NOKO NONO

The blogosphere has so far been pretty quiet about the North Korean deal. From what I can glean from the MSM reports, it’s essentially a re-run of 1994: they trade one kind of nuke reactor for another; we pretend not to notice their subterranean nuke development; there’s plenty of space for this thing to fall apart; and Kim Jong Il gets more goodies from the West. Maybe China, Japan and Russia figure that NoKo is falling apart anyway and this kind of engagement makes sense. It might if we had some kind of Gorbachev figure in Pyongyang. But, ahem, we don’t. I know we don’t have many good options here, but it’s hard to avoid the impression that the Bush administration blinked. And if things weren’t going so poorly with Iraq, Iran and domestically, we might have been strong enough to say no. Prediction: this will fall apart because of NoKo’s non-compliance. Even today, according to the Washington Post, “the official North Korean news agency early today quoted an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman as asserting that Pyongyang would not give up its weapons program until it received nuclear reactors from the United States.” So the backpedaling is under way. Bush, alas, would rather find a way to blame Kim after the agreement falls apart than have China blame him now for recalcitrance. The fruits of weakness.