Donklephant » Blog Archive » The North Korea blame game

The North Korea blame game

By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Foreign Policy, General Politics, History, Military, News, The World

I’m not that interested in the “who’s to blame” question over North Korea. It’s a fair topic, but as with many such questions it’s very difficult to compare the actions of different presidents, who faced differing circumstances at differing times. It often comes down to dreaming up alternate history — asserting that the world would have been a different place had President Clinton or Bush or Carter or Reagan just done this one thing differently.

That said, there are some arguments that can be firmly put to rest.

First, let’s not lose sight of the forest while we take aim at a few trees. Who is to blame for North Korea building nukes? North Korea. And China for sheltering them, even though China itself isn’t at all happy about the nuke test.

But as far as U.S. policy, who did what? Who could have done more?

Take a look.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 13th, 2006 and is filed under Foreign Policy, General Politics, History, Military, News, The World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “The North Korea blame game”

Alan Stewart Carl Says:
October 13th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
I’ve said it a thousand times: foregin policy is REALLY complex–despite what armchair diplomats would have you believe. Decisions are not cut-and-dry and almost never obvious. Even 20/20 hindsight is blurry because we simply don’t know, for any given situation, how things would have turned out had we acted differently.

I firmly believe that there has never really been a “good choice” when it comes to dealing with North Korea. Each president has had to pick from a collection of bad choices and hope he picked the least bad action (or inaction). Should any specific president have made different choices? Maybe. But most likely different choices would have just led to different but equally bad results.
ICAS Says:
April 16th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Is there solid proof of the allegations of uranium enrichment that the US used as a basis for withdrawing from the Agreed ramework in 2002?

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

NOTE TO COMMENTERS:

You must ALWAYS fill in the two word CAPTCHA below to submit a comment. And if this is your first time commenting on Donklephant, it will be held in a moderation queue for approval. Please don't resubmit the same comment a couple times. We'll get around to moderating it soon enough.

Also, sometimes even if you've commented before, it may still get placed in a moderation queue and/or sent to the spam folder. If it's just in moderation queue, it'll be published, but it may be deleted if it lands in the spam folder. My apologies if this happens but there are some keywords that push it into the spam folder.

One last note, we will not tolerate comments that disparage people based on age, sex, handicap, race, color, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry. We reserve the right to delete these comments and ban the people who make them from ever commenting here again.

Thanks for understanding and have a pleasurable commenting experience.