"Sticking to the carcass of dead policies"

Pat Buchanan writes at Newsmax,

"The North Korean regime is causing tremendous problems and is something that has to be dealt with, and probably dealt with rapidly."

So President Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden this week.

But how this is to be done "rapidly" is not so easy to see.

North Korea has just returned to us Otto Warmbier, a student sentenced to 15 years hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster. Otto came home comatose, and died within days.

Trump's conundrum: How to keep such a regime from acquiring an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, which Kim Jong Un is determined to do.

Having seen us attack Iraq and Libya, which had no nukes, Kim believes that only nuclear weapons that can hit America can deter America. He appears willing to risk war to achieve his goal.

...The only nation that could impose sufficient hardships on North Korea to imperil the regime is China. But China refuses to impose the Draconian sanctions that might destabilize the regime, and might bring Korean refugees flooding into China. And Beijing has no desire to see Kim fall and Korea united under a regime aligned with the United States.

...What would be an America First Korean policy?

The U.S. would give Seoul notice that we will, by a date certain, be dissolving our mutual security treaty and restoring our full freedom to decide whether or not to fight in a new Korean War. Given the present risk of war, possibly involving nuclear weapons, it is absurd that we should be obligated to fight what Mattis says would be a "catastrophic" war, because of a treaty negotiated six decades ago by Eisenhower and Dulles.

"The commonest error in politics," Lord Salisbury reminded us, "is sticking to the carcass of dead policies."

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