Wake Up

“North Korea, one of the world’s poorest, most isolated countries, is a difficult place to employ the containment strategy the United States is now pursuing. The world has little left to withdraw or withhold, according to diplomats and specialists. What levers exist largely have been pulled already — most recently when the Bush administration cut fuel shipments upon learning that North Korea has a program to create enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.”

I haven’t really talked about this developing story since it first started to take shape a few weeks ago, but it’s shaping up to be yet another foreign policy fiasco for the Bush administration. To make a long story short, the North Koreans reportedly already have nuclear weapons, and have started the process for making more, causing the world to ask if the United States is too focused on Iraq (which doesn’t have either nuclear weapons or the facilities to start building them any time soon) when the greater danger comes from North Korea. As this article from the Washington Post explains, dealing with North Korea will be no easy task, and everything the U.S. has tried so far has done little except make the situation even worse.