ARE YOU KIDDING ME?? Our U.N. Ambassador’s proposed response to North Korea’s missile launch was to add 42 companies to the sanctions list. China proposed two, and we compromised at … three. All of those entities — Green Pine, Amroggang Development Bank, and Tanchon Commercial Bank were already sanctioned by Treasury for their involvement in WMD proliferation. Back when John Bolton was at the U.N., the Security Council was passing tough and potentially effective resolutions against North Korea. People bitched...

PRESIDENT OBAMA, in a joint news conference with the visiting Prime Minister of Japan, says North Korea’s provocation are a sign of weakness, and this: “The old pattern of provocation that then gets attention and somehow insists on the world purchasing good behavior from them, that pattern is broken,” Obama said in a joint news conference with Noda at the White House. Let’s check back on that after November, when Wendy Sherman runs to the Oval Office with the blueprint...

EX-MILOSEVIC PROSECUTOR SAYS U.N. SHOULD “PUT NORTH KOREA ON TRIAL:” Unfortunately, this would require Security Council approval, so the precise means and moment of failure are completely predictable. This isn’t to say that the effort is unworthy. It would make a great thought experiment: The situation in North Korea is a clarion call for the Security Council and other U.N. members to show courage in a case of political complexity. There can be few places in the world where the...

THE ECONOMIST on North Korea’s gulag: Perhaps the scale of the atrocity numbs moral outrage. Certainly it is easier to lampoon the regime as ruled by extraterrestrial freaks than to grapple with the suffering it inflicts (The Economist is guilty). Yet murder, enslavement, forcible population transfers, torture, rape: North Korea commits nearly every atrocity that counts as a crime against humanity. A world that places any value on the idea of universal human rights should no longer overlook North Korea’s...