So the Bush administration has softened its stance. Faced with what amount to threats from North Korea’s dark regime to create an assembly line for nuclear bombs, the U.S. late last week began informal talks with the North Koreans, and earlier hinted at giving them diplomatic and economic benefits if they halt their nuclear buildup. Accompanying diplo-speak suggested that the U.S. also may give Pyongyang the non-aggression pact it has demanded.
There are several reasons why Washington softened its stance, including the fact that North Korea has a powerful military and can obliterate much of South Korea. But the ultimate card Pyongyang holds is the broad presumption that it already has a small number of nuclear weapons and the evolving ability to propel them to more distant targets. That leaves other nations with no good options beyond containment and deterrence, which may or may not forever keep the North from using, or quietly selling, nukes.
To an extent that few world leaders are openly discussing, the North Korea situation affects decisions on whether to disarm Saddam Hussein before he, too, can develop nuclear weapons.
Reasonable people profoundly disagree on whether the UN–or the U.S. unilaterally–should invade Iraq and eliminate whatever weapons of mass destruction exist there.
But few experts think no such weapons exist. And only the naive think Hussein won’t continue to try to develop nuclear arms if given the chance. The war debate revolves around whether Iraq poses an imminent threat–not about whether Hussein dreams nightly of being one.
It’s similarly clear that Hussein must envy Pyongyang’s ability to make Washington blink. If Hussein ever gets nukes, he too will, for practical purposes, be invulnerable. He can reject even such tepid restraints as the presence of UN inspectors: Having lost what it now has–the option to invade Iraq without encountering a nuclear response–the UN no longer could militarily enforce its resolutions or free the Iraqi people from one of history’s more ruthless dictators.
Many people will read that paragraph as a veiled argument for war with Hussein. It is not. It is, though, an attempt to connect two important dots. For all the cynical motives pinned on the Bush administration–the histrionics over Iraq are all about oil; the president just wants to settle his father’s score with Saddam–only the bitterest partisans won’t acknowledge that a nuclear Iraq would be a much more perilous foe.
Maybe that possibility is so remote that war with Iraq still cannot be justified. Maybe the rest of the world even could learn to live with a nuclear Iraq; after all, we live now with what almost certainly is a nuclear North Korea.
Yet it is largely Pyonyang’s nukes that have the U.S. and many other of the world’s civilized nations walking on eggshells. And that should expand our discussion of what to do with Iraq:
Can we tolerate two North Koreas?
Many Americans have not settled on an answer. But that is the question.
