Gates to North Korea: You Are Clear for Lift-Off! (Plus, N. Korea’s Nuclear “Reset Button”)
Is Obama the new Kennedy, or the new Carter?
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union”¦. To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation and port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. [John F. Kennedy, Oct. 22, 1962]
… Mr. Gates said the United States had no plans to take military action to halt the launching or to shoot down the missile in flight — with one exception. “If we had an aberrant missile, one that was headed for Hawaii, that looked like it was headed for Hawaii or something like that, we might consider it,” Mr. Gates said. [New York Times, Mar. 29, 2009]
I tend to see Robert Gates as one of the new administration’s responsible adults, but he hasn’t learned the first rule of deterrence.
North Korea is now threatening to press a reset button of its own — this one on the entire six-party sham if we take any action based on its missile test:
In an interview with the official Korea Central News Agency, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said “even a word” by the UN Security Council about “the peaceful launch of a satellite” would constitute “violent hostility.” [Chosun Ilbo]
I’d previously predicted that North Korea was looking for an excuse to do just that, so this isn’t surprising. North Korea wants a new round of American concessions in exchange for the same promises it has broken before, and the Obama Administration appears to have no better ideas than to go along. As an indication of just how little the last two years of Chris Hill’s diplomacy have accomplished, North Korea is threatening to restart its “disabled” plutonium reprocessing program at Yongbyon:
” … All the processes for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula … will be brought back to what used to be before their start and necessary strong measures will be taken,” the North’s foreign ministry spokesman said in comments carried by the official KCNA news agency. [Reuters, Jonathan Thatcher]
So after all those concessions, North Korea is in a position to threaten the undoing of Chris Hill’s sole claim to any accomplishment at all — the partial “disabling” of the 5-MW reactor at Yongbyon. Does that necessarily mean restarting the 5-MW reactor? That wouldn’t be my first guess. Instead, I’d wager that the 50-MW reactor next door is more likely to be rushed to completion, but either way, the fact that we’re now faced with the very same threat after all those concessions speaks volumes about how little our diplomatic brain trust has accomplished in North Korea.
Gates let slip this assessment of the minimal impact North Korea’s walkout would really have:
“The reality is that the six-party talks really have not made any headway anytime recently… Launching a missile like this and threatening to have a nuclear test, I think it says a lot about the imperviousness of this regime in North Korea to any kind of diplomatic overtures,” Gates told Wallace. [The Politico]
Sounds like a ringing endorsement of the man who would be our next ambassador in Baghdad, doesn’t it?