The Boston Globe’s insipid editorial on North Korea

I hardly know where to begin with the Globe’s editorial today, which seems to have been written by Nancy Pelosi on lithium. It evinces either a willful ignorance of history or a hostility towards the Bush Administration that makes today’s New York Times editorial look like a John Birch polemic.

North Korea’s announcement of a nuclear test raises the specter of a nuclear arms race in Asia. Yesterday's explosion may also set off a sequence of events that changes radically the balance of power in Asia and weakens current constraints against the spread of nuclear weapons around the world.

That’s radically right: up is down, black is white. Japan is now poorer than Laos while Burma warlords are driving Escalades. And nukes for everyone! It only took Iran sixty years to replicate what American scientists did in three with 1940s technology.

The test also represents the most preventable, and one of the most damaging, failures of President Bush's foreign policy. The administration has stubbornly rebuffed the North's offers to cede its nuclear and missile programs in exchange for economic and security benefits in direct, two-party negotiations.

Oh. My. God. Is the Boston Globe really suggesting that Kim Jong Il was leaving message after message on the American answering machine while Dubya was screening the calls? Do they really believe that North Korea would give up nuclear development if only we gave them a little attention (along with some light-water reactors?) They can’t be that stupid, or are they blinded by the Boston strain of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

North Korea has persistently, repeatedly, and willfully violated every agreement they’ve made with the United States, the United Nations and all the other aid countries. Here’s Nicholas Eberstadt explaining, in July 2006, North Korea’s brand of “Nuclear Shakedown”:

Plainly put, North Korea’s survival strategy is a policy of international military extortion. North Korea’s rulers have concluded that it is safest to finance the survival of their state through the international export of strategic insecurity and military menace. Consequently, the leadership, as a matter of course, strives to generate grave international tensions and present sufficiently credible security threats in order to wrest a flow of essentially coerced transfers from neighbors and other international targets to assure the continuation of what Pyongyang describes as “our own style of socialism.”

As the Washington Post points out in their editorial, the only thing propping up North Korea is aid flowing in from China and South Korea who are trying to stave off a refugee crisis. It is absolutely ludicrous to believe that the United States can generate a lasting policy through bilateral talks with the Kim regime. For this reason, the United States has insisted on the six-party talks involving all the regional powers that are either supplying aid to North Korea or watching Nork missiles fly overhead.

Furthermore, what kind of message would the United States be sending to the world if we now agree to two-party talks in the face of North Korean threats? I can assure you that the Iranian mullahs are watching closely.

The Boston Globe has utterly lost the plot. Shame on them.

Extra - From Opinion Journal: "Nuclear test calls for active intolerance of the North Korean regime."

More – It looks like I was unconsciously channeling Rich Lowry: “A blast at the Lamont doctrine – North Korea’s response to today’s Democratic party.”