STEYN: Testing what we’ll let pass

COMMENTARY:

What does a nuclear madman have to do to get America’s attention? On Memorial Day, the North Koreans detonated “an underground atomic device many times more powerful than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” as my old colleagues at the Irish Times put it. You’d think that would rate something higher than “World News in Brief, see foot of Page 37. ” But instead, Washington was consumed by the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who apparently has a “compelling personal story.”

Doesn’t Kim Jong-il have a compelling personal story? Like Judge Sotomayor, he grew up in a poor neighborhood (North Korea), yet he has managed to become a nuclear power, shattering the glass ceiling to take his seat at the old nuclear boys club.

Isn’t that an inspiring narrative? Once upon a time, you had to be a great power, one of the Big Five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, to sit at the nuclear table: America, Britain, France, Russia, China, the old sons of power and privilege. But now the mentally unstable scion of an impoverished no-account backwater with a gross domestic product lower than Zimbabwe’s has joined their ranks: Celebrate diversity!

Evidently, some compelling personal stories are more compelling than others. In The Washington Post, Stephen Stromberg argued that Mr. Kim’s decision to drop the Big One on a three-day weekend was evidence of his appalling news judgment.

Other blase observers shrug that it’s become an American holiday tradition. It began when Pyongyang staged the first of its holiday provocations on the Fourth of July 2006, and, amidst all the other fireworks displays, America barely noticed. No doubt there’ll be another Hiroshima on Labor Day or Thanksgiving. Geez, doesn’t the hick in the presidential palace get it? There’s no point launching nukes when everyone’s barbecuing chicken or watching football.

Well, you never know: Maybe we’re the ones being parochial. If you’re American, it’s natural to assume the North Korean problem is about North Korea, just like the Iraq war is about Iraq. But they’re not. If you’re starving to death in Pyongyang, North Korea is about North Korea. For everyone else, North Korea and Iraq, and Afghanistan and Iran, are about America: American will, American purpose, American credibility.

The rest of the world doesn’t observe Memorial Day. But it understands the crude symbolism of a rogue nuclear test staged on the day designated to honor American war dead and greeted with only half-hearted pro-forma diplomatese from Washington. Pyongyang’s actions were “a matter of” - Drumroll please! - “grave concern,” the president declared. Furthermore, if North Korea carries on like this, it will - wait for it - “not find international acceptance.” As the comedian Andy Borowitz put it, “President Obama said that the United States was prepared to respond to the threat with ‘the strongest possible adjectives.’ Later in the day, Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the North Korean nuclear test ‘supercilious and jejune.’ ”

The president’s general line on the geopolitical big picture is: I don’t need this in my life right now. He’s a domestic transformationalist, working overtime - via the banks, the automobile industry, health care, etc - to advance statism’s death grip on American dynamism. His principal interest in the rest of the world is that he doesn’t want anyone nuking America before he’s finished turning it into a socialist basket case.

This isn’t simply a matter of priorities. A U.S. government currently borrowing 50 cents for every dollar it spends cannot afford its global role, and thus the Obama cuts to missile defense and other programs have a kind of logic: You can’t be Scandinavia writ large with a U.S.-sized military.

Out there in the chancelleries and presidential palaces, they’re beginning to get the message. The regime in Pyongyang is not merely trying to “provoke” America but demonstrating to potential clients that you can do so with impunity. A black-market economy reliant on exports of heroin, sex slaves and knockoff Viagra is attempting to supersize its business model and turn itself into a nuclear Wal-Mart.

Among the distinguished guests present for North Korea’s October 2006 test were representatives of the Iranian government. Former President George W. Bush was much mocked for yoking the two nations together in his now all-but-forgotten “axis of evil” speech, but the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung reported a few weeks ago that the North Korean-built (and Israeli-bombed) plutonium-production facility in Syria was paid for by Tehran. How many other Iranian clients are getting nuclear subsidies?

It would be interesting to learn who was on the observation deck for the Memorial Day Hiroshima re-enactment, but North Korea is one of the most closed societies on the face of the Earth, certainly when compared with the more closely scrutinized corners of the Middle East. In other words, it’s the perfect partner for any state that wants to pursue certain projects under the Western radar screen.

It is remarkable how the world has adjusted in just five years to the inevitability of a nuclear North Korea and a nuclear Iran. Nudge it on another half-decade: Whose nuclear ambitions will be unstoppable by 2015? Syria’s? Sudan’s? Those of selected fiefdoms in Somalia?

Mr. Obama came to power pledging to talk to America’s enemies anywhere, anytime. Alas for America’s speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-teleprompter diplomacy, there are no takers for his photo-ops.

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