No Good Choices on North Korea

At Donklephant, Sean Aqui takes a look at the blame game being played over North Korea. Sean correctly notes that North Korea, not any U.S. President, is most responsible for North Korea building nukes.

Sean then links to his excellent analysis of Clinton’s and Bush’s North Korea policies.

My take is this: foreign policy is REALLY complex—a truth Sean Aqui readily recognizes but one many foreign policy commentators would have you ignore. Decisions are not cut-and-dry and are almost never obvious. Even 20/20 hindsight is blurry because we simply don't know, for any given situation, how things would have turned out had we acted differently.

I firmly believe that there has never really been a "good choice" when it comes to dealing with North Korea. Each president has had to pick from a collection of bad choices and then hope he picked the least bad action (or inaction) available. Would we be much better off had Bush, Clinton, Bush I, Reagan or any other U.S. president made different choices on North Korea? Maybe. It’s conceivable that different choices could have created a much more favorable outcome. But I tend to think that different choices would have just led to different but equally bad results.