Expert Consulted

Before lining my gerbil's cage with Sunday's edition of The News and Observer, I accidentally glanced at the paper itself and an article about North Korea and its nuclear brinksmanship caught my eye. Intuitively titled, "Desperation factor makes predictions tricky", it is essentially an interview of one of my old professors from UNC, James White. I had taken a Japanese history and culture class with the good professor, who I found to be very knowledgeable, if somewhat long-winded and a bit pedantic, which is usually the price one pays for a very knowledgable professor.

As an expert in Asian studies he was being asked a series of questions ranging from North Korea's culture to the current situation where it seems they are building the infrastructure to test nuclear weapons. While his remarks are mostly lucid, his agenda betrays his logic, and he finds himself in a heap o' cognitave dissonance:

We should be able to give them just a little without reducing our security, the way we did with the Soviet Union. We'd give up one missile and watch to see what they'd do. If they responded, we'd do another. The international relations crowd calls that a tit-for-tat strategy. The Bush administration feels that's blackmail, and it is in a sense. My feeling is it's worth trying.

So while the professor acknowleges that this strategem is blackmail, he still feels like it's "worth trying". This is not a strategem, it's the absence of strategy, akin to hiding one's head in the sand. We've been shipping them fuel since 1994, bribing them to not devleop nuclear weapons. Low and behold, in 2002 we discover that they have been developing them. So now we should start giving up our nuclear weapons, in the vain hope that some dictatorship is going to do the same? Another canard from the prof:

I still think they don't want to use them [Nuclear weapons]. I have changed my mind as regards to their desire to actually have them. Until we invaded Iraq, the North Koreans possibly would have been willing to give up all of their nuclear weapons, but that scared them.

Wrong. The North Koreans didn't develop them because of Iraq, and they wouldn't have given them up if we hadn't invaded Iraq. Why would they have given them up, when the world was (and is) still willing to bribe them not to use them? It's called Free Money.

So why did they even start developing them in the Nineties? We weren't invading tinpot dictatorships back then, so what was the genesis of their nuclear obsession? White rehashes the old leftist litany, that America's actions are the root cause of malevolant third-world behavior. It seems most reasonable that, like all totalitarian states, North Korea found that its economy could in no way feed the starving or employ the unemployed, so it resorts to force, or the threat of force, to acquire what it needs from the outside. But I am glad to hear the professor say that he's changed his mind that North Koreans didn't actually want nuclear weapons. These days it's getting harder and harder for some to admit the existence of the cat after it's clearly out of the bag.