Monthly Archive: January, 2009

What our negotiations with North Korea have always lacked was structure — starting with spine — but also deadlines, benchmarks, clear expectations, and clear consequences for reneging on agreed terms. As a result, two decades of American nuclear diplomacy have accomplished little except to solidify and reward North Korea’s instincts for stalling, lying, cheating, and moving the goalposts, often in ways that pose grave dangers to our national security. Occasionally, enough Americans notice this pattern that American politicians feel compelled...

Update: Or, Chris Hill might succeed at keeping his job. BBC monitoring, quoting the Japanese Monthly Sentaku, claims that Richard Holbrooke is leaning on Hillary Clinton to keep Hill, and that the Japanese are wary about that possibility. No link, sorry. Hope! Change! If this piece in the Washington Times has it right, it’s going to be Harvard Professor Kurt Campbell, who also advised the Pentagon on Asia-Pacific issues during the Clinton Administration and a number of other government and...

In these times, terrorists, whose training manuals teach them to fabricate claims of torture, can sue law enforcement officers for damages in our courts for having the temerity to interrupt their plans. If we’ve dispensed with the idea of keeping disputes between individuals and states out of the courts, it’s at least just to allow American victims of torture to seek compensation against those — including foreign states — who wronged them. A few years ago, Congress removed an impediment...