Really? Is there nothing we can do about North Korea?
Pyongyang’s Kim Jong Un celebrated his 33rd birthday with a bang, telling the world he’d tested a hydrogen bomb that can “wipe out the whole territory of the United States all at once.”
No, he can’t. Not yet. Experts think he didn’t even really detonate a thermo-nuclear bomb. Nah. It was merely the North’s fourth nuclear test.
The White House shrugs: Let the Norks be Norks. Kim went unmentioned in President Obama’s State of the Union address.
But ignoring a problem won’t make it go away. Living at Krazy Kim’s mercy is no longer an option. The megalomanic and mercurial tyrant’s missiles already can hit parts of the United States. Our Asian allies are threatened by his nukes and missiles.
And closing our eyes isn’t just a bad policy in itself. It also sends all the wrong signals to others who wish us ill.
So let’s take a cue from Michael Corleone: Where does it say that you can’t kill a regime?
After all, we’re talking about a crooked gang that’s mixed up in the rackets, proliferates arms, behaves like a neighborhood bully and starves its own people to death. We’re talking about a regime that never heard of the Cold War’s end, and that still reads George Orwell’s “1984” as a how-to book.
True, regime change is no longer in vogue. Yet it’s been America’s official policy for decades, and still is — except we call it Korean reunification. Now we must get serious about it.
A year ago, South Korea’s President Park Geun-hye said her free country must launch “meticulous preparations” toward reuniting the Koreas.
But Korean reunification is seen as a bit like awaiting the Messiah: We believe, but beyond prayers, there’s little we can do to hasten his coming. Thus, rather than vowing to get rid of the Kim regime, we call for “peaceful and gradual” unification, and then wait patiently.
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (in his second term) even tried to appease the North by awarding incentives, including sanctions removal, in return for promises. Even Obama — always eager to humor America’s enemies — saw the futility of that policy. So instead, he just ignored the problem altogether.
One reason: China has long opposed the collapse of a fellow Communist regime.
Beijing fears a flood of Korean refugees that’d tax its resources, and dreads the prospect of a powerful pro-Western unified Korea on its border. So it has propped the Kims up and assured their survival.
But two years ago, Kim the Third executed Jang Sung-taek, his uncle, a trusted adviser to his father — and, crucially, Beijing’s man in Pyongyang. Since then, the Chinese have become increasingly impatient with Kim’s irrationality, and he, largely, stopped listening to them.
As trouble brews in the Beijing-Pyongyang paradise, and as the North menace grows, some in Washington believe it’s time to strike. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a bipartisan sanctions bill that, according to its initial sponsor, House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.), will “help cut off Kim Jong Un’s access to the cash he needs to fund his army, his weapons and the continued repression of the North Korean people.”
Royce’s plan to end carrots and return to sticks is a good start. The Senate is expected to soon pass its own sanctions package. Royce has consulted with the White House, but it isn’t clear whether Obama will play along or revert to his “strategic patience” with Kim.
Serious sanctions can force China to choose: Do business with America or prop up North Korea. Not both.
The Bush and Obama administrations imposed such sanctions on Iran. But Obama saw them as mere chips to be bargained away. The bargaining-chip approach, he knows, has already failed with North Korea.
A return to painful sanctions is only a steppingstone toward regime change — er, Korean reunification. Obama won’t say so — but the presidential candidates can, and should. That strategic goal, they can say, is doable, and closer than you think.
Because without it, we’re held hostage to the world’s worst — and arguably most unpredictable and therefore dangerous — regime.