Saturday, January 24, 2004
STOP THE PRESSES! NICK EBERSTADT DOESN'T TRUST THE NORTH KOREANS (and thinks that those who do are dupes).
It looks as if Pyongyang's shakedown artists have judged their international market correctly. Western and Asian diplomats are whipping out their calculators to figure the new price for postponing a North Korean nuclear breakout. Last week, Beijing lauded North Korea's "further willingness" to "stop nuclear activities"; in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell hailed the offer as "a positive step" that "will allow us to move more rapidly toward the six-party framework talks." Lost in this feel-good chorus was any apparent recollection of the original objective of talks with the North: namely, to hold Pyongyang to its earlier promises to scrap its nuclear program completely and forever.
As North Korea's neighbors prepare to be fleeced, one may wonder: What keeps this con going? It's not that American and Asian leaderships are invincibly ignorant. They've just bought into a variant of La Grande Illusion (as such thinking was called in France in the late 1930s). The notion that the Kim regime has absolutely no intention of ever giving up its nuclear capability—at any price, for any reason—is too terrible to face. Better to play pretend, even if this means being bilked in return for fake "breakthroughs" and bogus "accords."
