Quote:
Originally posted by Spanky
And what exactly could a Democrat administration done differently about North Korea etc?
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Under Clinton, the strategy was to bribe the North Koreans to stop building the bomb, and to hope that the regime collapses in the interim. This worked, in that they shut down their weapons programs for years, but didn't work, in that they restarted the programs before the regime collapsed.
If you want to get the North Koreans to stop doing something, you need to either use positive or negative reinforcement. The Bush Administration rules the former out, on the grounds that it will reward bad behavior. And we haven't found any way to deter the North Koreans from continuing with both their uranium and plutonium programs -- if you don't understand the difference between the two, you probably don't understand how Bush has made things worse. Indeed, our use of force in Iraq has plausibly convinced Iran and North Korea that they need nuclear weapons as a deterrant.
This should suggest what one might try differently.
