Is the world safer now?
LISTENING TO President Bush's State of the Union speech nearly four years ago, I thought that putting North Korea in the "axis of evil" made as much sense as including Kim Jong Il on Seventeen magazine's "best-dressed list." But it is a dubious hallmark of this administration that the United States' foreign enemies have a way of living down to our expectations.
Iraq is now a wellspring of terrorism. Iran's new president wants to wipe our closest ally in the region off the map. Kim's ambition to threaten the world is now unmasked.
At the time of Bush's speech, however, "evil" seemed an ill-fitting epithet for North Korea. Bizarre, dangerous, yes. But there was no plausible connection between North Korea and 9/11. (Nor, for that matter, was the country partnered with the other two states to form an "axis" of anything.)
President Clinton had supported South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's attempt to thaw relations with North Korea, which augured a pleasant spring. North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear weapons program in 1994. In October 2000, Madeleine K. Albright became the first U.S. secretary of State to visit the Dear Leader Kim and 100,000 of his well-choreographed subjects. Even 9/11 seemed as if it might bring the countries closer: In its wake, North Korea signed several international antiterrorism conventions.
The Bush administration wasn't buying it. Shortly after he took office in 2001, the president expressed doubt that North Korea was "keeping all terms of all agreements." He was right. Under Clinton's watch, North Korea had steadily enhanced its nuclear capabilities with help from Pakistan's national hero, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
After the 2002 State of the Union address, Kim bore his fangs. North Korea soon admitted that it had highly enriched uranium, expelled International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Then the sack of Baghdad prompted North Korea to announce "the Iraqi war proved that disarmament leads to war." Kim unveiled plans to build a nuclear weapon to deter similar U.S. designs on Pyongyang. Early this year, North Korea declared itself a nuclear state, pulled out of the six-party disarmament talks, fired a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan and asserted its right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike.
