One of the more glaring and obvious flaws in John McCain’s pitch to voters is that he’s fundamentally running on a more-of-the-same platform when voters are desperate for a change. It appears that McCain has realized it’s to his advantage to break with the president more than he has been. Unfortunately, in this case, McCain is abandoning one of the few issues Bush got right (eventually).
McCain and (who else?) Joe Lieberman teamed up this morning for an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on U.S. policy towards Asia, and specifically presented McCain’s preferred approach towards North Korea.
American leadership is also needed on North Korea. We must use the leverage available from the U.N. Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang’s 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner, which we agreed to with the other members of the six-party talks.
This, in addition to McCain’s remarks in Denver this afternoon, led to headlines like this one: “McCain Breaks with Bush Over North Korea.” One might be tempted to think, “Great! Bush has been incoherent on North Korea, seemingly going years without any policy at all, and McCain has decided to ‘break’ with this. Maybe McCain’s learning after all.”
But this would have the situation backwards. The approach McCain described today is the same policy Bush embraced for the better part of six years. It failed miserably, undermined global security, and led to an expansion of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Bush eventually reversed course, did a complete 180, and decided the Clinton administration’s policy was the right one after all.
McCain is “breaking” with Bush, inasmuch as he wants to take the U.S. back to the policy that was a dangerous and humiliating failure. In other words, he thinks Bush is too liberal on North Korea, and we need to go back to Bush’s first-term failures.
Remind me why any serious person would consider voting for this guy?
It’s been a while since we really delved into North Korea policy, so it’s probably worth taking a moment to write up a primer. Way back in February 2007, the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler and Edward Cody explained that the Bush administration was able to strike a deal with North Korea because the president “was willing to give U.S. negotiators new flexibility to reach an agreement.”
Bush, of course, wasn’t supposed to believe in “flexibility” when it comes to negotiating with evil. As Cheney once famously said, “We don’t negotiate with evil — we defeat it.” North Korea wanted us to be flexible, so Bush was intransigent, telling Kim Jung Il’s regime that it had to give up its nuclear program in order to begin diplomatic negotiations. (It never made much sense — Bush was effectively saying, “Give us everything we want and then we’ll talk to you.” For some reason North Korea didn’t agree.)
To be “flexible” was to “reward bad behavior.” So Bush stubbornly stuck to his policy of not having a policy, while North Korea became increasingly dangerous.
What changed? As Fred Kaplan explained, Bush “finally got a nuclear deal with North Korea because he finally started negotiating like Bill Clinton.”
A constant mantra for the past dozen years — chanted by Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on several occasions — is that the Agreed Framework, which the Clinton administration signed with North Korea in 1994, was a naive and disastrous failure.
And yet the deal that Bush’s diplomats just negotiated is very similar to Clinton’s accord in substance — and nearly identical in its approach to arms control. […]
The talks made progress after the Clinton team made offers that called on the two sides to take actions simultaneously and in step-by-step phases. That’s what the deal reached Monday calls for, too. The “Joint Statement,” released at the six-party talks in Beijing Tuesday, refers to “coordinated steps … in a phased manner,” “the principle of ‘action for action,’ ” and “actions in parallel.”
The Clinton team also detected, once talks got under way, that disputes between the two sides were almost always resolved in small, informal settings. Bush has resisted these kinds of meetings, but that’s where the outline of this new deal was sketched out — in one-on-one sessions in Berlin.
The good news is Bush finally realized Clinton’s approach represented progress, and the policy of his first six years in office represented failure. The bad news is, Bush’s foolish delays have strengthened North Korea considerably. The president accepted a deal that was on the table five years ago, but Bush balked because he didn’t want to “negotiate with evil.”
In the end, Bush’s negotiations led us right back to where we were before, except now North Korea has a nuclear arsenal.
McCain looked at all of this and effectively decided, “Bush was right the first time.”
The mind reels.