Six months on, how fares the Obama doctrine? Concerning North Korea and Iran, the doctrine is on its deathbed. North Korea responded to administration outreach by testing a nuclear weapon, firing missiles toward U.S. allies, resuming plutonium reprocessing and threatening the United States with a “fire shower of nuclear retaliation.” The Iranian regime’s reaction to engagement was to cut the ribbon on a nuclear enrichment facility, add centrifuges, conduct a fraudulent election, and kill and imprison a variety of political opponents.
According to Gerson, the problem is not engagement, but rather, the regimes at which the engagement is directed at. Six months of Obama-style engagement consisting of open diplomacy and extended hand offers have yielded positively no results.
Of course, it would be unfair to pass final judgment on engagement policy at this point in time, however, the trend, especially in the world of things-nuclear, is potentially problematic - especially given Israel’s increasing impatience with the Iranian situation. Not to jump on the bandwagon of “Israel’s going to bomb Iran,” but there does come a time when you can no longer sit around and assume that people are going to act rationally. It certainly might be time to pay heed to Teddy Roosevelt’s mantra of “Speak softly but carry a big stick.” So far, there’s been a lot of soft speaking and even a lot of tough speaking - but as of yet, no big stick (sanctions and the threat of sanctions don’t really count).
This much is certainly true: as long as the North Korea issue remains unresolved, effectively dealing with the Iranian problem will prove impossible. As noted on this blog yesterday (see “Hawks and Doves”), Iran is in a far better place than North Korea, and, as such, has no incentive to desist from its nuclear pursuits while “Dear Leader” continues to ignore the entire international community. Obama is keen on engagement, and perhaps rightly so, but a more viable option may prove to be engaging the problem at hand, as opposed to the problem countries.