Designated Driver

From Saturday's New York Times:

". . . most Chinese international security experts insist that the United States holds the two most important keys to resolving the North Korean problem: ending a state of hostility that dates from the earliest days of the cold war and providing tangible assurances to North Korea that Washington does not seek the government's overthrow.

'Although many of our friends see it as a failing state, potentially one with nuclear weapons, China has a different view,' said Piao Jianyi, an expert in international relations at the Institute of Asia Pacific Studies in Beijing. 'North Korea has a reforming economy that is very weak, but every year is getting better, and the regime is taking measures to reform its economy, so perhaps the U.S. should reconsider its approach.'"

A reconsidered approach is exactly what the Bush administration has made the past four years. How carefully and consistently that approach has been made says much about the so-called neo-cons. This says it especially well, and explains both Powell's failure in the Bush administration, and the Bush administration's failure to end N. Korea's nuclear program or, in other words, Kim Jong Il's regime.

The "tangible assurances" North Korea seeks seem unlikely to come from the Bush administration any time soon, for diplomatically calibrated reasons the article makes all too clearly and amusingly, unless you're Powell (that sexy sportscar of a state department secretary who turned all the pretty little pundits' heads, but couldn't carry the load).

Nor should these assurances be offered. North Korea's not a nation in an "axis of evil"; it's a singularly imminent global ground zero, dead center of a decade-in-the-making disaster-to-be. Whether it's war precipitated by a border crisis with South Korea or nuclear brinksmanship in the Sea of Japan, it'd be hell on Earth, and we'd be in it with China. Short of a war with North Korea, there's its nuclear technology or materials being sold to Islamicists or nations like Libya.

Minus honeyed words in cuckoo Kim's ear, however, we had an obligation after Afghanistan and along with continued anti-terrorism efforts to make disarming North Korea our top international objective. Had we not reached for what's correctly been called the low-hanging fruit of Iraq, we wouldn't have spent almost two years and counting chewing that rotten apple instead of sitting at the table with the EU and China (in addition to the six-party talks), making what's in everybody's all-around interests clear: Kim's regime will struggle to survive nuke free, or not at all, and China—not the U.S.—can be the hero here.