Fantasy Overtakes Reality for WSJ Editors on North Korea

They Need to Return to the Real World

The editorials of the WSJ have always been divorced from reality, but now on North Korea they have taken leave of the universe in which we all live and gone where no fantasy writer has gone before. Here are their suggestions and comments on North Korea.

• Diplomatic. The U.S. can put far more pressure on countries to cut or restrict ties with North Korea

This means China. But the U. S. has already tried that, been there, done that. No real impact.

• Information. Defectors are already sending information into the North about the outside world. The U.S. and its allies can expand that effort and encourage elites to defect or stage an internal coup.

An internal coup is a suicide mission, a real suicide not the kind like people see in movies where the good guys survive. And one of the major things that would drive North Korea to attack is fear of a coup. Self defeating advice.

• Military. Building up missile defenses and conventional forces will diminish the North’s ability to use nuclear blackmail. Deploying tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea would make the threat to retaliate against a nuclear strike more credible.

Yeah, more self defeating advice. All this would do is increase the North's reasons to strike the South

The regime uses networks of Chinese traders to evade sanctions and also to conduct more legitimate business. Applying sanctions to these networks could curtail the North’s trade.

Like it would take China like 2 minutes to get around this.

• Financial. The U.S. can cut off North Korea’s access to financial intermediaries that conduct transactions in U.S. dollars. In June the U.S. applied secondary sanctions to the Bank of Dandong, a Chinese bank. Larger Chinese banks should suffer a similar fate if they continue to facilitate trade with North Korea.

Tried and failed as the WSJ itself notes.

• Intelligence. The Proliferation Security Initiative begun under the George W. Bush Administration tracked and intercepted the North’s weapons exports. The program could be enlarged to block other exports forbidden under United Nations sanctions.

North Korea is mostly an arms importer, not an exporter. This is useless.

• Legal. A U.N. Commission of Inquiry in 2014 reported evidence of human-rights abuses in the North’s huge network of prison camps. China and Russia have shielded the Kim regime from prosecution at the International Criminal Court for these crimes against humanity. Pressure for accountability will further isolate the North and encourage elites to defect.

What major crisis has ever been solved by a legal solution? And those elites defecting, they would if they could, no incentives need.

So once again we are fooled. It would be nice if someone came up with alternatives for North Korea, but the if it could have been done it would have been done. The 'we are smarter than anyone' editors at the WSJ need to learn this. And they need to stop saying things like this.

The Trump Administration rightly refuses to accept North Korea as a nuclear power,

Well this made us laugh, a lot. I guess if the Trumpies close their eyes and pout and whine like a child they can convince themselves and the WSJ that they refuse to accept what is right in front of them.