Obama Outflanks GOP on North Korea Policy

Here is President Obama, talking about North Korea, nukes, and sanctions yesterday:

“I think it’s fair to say that North Korea has chosen a path of severe isolation that has been extraordinarily damaging to its people,” Obama told a news conference at the end of a summit on nuclear security.

He said that as pressure builds, Pyongyang will want to break out of its isolation and “we’ll see a return to the six-party talks and … we will see a change in behavior.” [Reuters]

I don’t advocate that Obama’s North Korea policy is perfect, but it’s good enough to remove North Korea as a foreign policy issue for conservatives. Obama’s policy isn’t much milder than Bush’s in its semantics, and is clearly superior to Bush’s in its tangibles. I said when UNSCR 1874 passed that it would be as good as its implementation, and that the President’s directions to Treasury would matter most. On both counts President Obama deserves good marks from any objective observer. I’m even willing to give him a pass on his relative silence about human rights. What will his words really mean anyway? Nothing short of the regime’s collapse will change anything anyway, and financial sanctions have brought us much closer to that than any of George W. Bush’s hollow words.

If conservatives have a more practical and appealing policy to offer, I haven’t seen what that is. I know what it could be, but I don’t see any conservatives or Republicans advocating it. On the contrary, the Republican voice on North Korea is often Richard Lugar, whose policy is much closer to Bill Clinton’s than Barack Obama’s. That will be more true than ever when Sam Brownback retires this year.