Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

The point man for the Obama administration’s financial wars on Iran, North Korea and al Qaeda, Stuart Levey, has decided to leave his senior U.S. Treasury Department post at what is turning out to be a particularly critical time.

Someone wake me up now, dammit!

Senior Obama administration officials disclosed Mr. Levey’s departure, after nearly a decade in government service, but stressed that it doesn’t signal a shift in U.S. policy or a slackening of Washington’s financial campaigns against Tehran, Pyongyang and international terrorist groups.

They said the White House is set to nominate David Cohen, Mr. Levey’s deputy at Treasury and longtime confidante, to succeed him as the undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence. Mr. Levey, a Republican, was one of the few senior members of President George W. Bush’s national security team to stay on under Mr. Obama.

“When Stuart came [into the Obama administration], he agreed to stay for six months, and it’s been two years. There’s no perfect time for these things. But this is as good a time as any” to make the change, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said. “It will have no effect on policy, or on our ability to execute the President’s policy.”

Messrs. Levey and Cohen, in a joint interview at the Treasury last week, said they believed U.S. strategy wouldn’t be slowed because the two men had closely coordinated in implementing sanctions policy over the past two years. [WSJ, Jay Solomon]

That may be, but a visit from Stuart Levey or an alert from his department intimidated the Chinese and the North Koreans more than three aircraft carrier battle groups, and his diplomacy was almost effective enough to make up for all of the damage done by the State Department during his tenure. Through two administrations, he was the only consistently effective official at his level. Stuart Levey was Mr. Plan B. People with that kind of expertise, creativity, and talent aren’t fungible. And if we’re about to see a softer Obama policy toward North Korea during the second half of his term, this is about when you’d expect to see Levey go.

The man to watch closely now, if you ask me, is Daniel Glaser. Glaser is a Democrat, but he’s equally committed to enforcing the law against North Korea. He doesn’t see North Korea’s money laundering and proliferation in partisan terms, and has the respect of members of both parties on the Hill. If Glaser leaves, no amount of Washington “wishes to spend more time with his family” doubletalk will console me. Levey isn’t the first of the sanctions hawks to leave the Obama Administration. Just over a year ago, Phillip Goldberg quit as sanctions coordinator.

Goldberg’s departure may not have been about policy. Since he left, we’ve seen the administration roll out potentially effective sanctions in the form of Executive Order 13,551, but we’ve seen no signs yet that it’s prepared to sanction the Chinese state-owned entities that are propping up Kim Jong Il and simultaneously grabbing up North Korean resources and (arguably) territory. Without that critical step, sanctions will fail. It worries me that men like Goldberg and Levey might have grown frustrated with this inaction. And it worries me that without effective sanctions, we’ll have lost our last real non-violent option. That means we’re down to finding some form of military action that we have a reasonable chance of containing once we unleash it.