A few weeks have passed and most of us have already forgotten about North Korean nuclear weapons, which is understandable what with more important things going on like Sara Evans leaving Dancing with the Stars and Michael J. Fox pretending his Parkinson’s is actually a problem. We’ve also got eight and a half good days of pure political oversaturation ahead as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of a Congress that will do diddly-squat. But last week, one story quietly rippled over the wire that should remind us that the Bush administration can do more to undermine international security with the two years it has left behind the wheel than a drunk toddler can do to personal safety with two minutes behind a loaded gun.

The United States would not try to stifle any Japanese discussion on reconsidering the nation’s policy against nuclear weapons, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer said today.
“What the Japanese talk about with themselves or with their government is up to the Japanese. It is not up to the United States to decide what is appropriate or not appropriate for the Japanese to say,” Schieffer told reporters in Tokyo today.
–Global Security Newswire

Your average terrorist-loving student of logic might first point out the diplomatic irony of the fact that it apparently is “up to the United State to decide what is or is not appropriate” for several other countries to say on the subject of nuclear weapons. This naive argument would be swatted down by even the most mundane of neocons by explaining that obviously we can treat our trustworthy friends differently than we treat unstable nations run by dictatorial regimes, which would make sense to John Q. Public just long enough to get him out to the polls to vote us another term of international blunders.

The problem is that this is exactly not how a modestly successful but extremely tenuous arms control regime like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty works. As disastrous as it has been for two conflict-prone nations like Pakistan and India to surreptitiously join the nuclear club, it would be a dagger through the heart — from the back — for the United States to calmly wink another nation into it like some arrogant bouncer at a posh South Beach nightclub. (Nevermind the fact that this is what the Bush administration is attempting to do ex post facto with India, despite the good advice of people who actually know something about arms control, including a number of Republicans.) While it is all fine and dandy to say that our nation-friends are “free to discuss” their nuclear options amongst themselves, since we are, after all, the global champions of democracy, this is one of those areas where it is absolutely our responsibility to say to our friends, in the strongest of terms, that we would be seriously disappointed if they were to even say the word “nuclear” out loud too many times in one parliamentary session. Global nonproliferation efforts are built upon the foundation of our ability to dissuade our friends from abandoning the framework so that we might have any prayer of coercing our not-so-much-friends out of doing the same.

One of the backbones of the strategic security nightmare so many people have about an Iranian nuclear weapons program is not nearly so much the evaporation of Israel as the potential arms race that might overcome the entire Middle East. But how are our current leaders supposed to talk our friends in the House of Saud down off the nuclear ledge when we’re apparently prepared to let Japan rattle a plutonium saber with nary a disapproving word? While deference to the internal debate of sovereign countries is as American as apple pie (and Venezualan oil), for an ambassador to verbally “let the dogs out” like that can hardly be seen as anything other than deliberately provocative or irretrievably daft. When Charles Krauthammer thinks it’s a good idea, you know it’s so, so bad.

Sometimes it’s like none of these people are at all qualified to hold diplomatic positions. (Oh wait, many of them aren’t.) Considering the convoluted language that was painstakingly crafted and put in place as the United States’ “official position” on the One China Policy, which enables us to stay in bed with both sides of the Taiwan Straits without excessively irritating the other, it would take such a tiny effort for the US Ambassador to Japan to acknowledge their sovereign right to internal debate while at the same time reiterating the necessary commitment to nuclear nonproliferation principles. On the essential latter point, we seem to be silent.



Read more filed under (In)security