Frostbrain

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A snag in what is probably the easiest phase of the North Korea nuclear agreement has sparked new criticism of the Bush administration but U.S. officials appear committed to pursuing a solution, even if it reverses previous policy.

More than a month after Pyongyang was due to shut down its Yongbyon nuclear complex under a Feb 13 deal, it has not done so, insisting it first receive $25 million in once-frozen accounts.

“It’s tricky but I think some way forward will be found because everybody has such an interest in getting this issue stabilized,” said Gary Samore, a non-proliferation expert and vice president at the Council on Foreign Relations. [Reuters, Carol Giacomo]

If you can call one side’s complete non-performance and the addition of absurd, non-agreed demands “a snag,” then this story will no doubt lull you in the manner Carol Giacomo transparently intended. For the rest of us, it’s just depressingly predictable to see us betraying every actual and potential ally to sustain those who mean us harm.

There isn’t much of interest I can say about this kind of stupidity that I haven’t already said dozens of times, and it’s pretty depressing to see just how low the collective IQ of our diplomatic brain trust really is. To hear people straining to break law and logic to preserve a deal that does nothing for us but decorate the display cases of presidential libraries has a cauterizing effect on one’s frontal lobe. Life supplies that sort of thing in ample quantity as it is; why fill your spare time with it, too? It makes for exceedingly dull blogging for you to read, and for me to write, with the occasional exception:

It is “perplexing to see the U.S. now take a series of unilateral steps to unravel this policy (of U.N. sanctions and related actions) and reward North Korea for doing … well nothing,” Michael Green, a former White House Asia adviser during the period when Bush refused to talk to Pyongyang, wrote in the Financial Times.

Plus, I’ve already told you what the plan is and in general terms, how it will turn out. The Administration will succeed at burying this story through the remainder of its duration. The real problem issues — uranium, human rights, inspection, and verification — are being delegated to “working groups” that not even the wire services will care about during an election year. Perhaps, then, what I have to say for now might be better said to a wider audience, so I’m going to focus on writing pieces for publication for a while. Whenever this story becomes interesting again, I’ll have more to say here.

In the end, of course, the only people who can save North Korea are the North Koreans themselves. We can steepen the odds against them for a while, but inevitably, a change is coming, for better or for worse, because the current system isn’t sustainable and can’t be reformed without releasing the whirlwind. Just as inevitably, people will eventually wonder why the Agreed Framework of 2007 didn’t stop the North Koreans from building, testing, and selling extremely dangerous things, and we’ll be right back to a much scarier redux of where we stood in 2001 — wondering what we were thinking.