In the meantime, over in Prague, a seemingly aloof Barack Obama sings the praises of disarmament to a Czech audience.

In characteristic fashion, the new administration continues to wave the banner of “cooperation” with friends and enemies alike. I don’t think that Kim Jong Il is listening. Last week, N. Korea announced that they would be putting two American journalists, accused of espionage, on trial. Today’s launch is just the latest stunt in Kim’s attempt to demonstrate his relevance to the world and the United States’ impotence. Even though they were threatening to violate international law with a missile test that would improve the North’s ability to hit the U.S. mainland, our government announced that it had no planned of intercepting or downing the missile. Our response was, consistently, a semi-strongly worded statement advising N. Korea that it would damage relations and isolate them further. Obama’s promise of tough diplomacy seems to be falling short; let’s hope that this changes and that he learns from these events that we cannot simply talk to our enemies praying that they’ll see the light and play nice. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the missile launch demonstrates the “imperviousness of this regime in North Korea to any kind of diplomatic overtures.” The president should listen to his own SecDef… and to rational people around the country saying the same thing.

To his credit, Obama did signal that in this face of this renewed threat, he would be going forward with the missile defense shield over Eastern Europe. Though I doubt it. He has already committed to arms reduction with Russian president Dmitry Medvedev during a highly publicized meeting that plastered an all smiley photo op of the presidents on news sites and newspapers around the world. Also, his long lost senior thesis, which was about “Soviet nuclear disarmament,” will probably motivate our president to try and make his ideas a reality. The bad part is that we do not really know what he proposed in that thesis or if it was even relevant… but if recent events indicate anything, his current position is in favor of disarmament at a time when Iran and North Korea are aggressively adhering to a policy of armament. I expect the administration to trade the missile defense shield for some vague promise of Russian cooperation on Iran or some arms-reduction deal.

A thought on appeasement, which was a hot topic when George W. Bush made a comment in Israel expressing his distaste with some politicians that favored a softer line with Iran (all at a time when Iran was training, arming, and even possibly attacking our troops in Iraq while pursuing nuclear technology). When this exchange took place on the topic of appeasement, the Bush supporter was attacked for being ignorant of history and for redefining appeasement incorrectly as “talking to the enemy.” This particular Bush supporter was pretty incompetent and, the host of Hardball, Chris Matthews shouldn’t put people on the air who don’t know what they are talking about, especially when he uses their incompetence as an excuse to invalidate an argument. In reality, “talking to enemy” while that very enemy is developing nuclear weapons is tantamount to “running the clock” during a game… this type of diplomacy is a way of surrendering to the enemy regime’s demands while saving face, saying “we were trying.” Any sort of diplomacy must have time constraints, otherwise we will be faced with an international emergency that we will have to respond to with the blood of our soldiers and citizens. The indefinite, long-term diplomatic approach towards countries that are racing towards the ability to cause mass casualties can be fairly described as appeasement, especially when we consider that another goal of these isolated rogue states is to be recognized as a power on the world stage. We end up giving them legitimacy and allowing them to continue with their weapons programs, which is tantamount to surrendering half of Czechoslovakia or, in the Iranian case, sacrificing the security and very existence of Israel. That is appeasement. In the other case, to slap another round of sanctions on North Korea, an impoverished country that has been isolated for decades, while they continue improving their missile and nuclear capability so that they can hit us right here at home is also appeasement. Sanctions won’t do much, but letting them proceed unhampered will endanger world security.

The administration should realize that while they focus on reducing nuclear proliferation, threatening acts like this one fuel the image of American weakness which compromises the safety of Americans everywhere, including those two journalists that are to be put on trial by a dictator that does not believe in human rights. It is unfortunate that Bush’s attempt to make America strong was an overreach and now the knee-jerk reaction of this administration is to show the world that we are kinder… and contrary to popular opinion, when dealing with maniacal dictators, kindness is weakness.

-AG