Bosworth, On “Colbert,” Shifts the Goal Posts

The appearance was distressing on two levels. First, how is it possible that Stephen Colbert could be so funny on the Daily Show and yet provide so little entertainment value on his own show? Stewart becomes unwatchable during election years, but even when John Yoo is wiping the smirk off his face, Stewart still operates at a high level of sophistication. Colbert, on the other hand, seems to be playing for an audience that reads at a fourth-grade level, not because he isn’t intelligent, but because of the limitations imposed by the so-very-tired character he plays.

The appearance could have had great diplomatic and comic potential, all of which went unrealized. Stewart might well have forced Bosworth to defend some of his more untenable assumptions, but Colbert’s questions were cast from Nerf. They weren’t intelligent, funny, or calculated to evoke revealing responses. He even took a dig at John Bolton, the architect of the Proliferation Security Initiative and UNSCR 1718, now the foundations on which Obama’s North Korea policy and UNSCR 1874 stand. I don’t expect a clown like Colbert to know this, I don’t expect any presidential appointee in this administration to have the integrity to concede it, and I don’t expect Colbert’s audience to question it (still, the falsehood grates). Bosworth brushed all of this aside with a patronizing tone that couldn’t have been entirely faked, then plodded on with talking points that could have been written by Wendy Sherman in 1996 and unsealed for any such occasion.

More distressing was Bosworth’s softening of the Obama Administration’s previous insistence that North Korea must disarm before there can be negotiations on a peace treaty, or any other such distraction. Now, Bosworth says, North Korea must merely “begin to give up its nuclear weapons” before we proceed to peace talks (because that process is sure to be as frictionless and unstoppable as a ski jump once begun!). Maybe they can blow up another cooling tower for us.

You could defend Bosworth by saying none of this is really much different than what the Bush and Clinton Administrations believed before. Fine, but since the foreign policy Nostradamii wrote out these prophecies decades ago, we’ve had two nuke tests, two U.N. resolutions, two agreed frameworks, one Sunshine policy, multiple missile tests, one Syrian reactor, multiple shipments of banned arms intercepted, and God-knows-how-many North Koreans sacrificed for all of this. Don’t facts ever change conclusions? Doesn’t the conventional “wisdom” that North Korea really just wants to disarm and get along with everyone deserve a second look, because 2009 was a pretty damning year for it.

You could also defend Bosworth by saying that this is just so much cosmetic talk for public consumption, delivered on a comedy show after all. It used to be my default position to assume that diplomats didn’t really believe the naive things they said, but I was proven wrong enough times to change a few assumptions of my own. My new default position is never to underestimate the U.S. Department of State. Bosworth gives me no reason to question that view now.