Open Sources

Gee, but won’t that upset them?

“During the Key Resolve joint drill to be held in March, the two nations’ forces will jointly conduct exercises to remove North Korea’s nuclear weapons and WMDs,” a military source said, asking not to be identified. “Although this exercise first began in 2009, (the military) will strengthen the program this year.”

Writing at the Shadow Government blog, Michael Green worries that President Obama is about to “go wobbly” on North Korea. I’m worried about that, too.

My friend Joseph Hong pulls no punches in this piece for the Korea Times. I don’t endorse all of the views he espouses here, but there are also many ideas here that are worthy of discussion.

I suppose if North Korea is going to illegally sell weapons to Africa, I prefer that they sell defective weapons.

Video: the Voice of the Martyrs presents The Story of Yang.

This week’s Good Friends dispatch has some interesting reports about military morale and the persistent influence of fortune tellers.

Adrian Hong talks about Egypt and support for democracy. My heart is with Adrian’s idealism, and he’s right that our State Department too often favors arrangements with dictators for short-term gains, at the cost of long-term alienation of entire peoples. We’ve seen plenty of this in the cases of North Korea and China. Where I worry about the limits of idealism is that democratization usually works better as Hegelian evolution than Jacobin revolution. Societies that rush from dictatorship to democracy often rush to failure. But then, history isn’t rich in examples of smooth Hegelian evolutions.

In some ways, it’s easier to live in a society where your limits are set for you than to live in a society where you have to set your own limits, whether those limits are social, physical, economic, sectarian, or political. Democracies permit their citizens to engage in each of these kinds of promiscuity, and almost all forms of promiscuity are eventually destructive. A democracy must instill the idea of moderation to survive. Its citizens must learn to subordinate their own views to the interests of society as a whole. They must teach their children things like, “I didn’t vote for him, but he’s our President now, and we should wish him success.” Or, “I was against going to war, but now that we’ve gone, we have to win.” Or, “the Christians are our neighbors, not our enemies.” After more than 200 years of self-government, plenty of Americans still aren’t very good at that, or aren’t as good as they once were.

Maybe Egypt is ready. I hope it is, and it’s not really our place to say it isn’t — just to do everything we can to help it succeed. And either way, it’s right that we should support the immediate departure of Mubarak, who has become an impediment to restoring order and midwifing the birth of a freer society. These are the things that distinguish friendship with a regime from friendship with a people.