LOS ANGELES: Lawyers say hard cases make for bad law. That's because the hard cases tend to be hard because they're exceptions, and making a general rule based on the exception is bound to create problems. North Korea is surely one of those exceptionally hard cases.
Kim Jong Il would seem unrealistic even as a comic-book villain. In a world full of strange and exotic cultures, North Korea's neo-Stalinist experiment ranks as otherworldly. Try to imagine what a North Korea exhibit at Epcot Centre would display: Emaciated, out-of-work actors (no shortage there) eating fake tree bark while guarding a giant concentration camp where prisoners are forced to worship a guy who should be wearing a tinfoil hat at the local library. Don't forget to try the sawdust kimchi!
Proof that North Korea is a hard case can be found in the fact that the Democrats and Republicans have switched sides. Ordinarily multilateralist Democrats are now unalloyed champions of unilateralism, in the form of face-to-face negotiations with North Korea, while President Bush— that infamous, go-it-alone "cowboy"— has become a passionate defender of international teamwork.
Both approaches are flawed for a simple reason: North Korea wants a nuclear weapon because it wants a nuclear weapon.
The Jimmy Carter vision holds that North Korea uses nukes like poker chips to be cashed in. But the North Koreans pocketed US concessions after the face-to-face talks in 1994 and continued pursuing nukes because they wanted nukes. Bush's strategy has been, first, to declare that advances in North Korea's nuclear programme are "unacceptable" and then to do nothing, and second, to insist that the US cannot accomplish anything because our "partners" won't cooperate.
The North Korea dilemma— much like the threat of Islamic fanaticism— is Aesopian. The frog in Aesop's fable did not wish to be stung by the scorpion. The scorpion's position? Wishing's got nothing to do with it. Americans tend to think— and Europeans consider it gospel— that all differences can be negotiated. The truth is that only problems that are negotiable can be negotiated. Just ask Hamas if everything can be bargained for around a table. Their one nonnegotiable principle is that Israel must cease to exist. Beyond that, they're open to all sorts of creative proposals.
What worries me most about how the hard case of North Korea is making for bad precedent is that so many people see Pyongyang's intransigence as proof of the need for the whole international community to work together.
Don't get me wrong. I am all in favour of multilateralism, if it leads to something like a solution. But the rush to international solidarity rests on the assumption that working as a group is morally superior to acting alone. The belief that everything can be talked through is part of a tapestry of thought that believes communal efforts are more legitimate than individual ones. If we can all agree on what to do, it must be right, seems to be the thinking.
Initially, John Kerry's chief complaint against the Iraq war was that Bush didn't build a giant multinational coalition like his dad did, as if the argument for or against the war depended on whether Belize and Burkino Faso agreed with us.
If it was right to topple Saddam Hussein, it was right even if no one else agreed. And if it was wrong, then it was wrong even if the whole world was on our side. Lynch mobs aren't right because they have numbers on their side, and men who stand up to them aren't wrong because they stand alone. Multilateralism is good only to the extent that it allows us to achieve good things. To think otherwise is to confuse power-worship with principle.
