Eight years ago, a particularly stupid U.S. Administration at a particularly stupid juncture in American history offered Communist North Korea a deal: if you don’t develop nuclear weapons, we’ll give you free American oil — at U.S. taxpayer expense.
Even hard-right “reactionaries” dared not state the inevitable at the time: that the dictatorial North Korean government would never honor the agreement.
Fast forward to 2002, a somewhat less stupid but still surprisingly stupid period of U.S. history: lo and behold, the government of North Korea acknowledges that it is developing nuclear weapons after all.
After some initial hesitation, the U.S. stops shipping the free oil.
Here’s the response from the North Korean government: “Now that the United States has unilaterally given up its last responsibilities under the basic agreement, we believe the time has come to clearly identify whose responsibility it is for the complete collapse of the basic agreement.”
Now do you understand why there’s no such thing as doing business with dictatorial nations? There will never be peace with terrorists or dictators. Why? Because they are terrorist dictators. You wouldn’t do business with a known fraud. You wouldn’t marry a known physical abuser. So why should our government do business with a known terrorist nation currently building nuclear weapons?
It’s not that complicated. Yet it has taken years for our own government to start to see the light.
