North Korea hasn't yet tested its new long-range missile, but some bizarre ideas have already started flying around Washington about the best way for America to respond ― including a proposal by two Democratic defense experts to launch a pre-emptive American attack on the missile. While that isn't likely to inspire greater sobriety in Pyongyang, it has made the Bush administration's less strident preparations for a possible military response look statesmanlike by comparison.
What would be better still would be for the White House to heed yesterday's call by senior Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for direct talks with North Korea on the issue.
Pyongyang is unpredictable. It claims to have nuclear weapons already. And a successful long-range missile test would mark a significant step down a road that might eventually give it the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons as far as the United States. But the danger, for now at least, is scarcely imminent enough to justify a pre-emptive military response. An American overreaction would do more harm than good.
There are many good reasons why North Korea should not test an intercontinental ballistic missile. But it has every legal right to do so. Washington, on the other hand, has no obvious legal right to blow up North Korea's missile on the launching pad. Doing so would forfeit the diplomatic high ground on an issue that in the end will have to be resolved by diplomatic means, and with active Chinese support.
Washington needs to keep two fundamental goals in sight. The first, obviously, is to convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs. The second is to make sure that neither Pyongyang's feints nor Washington's responses touch off a nuclear arms race in Northeast Asia.
For most of its tenure, the administration has refused to engage in serious nuclear diplomacy with North Korea. The exception came during a brief period last summer when American diplomats were actually allowed to engage in substantive talks, which led fairly quickly to a broad agreement in principle. Progress came to a sharp halt after Washington abruptly imposed unrelated banking sanctions and declared them nonnegotiable. North Korea then responded in a very North Korean way by walking away from the nuclear talks.
This is all very symmetrical, except that time is clearly not on America's side. Now North Korea is renouncing its missile test moratorium, which it had agreed to in the hope of negotiations on that issue.
This gathering crisis is dangerous enough on its own terms. But if mishandled by Washington, it could have potentially disastrous regional consequences, driving a further wedge between Japan and China.
