McCain To Adopt Hard Line North Korea Policy?
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Foreign Policy, McCain, The World
Hmmm…something tells me that this new hard-liner stance is a loser from the get-go. Because not only does it represents exactly the type of inflexibility that people don’t like about the current administration, but does anybody think it’s a good idea for McCain to propose turning back the clock on one of the few things that the administration HAS been flexible on and HAS shown results?
Sen. John McCain broke today with President Bush’s new policy on North Korea, co-authoring an opinion article with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) in which he called for a return to Bush’s original demand of a complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament of North Korea’s nuclear programs. [...]“We must use the leverage available from the U.N. Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang’s 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner, which we agreed to with the other members of the six-party talks.” McCain and Lieberman write. The Bush administration essentially abandoned enforcement of the U.N. Resolution when early in 2007 it decided to negotiate an end to the impasse.
Okay…or what? Are we going to bomb them? Declare war? What’s the end game here? What does being a hard-liner in this situation get you except a stalemate where they close back up and continue their nuclear program without letting us see what they’re doing?
Listen, what McCain is proposing now is pretty much the exact same thing that Bush proposed when he first got into office…but eventually reality trumped rhetoric and Bush changed the policy. It’s one of the few things I’ve commended him on. And let’s not forget that this is one of the few times he has done this, so he’s probably particularly convinced that engagement is absolutely necessary…which means that going back to the old policy is suspect at best.
I really don’t know what McCain is thinking here. Perhaps somebody else can enlighten me.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Foreign Policy, McCain, 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.
May 27th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
He’s thinking his supporters like tough talking and that the only thing that differentiated himself from the other GOP candidates was his pro-war stance…so, if he keeps riding that horse the people who are beginning to lose interest in him might come back.
Or maybe he’s suffering from dementia and thinks it’s 1950 and the Korean war is still on….
either or
May 28th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
What progress, exactly, have we seen in North Korea? That they’re now outsourcing nuclear weapons manufacture to Syria instead of building them in-house?