered the document of September 1997 from the official government news agency. Reproduced here are the last few sentences of the paean, which serve our purposes. The official document concluded:
“The General is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation. They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united around him in ideology, morality and obligation. So their life is a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in history.”
In North Korea such tributes as these substitute for food, which does not exist, at least not enough to feed the country’s 21 million people, 10 percent of whom died of starvation in Kim’s first half decade in power.
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The proposed sanctions could hypothetically immobilize Kim. You can reduce the need for food by depriving incremental millions of it, but a million-man army needs fuel. Unfortunately, there isn’t any way to seal the border to the north, sufficiently to block extra fuel from passing through the long frontier North Korea shares with China. China has a special consideration here. The pressure of masses of North Koreans who want food and stability creates a huge problem, so much so that the Chinese worry more about instability in the Korean peninsula than about nuclear bombs dispatched from Pyongyang.
The diplomatic ideal, where China is concerned, is to mount sufficient pressure to influence Kim’s behavior, but not so much as to threaten his hegemony. The final formulation of Beijing’s collaboration will be critical, and the challenge in Washington is to egg it on to ensure that Dear Leader will recognize that he has gone one step too far.
Trudy Rubin in the Philladelphia Enquirer: Worldview | Why talks with N. Korea eventually must resume
North Korea’s apparent test of a nuclear weapon has provoked another debate over whether it’s worth negotiating with rogue states.
I believe this is not the moment for a U.S. dialogue with Pyongyang. This dangerous regime, with its track record of illegal weapons sales, must be disabused of any idea that it can get a free pass to the nuclear club. Strong U.N. economic sanctions are crucial, backed by a united front of U.S. and Asian powers. Also crucial is President Bush’s warning that North Korea will be held accountable if it passes nuclear materiel to other states or groups.
But then what? I’ve talked to no one - dove, hawk or owl - who believes sanctions alone will force Kim Jong Il to give up his arsenal. Nor does anyone believe military force is a viable option (provided Kim doesn’t sell his plutonium to al-Qaeda or Iran).
Unless sanctions are crafted to prod North Korea back to the table, it’s hard to see any chance of curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear program. But can talks with North Korea work?
Melanie Kirkpatrick with an idea that I’d love to hear more about, in the Wall Street Journal: “Let Them Go: China should open its border to North Korean refugees.”
The Border Police document, dated Jan. 10, 2005, begins blandly enough: “From the start of illegal border crossings in 1983,” it says, “the number of illegal immigrants from North Korea that have stayed in China has increased every year.” It adds, “Public Security and Armed Police departments have strengthened preventative and deportation efforts.”
The numbers it reports are newsworthy–and staggering: “To date, almost 400,000 North Korean illegal immigrants have entered China and large numbers continue to cross the border illegally.” And, “As of the end of December 2004, 133,009 North Korean illegal immigrants have been deported.” While Chinese authorities obviously know how many refugees they have deported, by definition they can’t know how many are in hiding. The estimate of 400,000 is sure to be low.
The Yanbian Finance Bureau document, dated Oct. 19, 2004, provides further evidence of the extent of the crisis. It is a letter to provincial authorities requesting more money to help with deportation efforts. “According to statistics from the Public Security, border police and civil administration, more than 93,000 refugees are still living in Yanbian Prefecture.” The letter goes on to say that although the Border Police Bureau has established “six new refugee-deportation and detention centers,” it does not have sufficient funds to do the job. Yanbian requests 30 million yuan ($3.8 million) a year “to solve this financial problem.”
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If Beijing wants to send a message to Pyongyang about its nuclear program, it could announce that, effective immediately, it is taking several steps: It will stop deporting North Koreans, allow the United Nations to set up refugee camps, and permit the resettlement of refugees in third countries, from which they could go to South Korea, whose constitution codifies its moral responsibility to accept its Northern cousins, or to other countries willing to take them in. The U.S., which so far has accepted a mere eight North Koreans, could step up to the plate here.
The Border Police document notes that since the early 1980s there have been six instances of mass migrations that have coincided with North Korea’s famines. Now, winter is coming, and there are already reports of food shortages. Allowing the world to help the North Korean refugees in China would help Beijing deal with a problem that is likely to get worse.
Thomas Lifson on RealClearPolitics.com (The American Thinker): “The Desperate Dictator: Kim Jong-Il”
Any dictator who can allow a million or two of his 20 million countrymen to die of starvation, rather than open up his country to allow the adequate provision of proffered aid, must be pretty well invulnerable. Death by starvation is visible, prolonged, painful, and heart-wrenching for the survivors. Anyone dominant enough to compel mass acceptance of starvation must have an iron grip on the reins of power.
Or so one might assume.
Thus most foreign observers consider Kim Jong-il to be acting to achieve foreign policy goals of some sort by provocatively launching missiles and detonating nuclear devices. Perhaps he is demonstrating to terrorist state customers that he has salable goods? Or perhaps he is seeking unilateral talks with the United States? Or perhaps he is just aid-seeking or even anticipating another deal like he got with Bill Clinton, in which the United States will supply billions of dollars in aid in return for promises he doesn’t intend to honor.
But an alternative theory of power in North Korea suggests that Kim is in fact desperate, and is acting to quiet a threatened rebellion by the only group which matters when it comes to domestic power: the North Korean military.
David Warren, in the Ottawa Citizen: Desolations
When I filed this, the United States was still trying to get a limp resolution through the United Nations, condemning North Korea for its claim to have tested a nuclear device, in defiance of all its international agreements. The Americans wanted something like “the full chapter seven” — which would not merely impose, but enforce a general embargo on all shipments of military equipment to the rogue state, and could lead to a naval blockade to isolate it. Instead, to please not only its enemies such as China, but its nominal allies such as France, the U.S. has watered its resolution down to “Article 41″ measures, such as making empty diplomatic gestures, and banning air travel. The pressure was continuing, to water the U.S. resoluton down some more.
The matter is unimportant at one practical level. For even if the psychopaths in Pyongyang cried uncle, they would only have to hide their nuclear programme a little more effectively, in return for the receipt of the generous aid package they negotiated a year ago. There being no commitment even from the U.S. to remove the rogue regime.
Charles Krauthammer on RealClearPolitics.com (the Washington Times) : What Will Stop North Korea
It shall be the policy of this Nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.
– President John F. Kennedy, Oct. 22, 1962
WASHINGTON — Now that’s deterrence.
Kennedy was pledging that if any nuke was launched from Cuba, the United States would not even bother with Cuba but go directly to the source and bring the apocalypse to Russia with a massive nuclear attack.
The remarkable thing about this kind of threat is that in 1962 it was very credible. Indeed, its credibility kept the peace throughout a half-century of Cold War.
Deterrence is what you do when there is no way to disarm your enemy. You cannot deprive him of his weapons, but you can keep him from using them. We long ago reached that stage with North Korea.
Richard Halloran on RealClearPolitics gives a run-down of the four options currently open in dealing with North Korea, and the limitations of each: “No-Win Reactions to N. Korea’s Actions”
The detonation of what North Korea claimed was a nuclear device last week should not have been a surprise as it has been evident for many months that the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, had no intention of giving up his nuclear ambitions.
The New York Times reported that the explosion had given the Bush Administration and much of Washington a “strategic jolt.” But that was because official Washington hasn’t been paying attention, consumed as it has been with Iraq, the Middle East, and the coming elections.
The critical question now is what the U.S. and its allies should do next. None of the options is promising: Negotiations, Sanctions, Military Force, Do Nothing
Jon B. Wolfsthal in Pittsburg Live: “Avoiding Armageddon”
After pursuing atomic weaponry for the better part of a generation, it now appears that North Korea has finally clawed its way into the “Nuclear Club.” And that means that the global strategic game has changed forever.
North Korea, which was barely tolerable to the major Asian powers back when it was merely a potential troublemaker, is now a real and present danger. The time for negotiations is over. Now it’s about containment and deterrence.
Todd Crowell on RealClearPolitics.com: “A Deadly Kind of Fizzle”
It is probably unwise to taunt a man who commands a million-man army. It is also probably unseemly to make light of the man’s ballistic and nuclear weapons, even if they don’t work.
Right now people around the world are running around in circles, pulling their hair and wringing their hands over North Korea’s underground atomic bomb test, when it ought to be the subject of late-night television comedians.
In the old days opposing armies faced each other in an open field before the battle , war paint on their faces, feathers in their helmets, rattling their shields and making rude comments about their opponents’ manhood.
Today global leaders rattle their ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons rather than spears and battle axes, but it is still a macho world. And in macho terms, Kim Jong-il is a man who literally can’t get it up.
