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Charles Krauthammer gives advice on how to stop North Korea from proliferating nuclear weapons. Not disarming Kim, it is simply too late for that (and has been since the Clinton presidency). What Krauthammer does is hearken back to John Kennedy's response to the Cuban missile crisis. Kennedy was the last Democratic presidents who believed in a muscular foreign policy and a strong defense, of course.
It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union .
– President John F. Kennedy,
Now that's deterrence.
Kennedy was pledging that if any nuke was launched from Cuba, the United States would not even bother with Cuba but would go directly to the source and bring the apocalypse to Russia with a massive nuclear attack.
The remarkable thing about this kind of threat is that in 1962 it was very credible. Indeed, its credibility kept the peace throughout a half-century of the Cold War.
Deterrence is what you do when there is no way to disarm your enemy. You cannot deprive him of his weapons, but you can keep him from using them. We long ago reached that stage with North Korea.
Everyone has tried to figure out how to disarm North Korea. It will not happen. Kim Jong Il is not going to give up his nukes. The only way to disarm the regime is to destroy it. China could do that with sanctions but will not. The United States could do that with a second Korean War but will not either.
So we are back to deterrence. Hence the familiar echoes of the Cuban missile crisis with North Korea's rude entry into the nuclear club this week. The United States had to immediately put down markers for deterrence. President Bush put down two.
Read the whole thing. Krauthammer later points out that there is one drawback to issuing the hard warning. If Iran joins the rogue nuclear club, the policy collapses. How do you tell which rogue regime to send return mail to? I think there is more going on here at the moment than just one rogue state with a mad leader. China continues to prop the little madman up – there has to be a reason for that. I suspect that China wants North Kore in place as a loose cannon for a reason. I suspect that reason has a lot to do with Taiwan.
North Korea | Gaius October 13, 2006
By Former Republican, October 13, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
I agree: China is perfectly happy to see N Korea with nukes and will be happy to see Japan with nukes. What China says is one thing, what it does (or doesn’t do) is quite another. China is playing a deep game. Unlike us, it doesn’t allow its foreign policies to be driven by the remote possibility of nukes killing a few million of their people.
I agree it’s about Taiwan but not just Taiwan. China wants to see us withdraw entirely from the Western Pacific. The Bush Administration seems clueless about what’s really happening. Maybe there are people in Defense or State who see what’s happening, but they sure don’t have the ear of the powers that be.
By kr, October 13, 2006 @ 4:34 pm
How about saying “any nuclear weapon launched by North Korea will be considered an attack by China against the United States”?