On North Korea

The Non-Proliferation Treaty requires that all nuclear-armed states make an honest commitment to disarm themselves. This was the explicit bargain made to convince non-nuclear states not to pursue weapons technology.

97% of all nuclear weapons are still owned by Russia and the United States of America. Reductions in the past decades have mostly stalled, and in any case were reduced from already-insane levels.

The United States, in direct violation of agreements with the government of Japan, maintained a nuclear weapons force on Japanese soil throughout the Cold War. This force - which the North Korean regime no doubt assumes is still in Japan, America protestations notwithstanding - was targeted at North Korea and China.

The combined tonnage of nuclear explosives owned by the 2 biggest nuclear-armed states is more than enough to devastate the Earth several times over.

But the crisis we're all supposed to worry about is a laughable North Korean test that was less powerful than what the Americans managed 60 years ago?

American diplomacy has, in the past decade, embraced the use of "red lines" where some activity by a regime or leader leads to the use of American force and the abandonment of negotiations. Bush has taken this to the natural conclusion, abandoning serious negotiations altogether. Considering how modest the North's demands actually are, this is insane.

The Kim regime wants a guarantee from the United States that Washington will stop its efforts to overthrow the regime, and a normalized relationship. To put this another way, Pyongyang wants to rejoin the community of nations, but correctly assumes that doing so without nuclear leverage would mean accepting American dictates that Pyongyang finds distateful. I find that position immature, but I'm not in charge of an impoverished nation obsessed with national self-reliance. I also find the American position immature, and given that only the US is capable of granting Pyongyang's modest demands, far more dangerous.

Ezra asks:

On the North Korea front, in 2002, the country offered to end enrichment in exchange for a non-aggression pact. We said no. They made a bomb, granting them an effective non-aggression pact. What would we have lost in acceding to their original demands? Even assuming they broke the pact and secretly enriched uranium, then all that would have happened is...exactly what happened. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't have. Why was this path better?

This is what all the talk about "not appeasing rogue regimes" misses entirely - we don't have the means to effectively stop North Korea, or Iran, or anyone else who chooses to develop nuclear weapons at the moment. If the United States weren't bogged down in Iraq, if Europe had a credible security policy, if Russia or China were interested in controlling proliferation... if wishes were horses. "Appeasement" is the only sensible policy we have available to us at the moment, if by that you mean - gasp! - negotiations and diplomacy.

It's worth comparing our current state of affairs with World War II, pre-May, 1940: The Phony War. Technically, all the states of Europe were at war, but there was no serious combat until the German invasion of the low countries. Despite the fact that the UK and France had nominally gone to war because of Poland, nobody believed the Allies had the ability to attack Germany in any serious fashion. It's hard to argue that Hitler noticed the difference between Chamberlain's policy of Appeasement on the one hand, and the pre-May policy of war in all but fact on the other.

Bush has been content to engage in a Phony War against countries he doesn't like - belligerence, threats, direct efforts to undermine the governments of certain countries - and is surprised to see that nobody cares what he says anymore.