Desperately in need of a stranger’s hand

At the end of last month, I linked to a post at Powerline, quoting Noah Pollak on the subject of Annapolis, which I said then could just as well apply to Condi Rice’s eleventh-hour test of Kim Jong Il’s character. Pollak said,

If Condi’s pursuit of the peace process is due to a belief that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is possible and will unlock the forces of moderation and conviviality in the Middle East, then, well, she is simply a fool. If it is because she wishes to add this most elusive accomplishment to her legacy, then she is a narcissist.

But could Secretary Rice really be that foolish or narcissistic? Apparently so.

During her Christmas holidays that year [2006], Rice read through mountains of State Department records. She wanted to learn a lesson from how the Clinton administration wound up its tenure.

Rice revised her goals. She decided that Bush would need some achievements he could display to the American people and she a legacy to leave behind as secretary of state. She had to take a realistic and practical approach. A good example of her change was her decision to find a breakthrough in the North Korean nuclear talks by unfreezing North Korea’s US$25 million from the Banco Delta Asia in Macao. [Chosun Ilbo, Kang In-Sun]

One woman’s legacy is another’s felony. How “realistic and practical” is laundering dirty money to cajole good faith out of a genocidal pathological liar? So much for a critical press. If they want the ends badly enough, they’ll even help you justify the means.

The ensuing sudden change in U.S. policy was the outcome of the decision Rice made right after the North Korean nuclear test. Bush gave his consent. Both were desperate for Iraq to be the last and only foreign-policy nightmare for the administration. That is the context in which Bush has now sent a personal letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

Kang is the former Washington correspondent for the Chosun Ilbo. Here, she relates information she drew from the odious Glenn Kessler’s “The Confidante,” which , not an article. I don’t doubt for a minute that Kessler is plugged into the mainstream of State Department thought, so I’m inclined to believe this. It’s interesting information that Rice would draw such consequential policy judgments from a cocktail of emotion, impulse, and a desire for self-aggrandizement. Maybe the correct answer to Pollak’s question is “both.”

Kang’s own analysis adds little to our understanding. It’s the same bland, unoriginal blame-America reflex we’ve come to know so well and like so little about a nation that wouldn’t exist, much less produce a glut of ankle-biting columns, without America’s willingness to (as JFK would later put it) “pay any price, bear any burden.” And while the pre-Vietnam use of “any” was later proven to be excessive, you have to wonder what kind of world South Korean columnists would live in if “any” were replaced by “no.”

Beyond that, for Rice and Kang alike, one senses a facile and emotional grasp at “escapist” diplomacy — that is, a desperate groping for some “easy button” that will make complex international crises just go away. Because escapist diplomacy is emotional and hollow, it is blind to the motives of interlocutors that deprive it of real prospects for success, at least without the assistance of other strategies, so incomprehensibly abandoned, and whose effectiveness far exceeded our expectations.

At least Rice won’t have to read about how quickly and quietly Treasury disposed of a crisis that State could not.