All sticks, all the time
The now-predominant Republican presumption that every foreign policy problem can be solved, if only the U.S. gets nastier, is a cancer on conservatism and on the United States.
States acquire nuclear weapons when they believe it’s in their interest to do so. Apply pressure, and you find them looking for ways of increasing their leverage. Right now, our refusal to recognize the legitimate interests of regimes we don’t like — or even tolerate their existence — is the principal cause of nuclear proliferation in the world. Look at India and Pakistan. We gave them all kinds of trouble for their nuclear programs, and the minute they tested bombs, we showed up at their doors with flowers and fruit baskets.
Why does John Bolton think the North Koreans chose to test a nuclear weapon when they did, when they could have done so at basically any time in the last 14 or 16 years? Could it be that they thought a bunch of fuel oil was a small pittance for essentially giving up the future of a program of great national significance? That if they were going to make that sort of of sacrifice — essentially dismantling their reactor at Yongbyon and blowing it up at an internationally televised event — we could at least do something substantive in return, like loosen the economic stranglehold, which would be no skin off our back?
What’s so astonishing about this entire perspective is that it presumes North Korean belligerence occurs in a vacuum. That American policy has nothing to do with it, and that there’s no room in the American arsenal for carrots. Stick, stick, stick, all the time. If a state doesn’t concede the ends sought through negotiations as a precondition for entering into those negotiations, we won’t talk. Well, if states were just falling over themselves to give us what we wanted, why would we need to talk to any state, ever? Hey, why not just replace the State Department with a P.O. box for all the adoring fan mail?
That policy may work when you’re a mobster extracting protection payments from hapless grocers, but it’s completely absurd to apply it to every rogue state in the world — and all the more so to apply it to all of them at once.
If we keep refusing to do any strategic thinking, or determine the ends to which we will and won’t spend our scarce political capital — ever scarcer all the time — we’re going to ride the Iraq war and our mounting debts right onto the ash heap of history.