Cheap, ‘Conservative’ Moralizing on North Korea

By Joshua Charles Published on June 15, 2018

Let’s be clear about two things: One, we have a long way to go before declaring “victory” with respect to North Korea; and two, North Korea remains, and always has been, a horrific, brutal dictatorship. There is zero doubt about that.

But I confess to being blown away by some of the comments from some of the Conservative Commentariat about the meeting between President Trump and Kim Jong Un.

For example, Ben Shapiro (who, for the record, I love on most days) tweeted:

We mauled Obama, rightly, for saying he’d meet with dictators without preconditions. There had better be results here beyond a round of golf at Mar-a-Lago.

Likewise, Sohrab Ahmari, someone I genuinely adore for so many reasons, expressed revulsion that the U.S. and North Korean flags were displayed alongside one another. He, likewise, went on to tweet:

North Korea is a Communist slave state. The worst regime on earth. Conservatives who — rightly — skewered Obama for his capitulation to Iran and Cuba shouldn’t be clapping today.

Jonah Goldberg tweeted:

FWIW [for what it’s worth], I think the North Korean flag is a piece of vile filth that stands for the dynastic rule of a racist cult that subjugates, tortures and enslaves its own people. Ideally it would spontaneously combust when it even touches our flag. But nfw [no f****** way] should it stand equal to ours.”

That last one was retweeted by David French (who I often adore as well).

Bottom Line

Let me cut straight to the point: these tweets, and others like them, are nonsense.

First, who disagrees that North Korea is a vile, brutal, pathetic excuse for a country? Who? Few things are as cheap as stating with gusto what everyone already agrees on as if you’re the only one that does. Posturing. That’s all it is.

Second, Shapiro and Ahmari’s tweets both imply that Trump, and by extension those who supported him on this Summit, are contradicting themselves. After all, we skewered Obama for saying he’d meet with the Iranians with no preconditions — didn’t we?!

Yes, we did, because the actions aren’t the same. What Trump did is profoundly different than what Obama proposed. Among the preconditions that were met were the release of prisoners, the commitment to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula (at least on paper), the destruction of multiple nuclear sites alongside the suspension of more tests, and even an insistence that the bellicose rhetoric stop. After all, Trump even cancelled the Summit briefly when these conditions were not being met.

Is this what Obama proposed? No. Did Obama get any concessions from Cuba prior to negotiations? No. From Iran? No. Any dismantling of anything by either? No. To compare the two is afactual.

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Another vitally important difference is the Trump administration’s commitment to a Senate-ready treaty. Rather than a merely executory agreement that can be cancelled or adjusted at will by any future President, Trump has committed to giving the North Koreans greater confidence in whatever final agreement is reached by insisting it become a fully ratified treaty. That would make it, according to the Constitution, part of the law of the land. That’s a far cry from anything Obama committed to — or even attempted. It would require the buy-in of another branch of government.

The simple fact is that not only has the framework of the entire negotiation been different, but numerous preconditions were met, in addition to the imposition of the most far-reaching sanctions ever laid on North Korea. For Shapiro and Ahmari to all but say otherwise is simply not true.

Forgetting Reagan … In Reagan’s Name

Now, to Goldberg (and French).

There’s a cheap, right-wing moralizing against President Trump that presumes to speak in Reagan’s name (and Goldberg and French both claim to be conservatives of the Reagan variety), and yet forgets what Reagan actually did. Both of these men are wonderfully insightful on so many things. They are important voices in the broader Conservative movement. But on this, as on other matters, they have totally missed the ball. They seem to remember the “evil empire” in 1983, and forget when Reagan explicitly left that behind in 1988 — while visiting the Kremlin! Why? Peace.

Reagan stood by the leader of the Soviet Union — the bloodiest regime that has ever existed in human history — and guess what? Our flags were of equal height! You know, the same country about which Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, and murdered millions of its own people. That one.

How much more absurd can you get?

Look, on an emotional level, I get it. I hate the North Korean regime. Kim Jong Un is a bloody tyrant. No doubt about it. Caution is absolutely called for.

But for the Conservative Commentariat types, those who think they are being principled for pointing out the obvious about North Korea: literally every single point you make could have been made even more strongly about Nixon and Mao, and Reagan and the Soviets — meetings that ended up serving the interests of peace, prosperity, and stability, despite the fact that both regimes had committed crimes of far greater magnitude than North Korea’s, black as they are.

In other words — you aren’t making a principled argument. You’re pointing out the obvious, and forgetting history in order to earn credit for doing so.

For Reality’s Sake

When millions of lives are at stake, and the only other option is eventual military conflict, arguments like these appear all the more ahistorical, tired, and boring. It is to live in a dream world where Nixon and Mao never met, where Reagan and the Soviets never talked (let alone, in the Kremlin!), and where U.S. Presidents haven’t been kicking this can down the road for nearly 30 years, making dramatic action all the more necessary. It is to engage in mere self-pleasuring moral abstraction divorced from reality, from history, and from responsibility for the consequences.

Jesus once observed that “the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.”

Too many in the Conservative Commentariat seem intent on proving this correct.

At least on this issue — ignore them.

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