The Two Potemkins

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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The growing consensus that Kim Jong Il’s nuclear test may not have been so nuclear after all means that the best news from the past week could well turn out to be that Kim is as impotent as the United Nations Security Council. The similarity between the possibly Potemkin nuclear test and the Potemkin Security Council resolution passed this weekend is certainly striking — a good show but one soon discovers that there’s not much there. The problem is that even if Kim has not yet exploded a nuclear device, there is a threat he will ultimately overcome his limitations. Less such hope obtains at the Security Council.

At first blush, the council’s resolution looks strong. It bars the sale of heavy military equipment, nuclear equipment, and luxury goods to North Korea and bans foreign travel by and freezes the foreign bank accounts of North Korean officials. Yet that resolution needs to be viewed in context, and especially alongside a more stringent earlier draft that embargoed all arms, not just tanks and their spare parts, and required searches of vessels bound for North Korea. Such conditions couldn’t survive the Security Council gauntlet. It isn’t even clear how vigorously the new resolution will be enforced — China for its part has said it won’t actually inspect any vessels bound for North Korea to make sure the embargo is holding.

The Bush administration is trying to put the best face it can on the resolution. Secretary Rice characterized the Security Council vote as “the toughest action that China has ever signed on to vis-à-vis North Korea.” She’s right, but that’s just the problem. China has never been as interested as it ought to be in solving the North Korean nuclear problem, and nothing in the latest development has changed that. The new resolution may well be diplomacy at its best, but in this case the best isn’t good enough.

It adds up to a failure of the diplomatic approach to quelling North Korea’s nuclear ambitions that President Bush inherited from President Clinton. At least two of America’s supposed partners in the effort to avert a nuclear North Korea, Russia and China, just aren’t as committed to the task as America is. There is a more serious problem with diplomacy, though. North Korea’s nuclear program is not a diplomatic problem, it’s a regime problem. Were North Korea free and democratic, it probably wouldn’t be diverting resources to a nuclear program from necessities like food and civilian industry.

Understanding that fact is key to understanding the current situation and what to do about it.The lack of any coherent freedom strategy is the most glaring omission in the United Nations’ approach. It’s also inevitable, given the vetoes wielded by unfree countries like Russia and China. At least now that the world has seen the limitations of the United Nations in respect of North Korea, America and her democratic allies like Japan, Australia, and South Korea will be able to think more creatively about the problem.


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