OPINION: A Grain Of Salt For Bolton’s View, Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2008
John Bolton’s charges about an alleged “total intellectual collapse” in current Bush administration policy on North Korea (“The Tragic End of Bush’s North Korea Policy,” op-ed, June 30) must be read in the context of the total policy collapse he and his colleagues participated in during the 2002-06 period.
During this time, North Korea moved from having no nuclear weapons and a shut-down reactor in October 2002 to having a tested nuclear weapon and possession of plutonium from 8,000 previously inaccessible spent fuel rods by October 2006. This was all done in the name of dismantling an allegedly “failed” U.S.-Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea Agreed Framework.
While such a policy may have been intellectually satisfying to Mr. Bolton, it represented a dangerous worsening of the security threat facing the U.S. The new deal is far from perfect, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her colleagues have wisely recognized the need to stop the bleeding from this prior policy disaster. We will now see what they can make of it.
Prof. James Clay Moltz, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif.
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