Athens — Even here in Europe, crippled by debt and economic malaise, there is deep interest in just how crazy North Korea is. Maybe not having to deal regularly with the Dali-esque surrealism of Pyongyang makes the Europeans all that more engaged spectators. Too bad Washington has yet to figure out that buying a melting watch draped over a stunted tree means that you won’t have a timepiece worth a sou.
As the latest episode of the “will they or won’t they” war-themed reality show that is North Korea drags into a second (or is it third) week, news now comes out that the Obama Administration held secret talks last month in New York (without informing Japan, apparently), and the result was all too predictable: a month of North Korean threats to launch a game of global thermonuclear war. Apparently the burning issue the Administration wanted to pass to Pyongyang was “don’t be provocative.” Which is a bit like telling a shark not to eat that bloody chum floating peacefully in the water.
At this point, the diplomatic farce with North Korea is good only for us to sit back and marvel at the regularity with which the hermit regime manages to tweak our tail. A world of economic uncertainty and continued terrorist fears needs the type of reassuring old-fashioned “we will rain a storm of fire upon your house” madness from North Korea. We never respond as we should, which is to dare them to shoot off a missile, which we then will try to knock out of the sky, or spend a few millions of borrowed dollars on fostering instability inside the country so as to embolden what opposition forces may be hiding about, but at this point, who really cares? North Korea’s threats of regional (or global) war are a quaint reminder of a time when we could better predict just how dangerous the world is.
And if the Obama Administration in its wisdom wants to pretend there is a snowball’s chance of returning to meaningful denuclearization talks, let alone the remotest possibility of actual denuclearization of North Korea, then who are we to prevent it from wasting another four years? It would be too easy to admit that North Korea is a functional nuclear state, and should be treated as such. That would create instant unemployment for the diplomats who have spent two decades wasting time talking with a regime that uses a different operating system from the rest of us.
Of course, that may mean that one day we wake up to a North Korea with a nuclear weapon on top of a long-range ballistic missile. But since they only will have one or five, and we have thousands (well, hundreds, if President Obama has his way), then there’s really little to worry about. And, we’ll have the moral satisfaction of knowing we spent thousands of man-hours around cramped tables with canny Pyongyang counterparts who ran diplomatic rings around us. Hopefully, we’ll have the same luck protecting our allies that we did in maneuvering North Korea into defying our will all these years.