Comments on: Ralph Cossa is wrong; Pressure on North Korea worked, when applied

By: Left Flank » Blog Archive » Beijing Advises Calm over DPRK Deadline

Left Flank » Blog Archive » Beijing Advises Calm over DPRK Deadline — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:17:05 +0000

[...] Ever since the late 1940s, "natural" is hardly the word I would use to describe dealing with DPRK. The pulling of perfectly good teeth is more like it. But, if Beijing, who after all have more influence than the US – especially post Treasury fiasco, or when Washington is not opposed by anyone, which is never – says it’s "natural" for delays to occur, then it has to be the truth. "The pace is faster in some areas and slower in some areas. This is natural," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a news conference, urging all sides to fulfill their respective pledges. [...]

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 04:07:59 +0000

Welcome back. By the way, after doing a lot of research, I ended up going with a Dell Inspiron 1420.

By: Richardson

Richardson — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 02:26:34 +0000

I agree that Cossa is way off-base on the assertion related to sanctions; Noland and Haggard already put that to bed.

Hitchensâ€™ anti-religious zealousness makes me take him much less seriously that I would otherwise.

By: usinkorea

usinkorea — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 02:35:18 +0000

Some people just can’t bring themselves to consider that force is also a tool of negociation. Somehow, in the Western mindset of higher education and State Department-think, “diplomacy” only means that if everybody will sit down at a table and speak nice to each other, problems will be solved ——– no matter how much the real world shows that not to be the case.

There was an article out of the UK some time ago by a liberal who confessed this nature of he as his collegues from the 60s to now. They couldn’t bring themselves to admit their dreams were hopeless because they could find no formulation that would work on regimes like the one in Pyongyang and it only made them bitter that what did work (from time to time only) were means antithetical to their ideals, and this was what led them to be so critical of much of Western foreign policy —– in desperation to feel like they could make a difference, they turned their frustration on the one side they had some chance of influencing — and in the end pretty much crossing their fingers hoping against all hope that a change of heart on one side could bring about movement on the other.

I’m not saying this is Cossa himself. I am saying it is a symptom of the malaise that is State Department-think.

(And I guess it is pretty much a textbook definition of the Sunshine Policy)

And this thinking has apparently settled into the Bush administration.

It took years for the US to get what eventually proved to be effective pressure on the North. It made the North squirm and got them back to the table, but then we didn’t have enough sense and fortitude to follow through in the negociations themselves.

This Cossa piece, and how the Bush administration has acted since the talks renewed, as well as the words of other analysts, just show how much they failed to learn anything from how North Korea was forced back to the table.

Without that lesson seeping in, what we got was a rapid dismantling of what was working.

And no reason to believe that lesson will be learned and applied again in the near future. Especially with a new administration slated to come into power in the US after next year.