On North Korea

I've been wanting to drop a post on the apparent emergence of North Korea as the world's newest member of the nuclear club all week, but the issue is so vexing that I haven't been able to get a good bead on what I wanted to say.

There will be more to come as I struggle with organizing my thoughts on the subject, but let me start by providing you with a link to an outstanding opinion piece I stumbled upon written by Gerard Baker and appearing in The Times of London.

He's right. The price of, as he puts it, "shillyshallying" with rogue states in response to their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (particularly of the nuclear variety) is indeed high. For all the hand-wringing we hear about nuclearized North Korea and Pakistan and nuclearizing Iran, there isn't much more to be done. We have passed the point of return with all of them. There is an inflection point in the nuclear development cycle before which negotiations and strong measures can bear fruit. But after the inflection point has been passed, the world finds itself with few options, none of them good. The world "shillyshallyed" prior to all of these nations' inflection points and only became concerned and engaged once the nuclear inflection points had been passed, once it was already too late.

Which brings us to Iraq. Although it is trendy to question and berate America's intervention in that country, we can today be certain that Iraq, no longer in the hands of Saddam Hussein, has taken major steps away from its nuclear inflection point as the result of the American invasion. Now certainly we face a whole host of other issues in Iraq. But none of them quite so ominous as nuclear weaponry in the hands of a dangerous fanatic and known proliferator.

North Korea is what happens when you shillshally. And today the world is truly less safe as a result. To be clear, the danger lies less in the possibility of a missile attack on an American west coast metropolis than it does in the sharing of nuclear technology with terrorists or in Asian disputes influenced and governed by an irrational leadership brandishing WMD.

Nuclear red-lines need to be drawn around the most dangerous of regimes. One was drawn around Iraq and enforced. As for the other members of the "Axis of Evil," well those inflection points had already been passed by the time the red-lines had been drawn. What next? I don't know. But hold on to your hats.