Family Security Matters » Publications » The Fruits of Appeasement

Family Security Matters » Publications » The Fruits of Appeasement

An excellent cometary with links to other commentaries and articles. Obama is clearly out of his league with North Korea and we will be paying the price for ever more unless he gets serious and starts acting like a leader.
Other countries are looking at him as he is a very weak and ineffectual leader and that perception is growing with each and every weak statement he makes.

So now we can see once again the fruits of appeasement. North Korea has tested a second set of nuclear bombs and the West throws up its hands in horror. What did it expect? Once the Bush administration cravenly decided to give up on North Korea (following the similarly short-sighted approach taken by Bill Clinton), Kim Jong-Il duly took the opportunity to press full steam ahead with his nuclear program. Now the same “new realists” who came to power at the tail-end of the Bush presidency and decided to “live with” a North Korean bomb – just as they have apparently decided the U.S. could “live with” an Iranian bomb – are serving in the Obama administration, which of course has taken such imbecility to unprecedented depths. Obama has been abasing himself to every despot on the planet, proclaiming America’s weakness through his “hand of friendship” and infantile belief that talking to tyrants is the route to peace.

The result of such epic cringing is two fingers from North Korea, with yet further threats today. Iran in particular will now be watching intently to see whether America will once again display weakness and impotence; if the U.S. won’t even act to stop North Korea from going nuclear, Iran will be reinforced in its belief that it can develop its own nuclear weapons with impunity. So far, Obama has “rushed out a special statement” in which he said, “I strongly condemn [North Korea’s] reckless action” and promised to “redouble” America’s efforts to stop Pyongyang from acquiring nuclear weapons. Well, that will have them quaking in their boots, for sure. Redoubling weakness simply results in twice as much weakness.

As John Bolton commented a week ago – correctly predicting the second North Korean test – following remarks by Stephen Bosworth, the U.S. special envoy to the region:

Despite Pyongyang’s aggression, Mr. Bosworth has reiterated that the U.S. is ‘committed to dialogue’ and is ‘obviously interested in returning to a negotiating table as soon as we can.’ This is precisely what the North wants: America in a conciliatory mode, eager to bargain, just as Mr. Bush was after the 2006 test. If the next nuclear explosion doesn't derail the six-party talks, Kim will rightly conclude that he faces no real danger of ever having to dismantle his weapons program. North Korea is a mysterious place, but there is no mystery about its foreign-policy tactics: They work.

Not only is America now paying the price of its past defeatism over North Korea, but Obama is now ensuring that the U.S. is weakened even more actively and catastrophically. The insanity of his overall strategy is set out here by James Lewis, who rightly suggests that Obama is simply the very worst person to be sitting in the White House right now. And as John Bolton again wrote in the New York Times:

... the Obama administration is seriously weakening both our strategic offensive and defensive capacity. The Defense Department budget proposes major cuts in missile defense programs, returning to an emphasis both in operational and diplomatic terms on ‘theater’ missile defense (mainly for defending deployed military forces), rather than ‘national’ missile defense (for shielding America’s population from missile attack).

... The Pentagon also proposes ending financing for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a key to substituting safe, dependable warheads for the ones now aging... The administration is also putting new emphasis on negotiating conventions against the ‘arms race’ in outer space, which would undercut America's current substantial advantage above the earth...

Unhappily, the administration is pushing Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty as a ‘non-nuclear-weapons state,’ meaning Israel would have to eliminate its nuclear arsenal. Iran and others will welcome this, given their repeated demands for the same result. Today’s real proliferation threat, however, is not Israel, but states like Iran and North Korea that become parties to the alphabet soup of arms control treaties and then violate them with abandon. Without robust American reactions to these violations--not apparent in administration thinking--more will follow.

But does Obama care about any of that? As Con Coughlin wrote in the Telegraph:

The naivety of the West’s approach to North Korea was best summed up by Stephen Bosworth, Mr Obama’s special envoy to the region, who declared he was ‘relatively relaxed’ that the American-led six-nation talks aimed at bringing Pyongyang to heel have achieved virtually nothing... If the Obama administration is relaxed about this failure, then I suppose it will take an equally sanguine view of North Korea’s attempts to export its bomb-making expertise to other rogue states, such as Iran and Syria.

Indeed, after Israel bombed the Syrian nuclear facility there was evidence of North Korean involvement in that forbidden program. North Korea is also selling nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan as well as Iran. Yet Obama appears “relaxed” about everyone’s nukes except Israel's – the one country that will never use them except to prevent itself from being annihilated by the countries Obama is appeasing.

Naivety – or the profound idiocy of malice?