I know it won’t come as any surprise to Corner readers, but Monday’s front-page Post story on the North Korean gulag highlights yet again how loathesome that gangster regime is. The reporter’s point appears to be that the United States needs to take a stronger stance against the Reds’ barbaric treatment of their subjects. The hypocrisy — or just shallowness and stupidity — of human rights types was nicely summarized by one activist: “Tibetans have the Dalai Lama and Richard Gere, Burmese have Aung San Suu Kyi, Darfurians have Mia Farrow and George Clooney. North Koreans have no one like that.”

And that’s a big part of the problem with making human rights a central element of our foreign policy. It’s inevitably going to be driven by the celebrity fad of the moment, whether Lord Byron and the Greeks in the 1820s, Hungary’s Kossuth in the 1850s, or George Clooney today, and if a cause doesn’t have a cute bumper sticker and catch the fancy of the Whole Foods crowd, it will be ignored.

The fickleness of such public enthusiasms is why the government needs to return to a hard line against incorporating such enthusiasms into our foreign policy. The world being what it is, we’re always going to have to do business with killers, whether Stalin against Hitler, Mao against Brezhnev, Saddam against the Ayatollah, the Saudis against Saddam. And while I’m all for sending good men abroad to lie for our country, I don’t want us to lie to ourselves. We need to be able to honestly face the fact that protecting the citizens, the territory, and the Constitution of the United States will frequently require us to make common cause with cutthroats and sadists, and that’s okay. As well-wishers of liberty everywhere, we obviously look forward to the day when their outraged subjects rise up and execute these cutthroats and sadists, but as defenders only of our own liberty, we’ll deal with the cutthroats and sadists as necessary.