Eberstadt in The Weekly Standard

In an interesting piece entitled, “Tear Down This Tyranny,” Nicholas Eberstadt does a good job of explaining how Bush’s first-term North Korea policy failed, and bluntly identifies many of those (China, South Korea, the State Department) that contributed to its failure.

Ultimately, however, reading the article is like foreplay without consummation–deeply unsatisfying. Eberstadt talks about adopting a policy of regime change without specifying just how we would do it, opening him up to the same all-policy-no-options criticism with which he assails the State Department. That may be the burden of writing for a publication as heavily identified with the Administration as The Weekly Standard. The assumption that the author speaks for the government must have great power to chill discussion that might lead us toward real policy options. One can only wonder what the article looked like before the editing.