Foreign Policy as Empty Moralizing

Jonah Goldberg takes note of the awful barbarity of the North Korean gulag-state and then concludes that "we have a lot to be ashamed of." Goldberg writes:

Our collective, bipartisan failure to deal with the human suffering in North Korea is chalked up to the fact that Kim Jong Il's nuclear program is a far more pressing concern than is the brutalization and murder of North Korean citizens.

This is simply not correct. The U.S. has not dealt with the human suffering in North Korea because any efforts to deal with it forcefully (i.e. removing the regime that perpetrates these awful barbarities) would quite likely entail a war - a war that would have devastating consequences for South Korea, Japan and U.S. forces in Korea. If there was a way that the U.S. - or international community - could alleviate North Korea's suffering without courting a massive military action in the heart of Asia, I suspect they would have done it.

And indeed, nowhere in Goldberg's article is there any hint of just how the U.S. is supposed to reverse North Korea's heinous human rights abuses. It's easy to scold us for "failing to bear witness" to North Korea's atrocities, it's quite another to actually grapple with the difficulties and costs that such a policy would entail.

Goldberg thinks realism is the "worst thing" about the Republican party. It's fair to ask how much worse realism is than an ideology which values empty moral posturing over any serious consideration of the difficult choices policymakers face.

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