Korea Changed the Subject for Republicans ... (But Bush has to produce)

In one deadly moment, North Korea has succeeded in doing what no amount of backtracking by Speaker Dennis Hastert or his beleaguered Republicans could do: It has changed the subject of the national debate. With nuclear weapons in the hands of the most deranged regime in the world, e-mails to pages will have to fade from the forefront of the public's attention.

Will Bush be able to deal with the North Korean crisis? This is truly the moment for a test of his leadership. If he is able to lead a strong global effort to face down the renegade nation and can set in motion a demonstrable process that could lead to a reversal of Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, he will have pulled off a coup akin to JFK's in the Cuban missile crisis and rescued his party from midterm election defeat in 2006 as surely as Kennedy saved it in 1962.

The key, of course, is China. Can Beijing be made to take the crisis seriously enough to turn off the spigot of fuel and food that permits the North Korean regime to survive from day to day?

China has one major fear: a regional nuclear competition with Japan. With Japanese technological prowess and the mangled history between the two nations, Beijing cannot react impassively to the nuclear arming of Tokyo.

Do we dare encourage our World War II rival to acquire nuclear weapons? We must. It is really only the "Japan card" that can bring China to heel and force her to ratchet up the pressure on North Korea.

Let's not allow nuclear nonproliferation to become an international equivalent of gun control, a system that seems to keep weapons out of the hands of the innocent while allowing the guilty, to have all the weapons they need.

Morris is jumping the gun.
Japan doesnt want to arm herself approiately,
liberalism again has fettered her.
China is the root of the problem not any
part of the solution.
Bush is frozen his leadership extends to threatening sanctions.
The legislative branch is populated by corrupt puppets
wether elections would change this dicotomy is yet
to be seen.
Americans need to demand response to these situations
yet the politicans on the scene currently are
caught up in corruption and have no vision.

Oh, Bush will produce...more rhetoric.

Fist he anounced a nuclear North Korea was unacceptable.

Now he's saying nuclear exports from North Korea are unacceptible.

Yeah, he's got credibility. Iran and NK are both deterred...

First off, even if they were going to develop a nuke, Abe wouldn't telegraph it to the world. There's already plenty of talk about a regional arms race and Abe's too smart to add any fuel to that fire.

But, given that reality, I totally disagree with the toe-sucker here (as I do on many other issues). Trying to limit nuclear proliferation is nothing like gun-control. If this was 1929 and it was an option it would have been really short sighted to encourage the Democratic Weimer Republic to develop nukes to counter Stalinist Russia (who was clearly a threat even then). All that that would have resulted in was a nuclear capable Hitler in the 1930's. My point is that, while Japan in 2006 is clearly a democratic ally of the U.S., there's no guarantee that it will still be democratic in 2016, or 2026, or 2056. There's even less of a guarantee that it will always be a U.S. ally.

I understand that we need a counter to Chinese agression, but I think that we have one in our OWN nuclear arsenal, not to mention our amazing conventional arsenal. We could accomplish the same goal of checking the Chinese by threatening to arm Taiwan with American nukes (which we would keep under strict American control) if they didn't go along with our efforts to strangle the North Koreans through sanctions.

I'm simply saying that, as usual, Morris is oversimplifying things. Yes, in the short term it would be in our interest to see a nuclear armed Japan, but nobody knows what the future really holds, and there are better options to dealing with this situation on the Korean Penninsula. Nuclear proliferation, even among our allies is a VERY dangerous game with some very scary potential outcomes.

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