When Clinton was President, negotiations with the North Korean President Kim Jung II were going fairly roughly, but they were making good progress. Coinciding with the end of Clinton's second term was the forseeable end of the nuclear rush. Talks continued to bring Korea and the United States closer together. Members of the Clinton administration visited North Korea multiple times and assured Kim Jung II that nuclear weapons were unnecessary, that another war between us and North Korea was totally absurd.
After Bush took office, he brought a complete change of policy. Bush has referred to Korea as if it was a personal issue between him and Kim. Talks ended abruptly and so did most of the agreements between the US and North Korea. Virtually all of the progress made under Clintons term went down the drain, and we were left where we started 10 years ago. Instead of discussing the USs requests with North Korea, Bush simply laid out a list of demands that they must comply to.
Now imagine that you were Kim Jung II, the crazed president of a nation with an isolationistic history. If you were presented with a list of demands from the most powerful country in the world along with the words all options are still on the table (war is not out of the question) from president Bush, would you not feel threatened? Would you not want to strengthen your army and pursue the development of nuclear weapons so that your country might not be so easily overrun as Iraq was? This is exactly what Kim Jung II did, and now the United States has an enemy fully equipped with nuclear weapons and possibly ICBMs that could strike Seattle or Los Angeles in a matter of minutes. North Korea also has a one million man standing army and thousands of missiles pointed at Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and Tokyo, Japan, that could transform both of these major cities into quagmires of fire and death with the push of a button.
The solution to this problem is not war, as Bush has so often hinted. A war with North Korea would not be like the one in Iraq, it would involve more strategy than just walking in and shooting up some starving, poorly trained army. We need to continue peace talks with North Korea, we need to urge them to give up their nuclear weapons by doing more than coldly issuing harsh demands. The international community also has to recognize the danger in North Korea. This is absolutely necessary if we want to avoid risking another war with North Korea.
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