In Other News

I realized recently that I've not done much blogging at all about the situation in North and South Korea. "Why is that Brad?" -- ah, it's you again, with the up-turned eyebrow, how you haunt me. There's a pretty good reason: I don't know squat about what goes on north or south of the 38th parallel. So, instead of reading the last section of Walter Benjamin's seminal dissertation of early German Romanticism, I read up on what's going on in the land that if my girlfriend gets her way we'll never visit. (Long, and not very interesting, story.)

First of all, and jumping right into the fray of today's news, there seem to be several reasons to like South Korea's new president, Roh Moo-hyun. If nothing else, the guy has a great rags-to-riches story.

Little Orphan Annie factor:
Check

The cat's also hip to technology.

Would William Gibson be pleased?
Check
(Yes, I'm stretching the parallelism, aren't I?)

The problem is, he seems a little shady when it comes to foreign policy -- or, wait, I guess it's pretty much domestic policy when the goal, or, as it seems to me, just a mushroom-induced dream, is the reunification of Korea. Far be it from me to cast myself as an expert in Southeast Asian diplomacy, but it just seems, well, forgive me for getting all uppity here, wrong to lay this whole nuclear-weapon-in-North-Korea bag squarely in the lap of the United States. The fact is, it's not just our bag. The other fact of the matter, though, the one that makes the first fact so irrelevant as to almost not even matter, is that, yes, it is our bag (practically speaking anyway).

We can probably just snicker off any chance of Russia or China helping out; Cold War or no Cold War, what's more bad for the United States than it is for them directly, so it seems anyway, remains a positive turn of events. As for Japan and South Korea, I dunno, can you really blame their unwillingness to play hardball, when they stand to lose more, at least in the immediate sense, than does the United States.

Of course, it's easy for me, nestled up in cool environs of lower Scotland to point out the blindness of all four of these countries, and then simply claim, with my own morally vindicated upturned eyebrow of which you seem fond, that a nuclear-free North Korea is good for everybody across the board. However, unless I'm missing something, this seems to miss the biggest reason of all that nobody has been particularly forthcoming about dealing with this situation: U.S. unilateralism.

It seems to me, because the only consistent thing we've seen in U.S. foreign policy of late is its readiness, indeed its preference, to take matters into its own hands, to disregard treaties, to reset the rules without asking anybody, the onus for the kinds of a decisions necessary in regard to North Korea is -- PLUNK -- right where America is saying it shouldn't be. North Korea's neighbors know that in the end, because America's interests are very much in the balance here, they will take care of business with or without support. Hence you have open warrant for diplomatic soft-stepping. Of course, this doesn't absolve the U.S. from acting, and neither is it an excuse for isolationism (which, c'mon, can we finally put that notion to bed?); rather, I think it more accurately pinpoints this administration's relative failure to set the precedent of not going it alone. With the the prattling of conservatives who blame every administration prior to Bush's for every problem he's ever faced running thinner with each successive editorial and quip (what was it these same conservatives said to Democrats in Dec. 1999: "Deal with It"?), one begins to feel a sense of vertigo, as our hopes -- indeed, maybe even our entire West Coast -- will probably once again lie in the by now booze-adled hands of Colin Powell.