US needs strong stance

North Korea defiantly marched back onto the world stage Sunday, aiming a long-range missile toward the heavens, depressing the flashing red button and therewith making a statement that reverberates still. Roughly translated, it was: Pfffffffffffffffttt. To which President Barack Obama, leader of the planet’s remaining superpower, responded by laying down weapons, ducking behind the United Nations’ skirts and reaching for his campaign slogan. Anguish roughly translated, it was, “Can we get along?”

Well, no, we can’t. But Obama is convinced that love, and perhaps his own extraordinary coolness, will find a way. So as the world bristled at North Korea’s latest and perfunctorily comic attempt at bravado – a test missile that failed halfway through three phases and splashed into the Pacific – the president stepped backward in Prague with an offer to slash America’s nuclear-weapons cache.

His hope is to make allies of the Chinese and Russians in opposing a nuclear buildup in North Korea and Iran. Interesting thought, that one.

It may be remembered that China for more than a half-century has played the part of doting big brother to North Korea. Team Obama and others see some opportunity in this: Pyongyang depends almost exclusively on China for food, weapons and fuel. The thinking goes that holding this leverage, and it is indeed enormous, China can soothe the wilder impulses of its little brother. China tried this in summer 2006, joining a U.N. resolution against North Korea after an initial missile test. North Korea launched a second missile several months later.

China’s answer? A shrug. China relies on North Korea as foothold on its northeastern boundary against a democratic incursion from South Korea, where thousands of U.S. troops are stationed. The Chinese also have plunged more than $2 billion in trade and investment in North Korea, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. China fears Pyongyang’s rogue impulses because North Korea is essential to China’s interests. But China will do nothing to alter its fundamental relationship with North Korea as an ally. That includes anything beyond shoal on the subject of nuclear deterrence.

Russia wants nuclear disarmament in North Korea, but like China, has a vested interest in the preservation of the current regime in Pyongyang. Trade between the two countries increased by about a third from the end of the last decade to the middle of this one, with Russia shipping metal, steel and oil to North Korea. After cooling in the 1990s, Russia’s relations steadily have warmed with North Korea. Like China, Russia wants a stable North Korea, something Pyongyang could threaten if it suddenly turns nuclear impotence to power.

Beneath the geopolitical folds, Obama pledged Sunday “to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” then adding, as if aware that the goal sounds more laudable than plausible, “We have to insist, ‘Yes, we can.’ ”

For Russia and China, the countries whose help Obama courts, the real concern is that America might be roused. This is a worry the president would be wise to maintain, for it is the best means of compelling the world’s other powers to contain the emergence of North Korea as a meaningful military threat, rather than comic relief. Ronald Reagan demonstrated the capacity of deterrence through strength to cow totalitarian regimes. Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, when the Soviet Union appeared to surge, demonstrated the opposite.

If Obama is bothered by North Korea’s latest failed attempt at might, he should be admonished, what the world needs now is not love, but a strong America with whom the rogues in Pyongyang have sufficient cause to think twice before tangling.