Writing in the New Republic Peter Beinart says:

On the subject of North Korea, there are two groups of people in Washington today: People who are terrified, and people who aren’t paying attention. Unfortunately, the latter category seems to include the president of the United States.

I’ve been in the terrified/horrified camp for some months, during which time things have drifted from bad to terrible. Beinart, recently, described as a full-fledged, talon-baring hawk on Iraq backs up his diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder with the observation

the diplomatic reality is that there is no united front. North Korea adamantly rejects multilateral talks, and South Korea, Russia, and China adamantly refuse to turn the screws. The Bush administration is paying the price for having helped fuel the anti-Americanism that elected an ultra-soft-line president in Seoul last December. And it cannot pull out all the diplomatic stops with Moscow and Beijing since its highest priority is convincing those governments not to veto an Iraq resolution at the Security Council. The unhappy result is that the United States is basically facing this crisis alone. (emphasis added).

Beinart concludes

If the Bush administration does understand that it will eventually have to sit down with Pyongyang, then its current delay represents the inexcusable privileging of politics over national security. If, on the other hand, it has no intention of engaging in such talks, its current stalling tactics may stem from a very different calculation: That the United States can only fight one war at a time. As Stanley Kurtz put it approvingly recently in National Review Online, “If our policy is to strike when we may and must, silence makes a good deal of sense.”

This has so far been too chilling an interpretation for most observers. But, in either case, the United States is much closer to the brink than most Americans realize. And, whether out of political self-interest or ideological zeal, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to mind.

I don’t think the NRO analysis cited by Beinart holds up at all. A war with North Korea would be incomparably more dangerous than anything Saddam Hussein could do, and the danger grows every day. If war with North Korea is planned, or even contemplated, any competing policy priority should be dropped immediately. Every asset the US has, military, economic and diplomatic, should be devoted to achieving a victory in which the North Korean government doesn’t use its nuclear weapons and to achieving the victory as soon as possible, before any more weapons are produced.

Given that this clearly won’t happen, I can only hope that the Administration is planning to buy the North Koreans off. A minimal silver lining in this generally gloomy situation is that a victory over Saddam might give Bush enough political points to cover a craven backdown to Kim-Jong Il – at this point there seems to be no alternative.

Update Ultra-hawk Charles Krauthammer takes precisely the line I’ve suggested on North Korea. He even uses the dreaded A-word “appeasement”. Krauthammer covers himself by saying “it would only be temporary appeasement”, but the North Koreans, like the Turks, are sure to demand cash up front. As Paul Krugman pointed out a while back, no sensible person deals with the Bush Administration on any other basis.