Smart Haass piece on the Koreas crisis
Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 12:09AM 
"Smart Haass" has a nice ring to it, yes?
WSJ op-ed by Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and holder of the George Kennan slot at State under Bush-Cheney (early, not late).
Call out text summarizes it perfectly:
Pass the South Korea free trade agreement and give up negotiating with Kim Jong Il.
The FTA has been sitting with Congress for 3 years. Instead of passing some meaningless message, why not pass that instead?
(Feel free to slap your own forehead and utter, "Duh!")
Other than that, skip the usual diplo show with nutty Kim and signal that you're just waiting for his death to screw the place over as much as possible.
Okay, I spiced up that last bit.
Reason why? Make it clear to China that when the event goes down, we'll just watch while things get dicey for them as much or more than they do for Seoul.
Meanwhile, we should publicly explore the reality of a unified Korea with our southern friends, says Haass, and let China come to that conversation as it sees fear--I mean, fit.
May have spiced up that last-last bit a bit too.
Reader Comments (2)
I realize the context has changed since the early bush years, but haven't we tried the "give up negotiating with Kim Jong Il" bit already?
It still seems to me an utterly hopeless venture to consider regime change due to outside influence, and domestically there is no guarantee "that event" will occur. Yes, he will die, but sadly we have just as much a chance of getting another extension of the great leader's long shadow. In which case, thumbing our nose at the toddler that is the NK regime will only get us more spilled cheerios.
Wouldn't it be more beneficial for SE Asia, and globalization, if we kept the tantrums to a minimum, reinforcing stability in the region?
@Mike:
"haven't we tried the "give up negotiating with Kim Jong Il" bit already"
We have, and it worked wonderfully for as long as we held it. They fired off some rockets, threw some temper-tantrums and revealed that they'd violated the last treaty by continuing to enrich *anyway*. "So NYAH!", they said. Meanwhile the world yawned, tut-tut'd them and continued discussing Iraq/Afghanistan and other problems.
Basically when we ignore them, they try and attention-whore and self-destruct as fast as possible.
Meanwhile, during the periods of time we were expending valuable political capital and manpower on paying attention to them, we achieved the following dividends:
.
..
End of list.
I think you offer a false choice - pay attention, you say, and stabilize the region because to ignore them risks them causing instability. But your linkages aren't supported - attention doesn't stabilize and non-attention doesn't significantly increase destabilization coming from the toddlers. So what we need to look at more, I think, is where can we better spend our resources and attention to better effect?