The Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations insisted that a nuclear-armed North Korea would be “unacceptable” even as Pyongyang continued to test and develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems. In fact, as recently as a couple of years ago foreign policy experts of the Democratic and Republican establishments were still patting themselves on the back over their self described success in containing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
But while U.S. foreign policy experts were busily congratulating themselves, North Korea was busy developing ICBM’s, nuclear bombs and miniaturization technology. Now North Korea is threatening to launch a few of those ICBM’s very close to Guam. One would think that the foreign policy establishment would be humbled by such a crashing bipartisan policy failure that was 25 years in the making.
Not a bit.
Lest this seem a tad harsh, let’s review what the foreign policy establishment has been saying all along. In 2013, then Secretary of State John Kerry said a nuclear-armed North Korea was unacceptable. In 2003 then President George W. Bush said the U.S. would “not tolerate” a nuclear-armed North Korea. And of course, the Clinton Administration’s Agreed Framework designed to curb North Korea’s nuclear ambitions was signed in 1994, and collapsed in failure in relatively short order.
And for the sake of completeness, we can’t leave out Hillary Clinton’s immense contribution to the predicament we are now in. Her war in Libya led to the execution of Moammar Gadhafi by U.S. backed rebels after he surrendered his nukes, a development that was surely noted by Pyongyang.
Needless to say, the authors of the failed North Korea nuclear policy have leapt right in to the fray without missing a beat. Hillary Clinton sagely notes that “Tweets won’t solve [the problem]”. Thanks for that, Hill.
Best of all, Susan Rice, former Obama Administration National Security Advisor and go to Ben Ghazi liar, now says that the U.S. can tolerate a nuclear-armed North Korea after all. If you like your doctor and all that, I suppose.
So the question is: why in the world should anybody take these people seriously? They have produced a catastrophic policy failure that just may lead to a nuclear exchange resulting in millions of deaths, and possibly a nuclear strike on the United States. Undaunted, after insisting for years that a nuclear armed North Korea is unacceptable, the party line is rapidly moving into just how acceptable it is. The people who for years insisted that North Korea’s regime was populated by crackpots, now tell us we can contain the regime because after all, they are rational and want to survive.
But look at it this way—it took about 25 years for the North Korea policy failure to be undeniable. It may only take 5 years for the U.S. policy with respect to Iran’s nuclear capacity to collapse in utter failure.
JFB