You’d think it would be hard to come up with a more shameful example of cravenness than the Bush administration’s pandering to North Korea over years of fruitless negotiating in the Six-Party Talks. But the Obama administration has surely trumped it. Just days after a sickening piece appeared in the Washington Post detailing the horrific torment of the barely living souls imprisoned in the vast North Korean gulag, and in spite of growing evidence of a military pact between the Norks and the tyrants of the Burmese prison-state, Mrs. Clinton’s team announces a new package of “incentives”-the carrot track of a carrot-stick effort to persuade Pyongyang to give up its nukes. No details yet, but, reports FOX’s James Rosen, these incentives “would include some elements that are ‘familiar’ from the Six-Party talks, the officials said, as well as new ones and some that differ in their ‘dimensions.'” We know how well the Bush sanctions/incentives approach worked, and also how well Obama’s efforts have succeeded thus far in disarming the Norks. Of course, outperforming Bush in the area of sucking up to anti-American dictators and would-be dictators is no feat. In this hemisphere alone, Castro, Chavez, Ortega, Morales, and Zelaya spring to mind, as do Syria’s Assad and the despots of Iran. And speaking of despots,
The Obami rely on their belief that they have better relations with North Korea’s neighbors (and rest of the world, as well), and take it on faith that conciliation is an effective diplomatic tool for dealing with despots. So, they’re crossing their fingers and holding their breath. But if they-and we-find that far from putting out Bush fires all over the globe their appeasement is pouring oil on conflagrations? What do they-and we-do then?
