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Worse Than BushWhen it comes to foreign policy, McCain is more of a neocon than the president.

By Fred KaplanPosted Wednesday, May 28, 2008, at 11:26 AM ET

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Then again, it was Bush who forfeited his leverage when he stood by and let North Korea build an A-bomb to begin with. Unable to take military action (the risks of North Korean retaliation against South Korea or Japan were deemed too dreadful) and unwilling to pursue diplomacy, he instead did nothing—and the consequences were inevitable. The deal that Hill worked out isn't great; it's not even as tight as Clinton's Agreed Framework; but the North Koreans hadn't reprocessed their plutonium when Clinton was president. Hill's deal might be the best that could have been negotiated under the circumstances. In any case, it's better than nothing.

McCain wants to undo the deal; he wants to go back to nothing. In an op-ed for the Asia edition of the Wall Street Journal, McCain and his co-author, Sen. Joe Lieberman, wrote, "We must use the leverage available from the United Nations Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang's 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of [North Korea's] nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner."

Absent knowledge of the historical context, this sounds reasonable. (Even with such knowledge, it's desirable.) The U.N. Security Council did pass a resolution that condemned the nuclear test and called on North Korea to dismantle its facilities.

However, the members of the Security Council knew, soon enough, that the resolution was unenforceable. Even Bush realized that, contrary to McCain and Lieberman's premise, the resolution gave them no "leverage" whatever.

In a similar op-ed for the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, McCain and Lieberman urged using the six-party talks "to press for a full, complete, verifiable declaration, disablement and dismantlement of North Korea's nuclear weapons program."

However, the fact is, the six-party talks really don't exist anymore, except as a ratifying body for bilateral talks between the United States and North Korea. (Hill, in fact, is reportedly in Beijing today, continuing these one-on-one sessions.) Bush decided, realistically, that demanding dismantlement as a first step was a nonstarter and that a freeze followed by a gradual disabling—prodded by the delivery of free fuel oil and other economic aid—was more feasible and imminently worthwhile. He had tried cutting off economic aid before, but it had no effect in weakening Kim's hold on power.

As Daniel Sneider, assistant director of the Shorenstein Asian-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, put it in a phone interview Tuesday night: "The policy that John McCain proposes is the policy that George W. Bush pursued—and that policy failed. There's not much to be said for going back to a policy that failed to contain North Korea's nuclear program."

Finally, in a speech at the University of Denver, delivered the same day that the op-eds were published, McCain suggested that his demand for nuclear dismantlement was contrary to the position of the Democrats' likely presidential candidate, Sen. Barack Obama. "Many believe," McCain said, "all we need to do to end the nuclear programs of hostile governments is have our president talk with leaders in Pyongyang and Tehran, as if we haven't tried talking with the governments repeatedly over the past two decades."

In effect, McCain was really criticizing George W. Bush. It was Bush who dropped the demand for North Korean dismantlement as a first step, much less as a precondition to talks. And as for McCain's snide aside—"as if we haven't tried talking with the governments repeatedly"—well, in fact, we haven't, or at least Bush hadn't, until he let Hill talk directly with the North Koreans. And, as it happened, that was all we needed to do to end (or at least to halt and start to tear down) their nuclear program.

And so, if John McCain is elected president, it's not quite true that he'll continue the policies of George W. Bush, as Sen. Obama charges. When it comes to controlling and disarming North Korea's nuclear program, McCain would set back Bush's policy several years.