Comments on: 2007: A Lost Year

By: usinkorea

usinkorea — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:51:50 +0000

Speaking of previous foreign policy examples, I was bored today, and spending some time in the toilet, and I picked up and re-read the chapter in Kissinger’s Diplomacy on Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War.

I think that chapter could be a blue print for a North Korea policy I would like to see put into place.

In just about every way I think about it, North Korea is placed in a much more prime position for the policy to be more effective than it was with the USSR in the 80s.

I tried to write it up on my blog today, but my head is too thick, and there were too many good tid bits from that chapter to write up.

I just recommend people read it….

It contains, also, what I mean when I say from time to time that people with State Department-think have trouble accepting that confrontation is an acceptable tool of diplomacy itself — not its diametric opposite.

Reagan showed you can both engage and actively confront a powerful enemy nation. He also showed you can both despise and engage in negociations with a nation.

Bush seemed to have understood that with his axis of evil comments and slowly and doggedly working to get China to apply effective pressure on the North. But, unlike Reagan, when he finally got to the table, he lost the will to maintain the strength and pressure that forced Pyongyang to the table in the first place.

By: Rand Millar

Rand Millar — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 17:29:30 +0000

New Yearâ€™s Greetings Joshua Stanton. As 2008 commences your pen of indictment retains it clarion quality. The present disgraceful accommodation to the ongoing Kim family regime atrocity recalls the Compromise of 1850 during the struggle against slavery in the USA, or the dismissal of Anthony Eden as British Foreign Secretary in February 1937 during the struggle against Hitlerism. You will always find the equivalents of Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas, of Lord Halifax and Nevile Henderson, to ably resist confrontation with the evil. Times enough, it must seem as if banging oneâ€™s head against an ever-denser wall. Even so, the resources of the Kim family regime at this stage are much depleted and far fewer than the resources amassed by the other evils in their times, and so perhaps one may dare to dream that the head Hennessy imbiber in Pyongyang may become history with little or no innocent blood shed. Even so, the vigilant, implacable efforts of you and your brother bloggers, of Christian pastors, and of manifold others in each his or her way, are quite essential to the freedom and salvation of the people in northern Korea. So much appreciated by a few now, and many more in Godâ€™s good time – ë§Œìƒˆ!

By: usinkorea

usinkorea — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 15:40:35 +0000

At least we did get to see that the North Korean ICBM program has not advanced much since 1998. (Of course, North Korea learned this as well and though the failure set them back a good bit, they can now work feverishly to fix the problems the test displayed.)

And we got to see that the North probably doesn’t have a good nuclear bomb model — which again – the North’s test, though a failure, shows them they have to work at it more.

By: North Korea Sucks, And We’re Stupid at No Man’s Blog

North Korea Sucks, And We’re Stupid at No Man’s Blog — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 13:09:18 +0000

[...] Joshua Stanton at One Free Korea offers a highly informative timeline that documents our bungled attempts at denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.Â The timeline runs from 2002 until the present.Â His final paragraph is telling: January 2008: The last year of the Bush Administration begins; the Administration and the North Koreans have just 12 more months to run out the clock while pretending that this diplomacy is still viable. And yet, nothing has been solved or will be as long as Kim Jong Il has nothing to fear lives. [...]