Obama Getting Tough on North Korea?

posted at 8:18 am on June 16, 2009 by Karl

That is what the New York Times would have us believe in advance of today’s visit from South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, a conservative who has been far more confrontational in his dealings with North Korea than most of his predecessors:

The Obama administration will order the Navy to hail and request permission to inspect North Korean ships at sea suspected of carrying arms or nuclear technology, but will not board them by force, senior administration officials said Monday.

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The planned American action stops just short of the forced inspections that North Korea has said that it would regard as an act of war. Still, the administration’s plans, if fully executed, would amount to the most confrontational approach taken by the United States in dealing with North Korea in years, and carries a risk of escalating tensions at a time when North Korea has been carrying out missile and nuclear tests.

The usual anonymous officials said that they believed that China would also enforce the new sanctions, which (again, if true) suggests the administration seized the opportunity presented by Kim Jong Il’s latest lunacies. The Obama administration is also selling the notion that a tougher line on North Korea has been in the works for some time:

Mr. Obama’s decisions about North Korea stem from a fundamentally different assessment of the North’s intentions than that of previous administrations. Nearly 16 years of on-and-off negotiations — punctuated by major crises in 1994 and 2003 — were based on an assumption that ultimately, the North was willing to give up its nuclear capability.

A review, carried out by the Obama administration during its first month in office, concluded that North Korea had no intention of trading away what it calls its “nuclear deterrent” in return for food, fuel and security guarantees.

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The result is that Mr. Obama, in his first year in office, is putting into effect many of the harshest steps against North Korea that were advocated by conservatives in the Bush White House, including Vice President Dick Cheney.

(That would be the same Dick Cheney recently smeared by Obama’s CIA chief. It’s a Small World, as annoying Disneybots like to say.)

If true, the Times story raises the question of why Obama remains hell bent on chatting up the Iranian theocracy, whose divinely annoited despot has vowed never to negotiate about Iran’s nuclear program. The answer cannot be public opinion — Obama has already forged a broad, bipartisan consensus against his policies on North Korea and Iran. Fifty-seven percent of Democrats thought Obama was not tough enough on Iran, even before the current crisis. Kim Jong Il must be kicking himself for not denying the Holocaust or threatening to wipe Israel off the map more often.

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