Former United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson has long been boastful of his close relations with the North Korean regime. During his misbegotten 2008 presidential campaign, Richardson bragged often of his tight relations with the Kim dynasty, among sundry other tyrannies, including Cuba and Sudan. Voters were apparently meant to find it a good thing that he was friendly with various murderous tyrants.
Richardson has traveled to North Korea at least six times; if the Kim regime believed in private property, he’d no doubt have a vacation home there by now. So it’s perhaps not surprising that John Kasich has, according to the New York Times, enlisted Richardson to help negotiate the release of an Ohio college student, one Otto Warmbier, who is currently being held prisoner in Pyongyang.
For all his expertise in matters North Korea, and his long tenure as a diplomat, Richardson has amassed a pretty bad track record in terms of actual results. In 1994, Richardson traveled to North Korea to promote enforcement of the country’s supposed freeze of its nuclear weapons program. Pyongyang reneged on that agreement, and is now a full-fledged nuclear power. More recently, in 2013, after another sojourn there, Richardson took to the pages of the Washington Post to assure Americans that North Korea did not plan to test any more nuclear weapons. The regime was focused on economic growth, not weapons, Richardson said. Less than two weeks later, the regime conducted a nuclear test. And Richardson’s failures are hardly limited to North Korea: In 2007, for example, he negotiated a ceasefire with Sudanese leader Omar Bashir, which Bashir proceeded to violate a couple of short weeks later. If President Obama enlists him to, say, negotiate a settlement in Syria, we can only hope that he forgets to get his passport renewed.
But Richardson actually has done a decent job securing the release of American prisoners from time to time. In 1996, for example, he helped negotiate the release of an American who swam across the Yalu River to enter North Korea. In Sudan in the same year, he helped free three Red Cross workers.
Assuming former NBA star Dennis Rodman is unavailable, the failed minor leaguer may be the man for the job.
