For the past week or so we’ve been following the fallout from Jay Lefkowitz’s criticism of the State Depatment’s North Korea policy (see here, here, and here). The criticism itself went something like this:
Since then the State Department has erased any record of Lefkowitz’s speech from its own website, and now the Secretary herself has fired back:
The Wall Street Journal expressed some hope in a recent editorial that Lefkowitz might have been talking for the president when he made those comments. Or at least that Lefkowitz might have the president’s ear on this issue. I’m skeptical. But her reaction here is a bit bizarre. Nobody besides Rice, Chris Hill, and the president really have any idea what’s going on at the six-party talks. And in fact, we don’t need to know what’s going on there to know that the North hasn’t yet met its deadlines for “disablement,” hasn’t yet stopped starving its people, hasn’t yet become a credible partner for negotiation. If, despite his title, Lefkowitz has no say in American policy on North Korea–perhaps he ought to.
