Obama Cabinet Watch: Someone is going to be very disappointed

We still don’t have a very clear picture of what Obama’s North Korea policy is going to be, but the North Koreans apparently have high expectations, as does one of its most prominent U.S. sympathizers, Professor Han S. Park. Park, writing in the Korea Times, says Team Obama met with the North Koreans recently and promised a “dramatic stride toward diplomatic normalization.” Oh, and the Americans will also demand that North Korea give up its nuclear weapons.

Some day.

This would mean that North Korea would have achieved all of its demands for no significant performance whatsoever and leave the next Secretary of State nothing to negotiate with. Hillary Clinton may be many things, for better or for worse, but she strikes me as a better negotiator than this.

Is this kind of preemptive capitulation possible in an atmosphere where North Korea’s version of disarmament means it keeps its nuclear weapons, its fissile material, its bigger reactors, its uranium program, its concentration camps, its supernote factories, and its proliferation rackets … and denies that we can conduct verification in any real sense? The early signals from Obama’s nominations don’t suggest that our foreign policies will be built around complete prostration to our enemies, and I can state on good authority — a source who prefers to remain off-record — that Park is at least half full of shit here.

If Park also happens to be half right about this, it will be interesting to see whether Republicans who sat on their hands throughout Team Bush’s total sellout suddenly become strident supporters of the national interest who denounce the new administration’s “appeasement.” And as disingenuous as that would be, it sure beats the alternative of them continuing to slumber as our diplomatic incompetence transforms a starving, tin-pot tyranny into a major nuclear power and proliferator.

As of today, however, one can plausibly hope that Obama’s North Korea policy will be vastly less awful and more competent than Bush’s.