Time for Talk and for Action
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.

Iran and North Korea are likely to be topics in tonight’s debate between the vice-presidential candidates. They were also at the center of last week’s presidential debate.
Indeed, the only thing both candidates agreed on last week – aside from the quality of each other’s parenting – was the threat of nuclear proliferation. President Bush pronounced mullah “moo-lah”; Democratic challenger Senator Kerry lacked time to present detailed proposals. Still, the positions of the two sides on this crucial issue are already clear. A review shows the “unilateralist” Republicans are offering the stronger – even the more multilateralist – policy.
Start with North Korea. Mr. Kerry charges that America has done nothing to stop Pyongyang arming itself. As a result, Mr. Kerry said last week, North Korea has “gotten nuclear weapons.” Mr. Kerry would, therefore, like America to initiate direct – one could say, unilateral – talks with North Korea.
As Vice President Cheney is likely to explain tonight, the Democrats’ arguments are wrong on two counts. The first argument is that North Korea’s nuclear weapons are the result of Bush policy. The North Koreans have been moving toward a weapons program and covertly enriching uranium since the Clinton days. The Clinton administration took great pains to lock North Korea into a commitment not to turn a fuel capacity into a military one but North Korea ignored it.
As for the Bush administration, it has worked hard on North Korea from the start, participating in a six-nation discussion that includes China. America does not have much influence over North Korea, which is probably one reason Pyongyang felt it could flout President Clinton. But China does – it provides 80% of North Korea’s energy in subsidized coal and diesel fuel. This, as Mr. Cheney could point out, is one reason Mr. Bush hosted President Zemin of China in Crawford, Texas, two years ago.
Then there is Iran and its troubling uranium enrichment, which Senator Edwards will probably bring up. He has already blamed the Bush administration for allowing “dangers to mount” – that is, allowing nuclear weapons to be developed.
Mr. Kerry also alleges that America has no Iran plan. Last week, he said the United Kingdom, Germany, and France “were the ones who initiated an effort, without the U.S. regrettably, to curb nuclear possibilities in Iran.” He argued that the Iran situation would not be worsening had America offered nuclear fuel to Iran and supervised its nuclear fuel plants. Then if Iran had diverted material to nuclear weapons, America could have punished it with sanctions.
The first rebuttal here is that, as Mr. Bush noted, America has approved of and supported the European initiative at issue from the beginning. The administration does not necessarily agree with this plan. But it has gone along, doubtless because ally Prime Minister Blair wants it to.
The second point is more fundamental: with or without supervision, providing nuclear fuel to Iran is a crazy idea. Iran does not need a fuel source in the way North Korea does. It has oil and natural gas.
The only reason Iran would want to build its nuclear capabilities is to create a weapons program, or at least the potential for one. And, as Mr. Bush noted, those theoretical American trade sanctions against Iran to which Mr. Kerry referred are already real, and in place. They predate this administration.
Finally, America has been aggressively working on the Iran problem through a traditional multilateral venue, the International Atomic Energy Agency. Now is the moment to refer the issue of a weapons program to the United Nations Security Council, with the expectation of pursuing international sanctions on Iran. France, Germany, and Britain have, however, been unwilling to make the difficult decision to join America in this push.
What about nuclear challenges beyond Korea and Iran? America and its allies have spent enormous energy preventing technology transfer: the sale of nuclear toolkits via the black market. This Proliferation Security Initiative includes more than 60 nations. An aggressive PSI interdiction at sea helped convince Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi to give up his program for weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Cheney recently explained his administration’s attitude to multilateralism: America, he said, wants to work multilaterally. But being multilateralist does not mean “submitting to the objections of a few.” And multilateralism does not preclude Mr. Bush’s stated policy of staying “on the offense.”
In brief, what Democrats are asking for is a return to the emphasis on careful diplomacy that was the policy of America in Asia and the Middle East during the 1990s.This is why Mr. Kerry recalled Mr. Bush’s father, in the debate.
But the reality is that the look-away-and-preempt-not policy of the Bush-Clinton 1990s did damage. It is a “colossal error” – to borrow a Kerry phrase – to give countries such as Iran and North Korea time to develop nuclear weapons. Diplomacy, as Secretary of State Powell said recently of Iran, doesn’t have to “mean pretending something isn’t there when it is there.” In this new and unstable era, both diplomacy and offensive action have their place. Right now the Republicans are the ones showing they are ready to try both.