Talk to, don't provoke, North Korea

The problem was that North Korea had been given no reason to trust the U.S. government. Prather described the context of “Second Phase Actions” of October 2007: the purpose was “to effectively re-instate the Agreed Framework of 1994, except that now North Korea has–somewhere—at least a half-dozen plutonium-239 based nukes, definitely not under IAEA padlock or seal. Furthermore, North Korea is no longer a signatory to the NPT. Hence, North Korea is under no international obligation to give up its nuke stockpile.”

Bush-Cheney-Bolton had indeed made a royal mess of things. Remember this the next time someone asks, “Can we trust North Korea?” The more appropriate question is whether North Korea can trust the U.S. government.

Decades of embargos and other attempts to isolate North Korea have failed to destabilize the regime or change its policies. Every administrations’ expectation that the government would fall have been dashed. Thus more of the same, including efforts to have China join in isolating North Korea, won’t work. We should recall how U.S. economic warfare against Imperial Japan turned out: it resulted in a (hoped-for) attack on the United States, specifically, its naval fleet at Pearl Harbor.