It’s foolish to keep warning North Korea’s Kim Jong-il that he faces dire consequences for stepping over a line in the sand, then failing to impose those promised consequences. Empty warnings simply invite more bad behavior. At some point, the nutty dictator will go too far, and massive retaliation will become the only option. North Korea¹s defiant launch of a ballistic missile likely capable of striking targets in America suggests that we are approaching just such a terrible point with North Korea.
The U.S. response to North Korean provocations since the Clinton administration has been a laughable progression of threatened consequences that never materialize, combined with laboriously negotiated agreements giving massive bribes to Pyongyang. The bribes - mainly food and technological assistance - are given in the hope North Korea will finally stop its development and export of nuclear materials and ballistic missile technology to Iran, Syria and other declared enemies of America. The Bush administration continued this destructive cycle, and in the weeks leading up to this weekend’s launch, the Obama administration acted just as helplessly. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned North Korea “not to go there” before the launch, and President Obama promised that North Korea would be “penalized” after the launch. Perhaps the Obama White House thinks carpet-bombing North Korea with millions of leaflets inscribed with sternly worded UN Security Council resolutions will change Kim Jong-il’s taunting attitude.
Despite our vacillation over the years, the U.S. has a variety of ways of dealing with North Korea short of massive retaliation. First, although it wasn¹t used this time, the U.S. still possesses the capability to knock down missiles once they are launched, either with Aegis-class anti-missile naval forces stationed off the North Korean coast, or by deploying the prototype Airborne Laser being developed by Boeing. These assets enable us to take a page from JFK by imposing a quarantine against future North Korean missile launches. Second, the U.S. should support a limited defensive re-militarization program in Japan. Finally, President Obama should stop equivocating about the future of the U.S. missile defense deployment for the continental homeland. The technology has been proven in repeated tests, and the U.S. needs only political will to move ahead with full deployment. North Korea¹s defiance reminds that our window of opportunity to protect America is closing all too rapidly.
