No Cop on the Beat

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

Concerning North Korea’s recent test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, Gary Samore – the Obama White House coordinator for nonproliferation – told The New York Times, “I hate to speculate about the North Korean motivations. I’m not sure this is a deliberate calculated action on the part of the North Koreans.”  I may not be as sophisticated an expert on world affairs as Mr. Samore but I think that a maniacal dictator who diverts his nation’s dwindling resources to missile development at the expense of his starving people – in order to threaten the outside world – is a clear expression of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il’s malevolent motives.

Speaking before a crowd of 20,000 people in Prague, President Obama said of the North Korean missile test, “This provocation underscores the need for action — not just this afternoon at the U.N. Security Council, but in our determination to prevent the spread of these weapons. Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

Former President Bush may have bungled the Afghan and Iraq wars, but one of the few points on which W was clear-headed was his belief that all the words and resolutions emanating from the United Nations meant absolutely nothing. In its long and tortured history, the U.N.’s tenuous legitimacy and relevance has rested solely on U.S. moral and military might – from the Korean conflict to both Iraq wars.

Mr. Obama’s weak pleas for the U.N. to rescue our world from the threat of North Korea’s missiles, as well as blunting that communist nation’s forays into nuclear proliferation, are a pathetic abdication of real leadership in favor of symbolic leadership. Obama, it seems, would rather be Gandhi than Churchill.

Churchill relentlessly fought Hilter and fulfilled his pledged to “rid the Earth of his shadow.” Gandhi, on the other hand, sought to transform Nazis through his symbolic power. “I am as certain as I am dictating these words that the stoniest German heart will melt [if only the Jews] adopt active non-violence. Human nature… unfailingly responds to the advances of love. I do not despair of his [Hitler’s] responding to human suffering even though caused by him.”

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan thumbed their nose at the League of Nations (the forerunner to the U.N.) precisely because its decisions meant nothing. England’s diplomatic concessions to Hitler at the Munich Conference – all in the name of collective security – emboldened the German dictator, helping usher in the Second World War and the Holocaust.

President Obama pledged during his political campaign, and now to Europe’s adoring throngs, that America will no longer go it alone – in effect telling the globe that we are no longer the world’s policeman. In the years to follow, when international monsters (like North Korea's Kim Jong-il) add further atrocities to the catalogue of crimes against humanity, what remains of the civilized world will lament that there was no cop around when it needed one.