Never Say No

When I was a young military officer, one of my advisors gave me some advice on how to say no without saying no.  Most of you know this trick:  Always say, "Yes, but..."  It served me well over the years, and it looks like it serves China well in international relations.  Russia has never been very good at it.

Two stories in today's Wall Street Journal are good examples, an opinion piece called Iran's U.N. Free Pass and  Jay Solomon's article U.S. Imposes Fresh Sanctions on North Korea.  The Journal points out that attempts to control Iran's missile development through any kind of international effort are pointless.  Russian vetoed any moves by the rest of the world to use sanctions against Iran for their latest missile test launches, which Iran claims are not violating any U.N. Resolutions.  The North Korean sanctions are not doing any better at achieving the results expected years ago.  North Korea now has the weapons and still works on a delivery system.  The difference is, China went along with sanctions against North Korea and Russia doesn't for Iran.  China has the better way.  The UN seems to have no way.

The difference is, China says yes to sanctions, but does pretty much what it wants to support North Korea's development.  Russia says no to the Iranian sanctions and most all the countries who favor sanctions against Iran protest their blockage.  China says yes and the world thinks they are cooperating.  Only this time, the US has even started to sanction Chinese businesses that support North Korea's programs.  That seems never to have worked before, but this time, it will.  We just have to have hope.

So, unless we change our approach to doing something about it, we are going to end up with two proxies with nuclear weapons and the ability to deliver them.  One even has the slogan of Death to Israel, which we have all heard before, but carries a little more significance when painted on the side of a missile.  The other threatens the US directly.

Perhaps we might think about what we want the outcome of sanctions to be and work towards that end by any and all means necessary.  As North Korea's little sojourns into cyber attacks have shown, they don't just talk about doing things.  They actually do them.  We can ask Otto Warmbler, a 21-year old who got 15 years of hard labor for taking a political poster.  If anyone doubts that Iran will be any different, look at all the trouble they cause now in the Middle East.  If it is true that the attended the testing of North Korea's last bomb, as reported by several press outlets, then we could have two of the world's worst regimes cooperating while the rest of world talks.  Is this what we want?