WaPo picked up on the strategy as well, for those looking for a more familiar source:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlo...=.cf5a8068d488
Trump is right, as he tweeted Oct. 1, that “being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed.” Nearly a quarter-century of negotiations with Kim and his father, Kim Jong Il, by both Republican and Democratic administrations have yielded no progress. Since the 1994 Agreed Framework , the Clinton-era pact under which the North was to get fuel oil, food aid and billions of dollars’ worth of civilian nuclear equipment in return for freezing and “eventually” dismantling its plutonium program, North Korea has used its nuclear program as a bargaining chip to gain Western aid. And every time, it has failed to follow through on its pledges to dismantle the program. The last time there was a real chance to talk Pyongyang out of nukes and intercontinental ballistic missiles, some diplomats believe, was then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s October 2000 visit (which I covered as a Newsweek correspondent); in the 17 years since, nothing has worked. The North Koreans will simply not be negotiated out of their weapons program.
But perhaps Trump is giving Tillerson the ability to persuade North Korea — and just as important, China — that if it doesn’t engage in earnest diplomacy at long last, then the man in the White House could go, well, ballistic.
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But during the Cold War, with far more lives at stake, the United States engaged in occasional tense brinkmanship with the Soviet Union as a matter of policy when it perceived its vital interests to be threatened, most notably during the Cuban missile crisis. A final round of hastily improvised diplomacy resolved that terrifying standoff (with a quiet deal to trade the withdrawal of U.S. missiles from Turkey for the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba). But diplomacy arguably worked only because President John F. Kennedy was willing to go to the brink of war — in other words, because Washington was prepared to declare that a missile threat from Cuba was so intolerable that it was ready to preemptively open hostilities. JFK’s stance (even as he secretly negotiated a compromise) altered the global balance of power in a fortnight and led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed in August 1963.
We may be at another such juncture now. In the past, when North Korea was far less technologically advanced and therefore less dangerous, even some senior Democratic officials advocated preemptive strikes. In 2006, former and future defense secretaries William Perry and Ashton Carter proposed just that in an op-ed for The Washington Post (at a time when President George W. Bush was failing at diplomacy with Pyongyang). “The United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched,” they wrote. “. . . A successful Taepodong launch, unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea even further. The result would be more nuclear warheads atop more and more missiles.” That prediction appears to have been vindicated.
Yep. Someone should have walked out to the playground and smacked the bully in the mouth years ago.
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Originally Posted by Jaw
