We’re screwing up the U.S.-Japanese alliance … but what for?

On the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page, Kyoko Nakayama, a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan, tries”>tries to keep America’s attention on  an issue the Bush Administration wants you to forget.  If South Korea care about its abductees as much as Japan does about its abductees, a lot more of them  might be free.  Of course, if the United States cared as much about Japan’s abductees as it once pretended to, it would not have done such lasting damage to our relationship with Japan by even entertaining the thought of de-listing an unreformed serial kidnapper-for-ransom as a sponsor of terrorism.

I can understand arguments for  eschewing principles for cold-hearted interests, but  one of our greatest diplomatic  needs to explain to me just what national interest is so compelling that it justifies flipping the bird to one of our greatest allies and trading partners.  Either someone isn’t telling us about the North Korean nuke buried under the White House, the ChiComs has secretly kidnapped and replaced our entire  State Department, or Chris Hill has a nasty  crank habit the North Koreans are feeding.  Those theories have their limitations, but they’re all more plausible than  any that requires  faith in the  idea  that, sometime in the next seven months,  Kim Jong Il will be stricken by a  fit of sentimentality  and  surrender his nukes to  this flock of boneless lame ducks.  In what alternative universe is that called “realism?”