Newsweek -- Morality Is Not a Strategy

RIGHT NOW ON North Korea we have moral clarity but strategic incoherence.

A military attack on North Korea is impossible, not because it may have one or two crude nuclear weapons, but because it will retaliate by obliterating a large part of South Korea. Seoul is 35 miles from the North Korean border. Our options are constrained not by nukes, but by geography.

Harvard professor Ashton Carter, one of President Clinton’s senior defense aides, puts it sharply: “We told the North Koreans that we were not out to topple them but we would not tolerate their going nuclear. The Bush administration is doing the opposite. For two years it signaled that it was out to get them, but now that they’re going nuclear, it says that’s not a crisis. For American interests, this gets things backwards.”

Tracking the Bush foreign policy blunders.