Wrong Path on North Korea
In a further indication of the Bush administration's lack of a clear plan towards North Korea, it has been announced that the Bush regime plans further sanctions against the regime of Kim Jong Il's.
The danger of further sanctions is that the North Koreans will simply continue with more missile tests, a point that the Bush regime's allies have been stressing to no avail.
Leaving aside the disaster of Iraq and the mess the Bush regime has made of the wider Middle East, nothing exemplifies the failure of the neo-con foreign policy more clearly than North Korea.Recent U.S. financial sanctions based on North Korea's money-laundering and counterfeiting of U.S. currency have been painful for Pyongyang's free-spending leadership. But neither these sanctions nor the impending comprehensive sanctions are likely to lead to the demise of the 60-year-old North Korean regime or to a positive shift away from its militaristic actions. Instead, the predictable result of new sanctions now is new steps by Pyongyang to prove it will not be intimidated: additional tests of ballistic missiles or an underground nuclear explosion to validate its declaration early last year that it is "a full-fledged nuclear weapons state."
In June 2005 Kim Jong Il told a South Korean emissary that his country possesses nuclear weapons but that it does not need to test them. Semi-official U.S. estimates are that Pyongyang has sufficient nuclear material for six to 12 nuclear weapons, though the status of bomb assembly is unknown. Should Kim's regime be spurred to test such a device, the repercussions of a successful test for the global drive against the spread of nuclear weapons would be great, with especially powerful political and military impact in Northeast Asia. Such an event might prompt extensive new arms programs, possibly including nuclear weapons programs, by South Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Why, at such a time, choose sanctions, a policy option whose historical record is overwhelmingly one of failure? One possible reason is that sanctions give vent to the visceral hostility that senior Bush administration officials feel toward North Korea. Another is that sanctions could be a defense, however inadequate, against political charges that the administration has done little or nothing to slow North Korea's nuclear programs. But a sanctions-based policy ignores the damage it would do to those in North Korea seeking transformational change and greater openness. Some longtime foreign observers believe such trends are gathering force.
Under Clinton, they were very much contained. Under Bush they are on the verge of becoming, or may very well already have become, a nuclear state. And Bush appears to have no plan to prevent this.
Now, by calling for further sanctions, Bush - similar to his failed policy in Iraq - is simply calling for more of the same.
Sticking to the course is blatantly not working. Sadly, Bush has no other plans.
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