WarSclerotic

North Korea Points to the Way on Iran.

“The U.S. has no good options.” How many times have we heard that refrain in the days since North Korea attacked the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong?

In fact, even calling our options “options” is optimistic. We have obligations. Foremost among these is our obligation to “act to meet the common danger” now manifest in North Korea, as stipulated by a mutual defense treaty signed in 1953. Even if the president wanted to stay clear of the action in the Koreas, he couldn’t do so without breaking America’s promise to a long-standing democratic ally.

After obligations, we have hopes. We hope China will rein in the aggressive regime in Pyongyang. We hope that that regime is being tactically provocative and not irrevocably bellicose. We hope Kim Jong-il wants aid or summitry or a smooth transition of leadership for his son, not the destruction of his neighbor to the South. But we can’t know. Decades of bad bipartisan policy have left us guessing at the deathbed motives of a nuclear-armed paranoiac.

The words coming from the Obama administration do not instill confidence. When the Kim regime revealed its new and highly advanced uranium enrichment facility, U.S. Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth said that American officials still “do not at all rule out the possibility of further engagement with North Korea,” and he let Americans know that “this is not a crisis. We are not surprised by this.” That was Monday. On Tuesday, under the calm and knowing watch of engagement-ready Washington, North Korea launched an unprovoked artillery attack on Yeonpyeong. If there was still no crisis, someone forgot to tell the South Koreans, who contemplated aloud the redeployment of American atomic warheads to South Korea.

It should come as no surprise that when Pyongyang conducted verifiable nuclear and missile tests in May 2009, Ambassador Bosworth assured us that there was — you guessed it — “not a sense of crisis” in Washington.

This unreachable crisis threshold is emblematic of an academic and political class that forever expects the better angels of autocrats and fascists to be lured out by the bait of American affection. For even after Ambassador Bosworth’s conciliatory engagement hint was answered with a deadly shelling, President Jimmy Carter took to the pages of the Washington Post to explain that all the North Korean leaders wanted was “respect in negotiations that will shape their future.” It is a position that can rightly be called eccentric.

However, in a sense, Bosworth was almost right. Nuclear tests and enrichment facilities are not, in themselves, crises. When they exist in democratic countries, they are guarantors of efficiency, productivity, and security. Under the auspices of rogue regimes, they are downstream indicators of a crisis that has already occurred: a modern-day tyrant has taken hold of a country. It is at that point that we can begin to wait on the benchmarks of WMD acquisition and transnational attack.

Our paralysis on North Korea, therefore, makes one thing clear: we cannot, for any reason, allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. The only good option today is to ensure that we do not end up with “no good options” when faced with an aggressive and unpredictable nuclear Islamic Republic. If guessing at Kim Jong-il’s motives makes fools of us all, just imagine trying to react to a nuclear theocratic thug-state perpetually sponsoring regional terror and frozen in a cold domestic revolution. Just as the U.S. is obligated to defend North Korea’s neighbors, so too are we obligated to our allies in the Middle East, most critically Israel. If war on the Korean peninsula threatens to destabilize the region, imagine what happens when you throw oil into the mix. Worst of all, where the cult of Kim is unpredictable, the doctrine of Khomeinist Islamism is not. Pyongyang may ultimately only want goodies or talks or an unfettered palace ascendancy. For the leaders in Tehran, however, everything is a means to defeating America and her allies.

On Saturday, Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s atomic-energy organization, announced that the country’s first nuclear power plant, in Bushehr, has been completely fueled. As Stephen Bosworth would put it, we are not surprised by this. Whether we are prepared to do anything about it remains to be seen.

In an age of unprecedented peace, there is an illusion that the status quo is inevitable and — provided we leave things alone — eternal. If we had not invaded Iraq, so this thinking holds, Saddam’s regime would have remained an unrealized threat. If undisturbed by American overreach, troublemakers in distant lands will keep their provocations far from our shores; bad actors seeking greater power will remain merely aspirational; the occasional demonstration of aggression will be met with an appropriate reprimand; and an acceptable stasis will hold indefinitely.

In reality, a rogue nation attacks an American ally for reasons so unrelated to American intrusiveness that some cite lack of American involvement as a possible provocation. “North Korea insists on direct talks with the United States,” Jimmy Carter writes. And of the supposed nuclear deal it’s ready to strike? “We should consider responding to this offer.” Let’s respond to Iran before it, too, can start calling the shots.

This entry was posted on November 28, 2010 at 6:36 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.