When Blackmail Fails

[Geee]

American Spectator:

It’s hard to out-threaten the North Koreans. We criticize their nuclear weapons and missile programs. They say they’ll obliterate American bases abroad and cities at home. We ask the UN for sanctions, including some that could — shudder — cut off Pyongyang’s supply of Napoleon brandy. They abrogate the 1953 cease-fire agreement and say that a “state of war” exists between them and South Korea. They’ve even gone so far as to call the U.S. a “boiled pumpkin.”

Bellicose rhetoric from the Norks is nothing new. It’s a commonplace, though the pace of it — and the accumulation of it — over the past few weeks are not. Now we’re enduring the usual eruptions from the usual liberal suspects bemoaning what they see as a failure of U.S. policy.

There’s a whole lot wrong with that, because it starts with the conclusion, and the assumption, that we actually have a policy. So let’s work backwards: What would success for American policy toward North Korea look like? Why the long barrage of war talk? And how can we quiet things down?