Make talks, not war

When I was little, my mom always told me that fighting doesn’t solve anything. She said when you have a problem with somebody, you should talk it out.\nThis usually works out pretty well, especially as people get older, since the penalties for fighting and the amount of damage done increase. This advice works out so well, in fact, that it’s a good strategy for almost any person in almost any situation – including international relations.\nTake, for example, North Korea. For years, the nation has been in conflict with the United States, fighting the Korean War of the 1950s. North Korea stands as one of only five communist nations left in the world – and these days, China only sort of counts. Furthermore, the North Korean government – specifically, its leader, Kim Jong-il – openly antagonizes the West. For almost 20 years, North Korea has been on the path toward developing nuclear weapons. This has produced incredible tension that could, at pretty much any point, have erupted into a full-scale conflict once again.\nBut it didn’t. There was no war (at least, there hasn’t been one yet). And though tensions escalated further last year – when North Korea performed its first successful nuclear test – it appears that the situation might be moving toward a reasonable conclusion.\nOn Sunday, it was announced that North Korea had agreed in diplomatic talks to a time line in which it would declare and disable all of its nuclear programs by the end of 2007. This agreement was announced separately by the chief U.S. negotiator, Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill and the chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Gye Gwan.\nIn addition, other steps toward making normal relations with North Korea were taken, including discussions about what would be necessary to remove the nation from the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism.\nThis diplomatic victory takes me back to late 2002 and early 2003, when the United States was in a similar state of concern involving Iraq. We thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that he wanted to use them against us. In North Korea’s case, we know both to be true. Both nations had been openly hostile to the U.S. in the past. Why, then, did we invade Iraq, but open diplomatic talks with North Korea? I don’t pretend to have an omnipotent grasp on international relations, but that just seems wrong to me.\nI know that all international problems can’t be solved diplomatically – the chances are slim that negotiations could have driven the crazy out of Hitler, for example – but it seems to me that if we can convince Kim Jong-il, who is supposedly a little bit off, to disarm, we could have done the same to Saddam Hussein. \nI can only hope that this breakthrough with Pyongyang will signal a move back toward significant diplomacy before action for the United States. This is how it’s supposed to be done; let’s keep it that way.