North Korea’s inexorable march toward nuclear weapons has been treated as something akin to a malign meteorological phenomenon. Sure, it’s bad. But there’s also nothing we can do to stop it, the standard line has gone. After all, by the time Barack Obama took…
North Korea’s inexorable march toward nuclear weapons has been treated as something akin to a malign meteorological phenomenon. Sure, it’s bad. But there’s also nothing we can do to stop it, the standard line has gone. After all, by the time Barack Obama took office, the “heavily isolated” country was already sanctioned to the hilt. Short of a sure-to-be-disastrous military strike, what could the prior administration have done?
Yet for the eight years that Barack Obama served as president—years in which America’s North Korea policy was described as “strategic patience,” i.e. waiting around and hoping that North Korea would unilaterally disarm—North Korea was in fact not sanctioned all that heavily. Indeed, it was only toward the end of Obama’s presidency that Pyongyang was sanctioned even as heavily as Moscow. (Sanctions aside, David Sanger has suggested in the New York Times that the Obama administration was semi-successful in undermining North Korea’s missile program through cyber sabotage.
