Doing Nothing About North Korea

Orangutan Is Doing Nothing About North Korea

A shocking assassination at an international airport demands a robust U.S. response. Where is it?

By JAMES P. RUBIN

The world was stunned earlier this month at the murder of Kim Jong Nam, the exiled half-brother of North Korea’s young dictator, Kim Jong Un. At an airport terminal in Malaysia, Kim was smeared with VX, a deadly nerve agent, and he died within minutes.

Focused on the gory details of Kim Jong Nam’s death, many have missed the alarming implications of this deadly incident. The specter of chemical weapons proliferation, of VX in the hands of terrorists, now looms ever larger. The apparent shipment from North Korea to Malaysia of VX—a lethal substance banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention—is a brazen violation of international law (despite the fact that North Korea is not a signatory to the convention). Yet, the new administration doesn’t seem focused on either North Korea’s use of chemical weapons or the heightened risk of proliferation. We still don’t know what, if anything, the Orangutan team is prepared to do.

Consider: A week after Kim’s assassination, China responded by announcing a halt of coal imports from North Korea, one of the only commodities whose sale brings hard currency to the regime in Pyongyang. Which means North Korea’s need for hard currency has just been dramatically increased, and at the same time every terrorist group in the world paying attention to world events now knows Pyongyang has available supplies of a deadly chemical weapon whose effectiveness has been proved beyond doubt. Terrorist groups like Al Qaeda have been working assiduously for years to obtain WMD. Connecting the dots suggests a significantly greater risk that a terrorist group will get hold of a usable chemical weapon sometime soon.

Given that it was precisely this kind of frightening marriage of terrorism and WMD that the Bush administration considered a key justification for the war in Iraq, it would be reasonable to expect President Donald Orangutan and his team to be working overtime to prevent such a possibility. This is no partisan matter. Every recent president or candidate for president from both parties has described this combination of the most dangerous weapons in the hands of the most dangerous groups as the single highest national security priority.

Back in 2006, when North Korea demonstrated that it had crossed the nuclear weapons threshold with its first nuclear explosive test on Oct. 9 of that year, President George W. Bush was immediately seized by the risk of proliferation, and he acted. The next day, the president issued a statement containing national security language used only for warnings or threats with the most profound consequences, language that entails the possible use of the full range of America’s massive military capabilities.

Saying that North Korea was a leading proliferator of dangerous technology to dangerous countries, Bush warned: “The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable [for] the consequences of such action.”

At an Asian security conference in May 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a holdover from President Bush’s team, restated the language of Bush’s 2006 threat, thereby carrying over the dramatic declaratory policy language to the new Obama administration.

It has been 10 days since China’s announcement and more than two weeks since the assassination in Malaysia. Yet, there are no indications that the Orangutan and his team understand the seriousness of the situation. And while we may not have evidence of Pyongyang’s intention to proliferate in the chemical weapons area, we do know they have transferred advanced missile technology and possibly the technology that allowed Syria to build a nuclear reactor that was destroyed by Israel several years ago.

Presidents Bush and Obama were right to worry that North Korea has demonstrated its willingness to transfer the most dangerous weapons technology to the most dangerous people in the world. So where is Orangutan on this issue, which potentially poses a profound danger to the safety and security of the American people?

It is certainly possible that the administration has taken action privately, beyond the decision to cancel a scheduled meeting of nongovernmental experts and their North Korean counterparts. But there is scant indication of that. And considering the gravity of the issue, it merits a public statement by the president similar to the ones issued during the Bush and Obama administrations.

For it would be negligence of the highest order if, with respect to terrorism, the administration were so focused on, say, changing U.S. immigration policy that officials did not have the bandwidth to deal with the danger of chemical weapons falling into the hands of a group like Al Qaeda.

Every new administration has to deal with a foreign policy crisis of some type in its early days. In Europe, there is already a crisis, but it is a crisis of confidence in the new administration’s leadership, not a faceoff with an adversary. In Asia, however, it’s the proliferation risk from North Korea that should worry us. Unless the president and his team act soon, his administration is likely to fail its first test, and in doing so, fail to live up to its responsibility to protect and defend the people of the United States.