Catching Up …

Well, that was nice while it lasted: a hiatus spent playing with my kids and the excess of gifts they got last month. A few things I can’t let pass without some mention, starting with this question: can it be a bad thing, from the perspective of North Korea policy, that Kim Jong Bill is too tainted to hold a cabinet position? Doesn’t competing with Chris Hill to see who can appease the North Koreans more put you in line for eventual infamy, by definition?

Another report tells us that North Koreans are losing their fear of expressing open dissent, though I think the word “resistance” implies something that this article does not describe. This is consistent with other reports we’ve seen in the last several years, though it’s hard to say how far the trend has advanced.

I’m glad to see that South Korean activists have restarted those balloon launches.

By now, you’ve probably seen Michael Gerson’s eleventh-hour condemnation of his former boss’s unheroic North Korea policy:

As a practical matter, Hill’s exclusion of humanitarian issues in negotiations — including the issue of North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens — has offended America’s Japanese allies.

As a matter of judgment, Hill has accompanied his approach to North Korea with a crude moral equivalence. Recently questioned about North Korean human rights abuses, Hill responded, “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.”

This is staggering from a Bush official, or any American official. The United States is a flawed but noble nation. Kim’s North Korea is a vast prison camp, practicing what Elie Wiesel and Vaclav Havel, in a report to the United Nations, termed “crimes against humanity.” Comparing human rights in the United States and North Korea is not national humility, it is a libel against our country and the trivialization of immense human suffering — a kind of moral blindness sometimes confused with diplomatic sophistication.

In practice, this approach is simplistic. It posits a binary choice between diplomatic engagement and the defense of American values. If we want to get something accomplished with North Korea — or China or Iran — we need to play down human rights. But this diplomatic approach is awkward for a nation committed to liberty, inviting charges of hypocrisy. And it squanders one of America’s greatest soft-power advantages — the appeal of human rights to the next generation of dissidents and (one hopes) leaders in North Korea, Iran and elsewhere. [Michael Gerson in the Washington Post]

Writing in the Epoch Times, DJ McGuire thinks Gerson sounds as bad as me. That bad? I have to say I like the way John Bolton put it here:

The recent, embarrassing collapse of the six-party talks starkly underlines how, under Mr. Obama, everything old will be new again. The talks are classic multilateral diplomacy, pursued since 2003 with notable deference to North Korea. There’s been about as much engagement with Pyongyang as consenting adults can lawfully have. [John Bolton in the Wall St. Journal]

Finally, I refer you to Adrian Hong’s piece in the IHT, “A Faustian Failure.” That’s one I will just recommend you read in its entirety. I liked this piece by Adrian as well. If there’s one criticism I have of Hong’s piece, it’s that he leaves the means to change North Korea’s regime unstated and open to the distortion of others. In fact, and as I’ve explained, it can be done non-violently, and I don’t know anyone who advocates doing it militarily, except through a nascent North Korean resistance that has yet to reveal itself.

I suspect the legacy of George W. Bush will probably be to give Obama cover to continue to do as bad as Bush did, or worse. Writing in the Asia Times, Prof. Sung Yoon Lee urges Obama to be patient in the face of North Korean provocations. As a matter of short-term crisis managment, that’s great advice. From a perspective of long-term crisis management, however, I posit that we’ve been mostly harmed by an excess of patience and an unwillingness to demand deadlines, benchmarks, and strict compliance with the agreed terms of our deals with the North.

Thanks to all of who forwarded links.