Is Donald Trump as Sane as Kim Jong Un?

If we go back in time, we’ll see that much of today’s crisis is the fruit of yesterday’s dumb feelings. When Bill Clinton turned over the White House to George W. Bush, North Korea was nearly contained. A deal had been reached to provide North Korea with heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors in exchange for shutting down their plutonium reactor. Unfortunately, this disgusted Washington’s hawks, and they did their best to undermine it. Only an amoral egghead, went the sentiment, would stoop to cut a deal with a malevolent tyrant. Once Bush took office, the heart got to point the way. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” explained Vice President Dick Cheney. “We defeat it.”

Well, that worked out well. Going with gut revulsion toward North Korea’s tyranny regime led Pyongyang to tear up the deal and get back to its bomb-making ways. By the time Bush handed off the problem, North Korea was well on the way to being untouchable.

Then came Barack Obama, who looked at all his options. Failure might have been an unavoidable result, but what made it inevitable, at least after 2011, was yet another moment when sentiment pushed reason out of the car and grabbed the wheel. That was when Libyans started to protest the tyranny of their leader, Muammar Qaddafi, in February 2011. The protesters had grounds for complaint, especially since Qaddafi’s response was to promise to kill them all. But did it mean the United States should intervene?

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Yes, came the consensus reply. Decent people couldn’t stand by while mass killing unfolded. Reluctance to use force, of the sort Obama was showing, was “a disgrace,” wrote Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic. Familiar names like Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen and Council of Foreign Relations fellow Max Boot were among the many signatories to a letter urging Obama to take action “for the sake of our security as well as America’s credibility.” So did Samantha Power and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. So did former Clinton employee and Princeton professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, with a New York Times op-ed headlined “Fiddling While Libya Burns.” This wasn’t her title, but it summed up the zeitgeist of the moment. Eventually, Obama relented and took out Qaddafi by force.

Rare in that stretch were the voices counseling nonintervention, and even fewer were those warning of the effect on nuclear proliferation. They included American Conservative blogger Daniel Larison, conservative provocateur Mark Steyn, and C.I.A. veteran Paul Pillar, who warned about the message sent when we whacked “someone who gave up not only terrorism but also his unconventional weapons programs in return for normal relations.” Arms expert Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey was among an even rarer group who warned that North Korea was watching.

As it turned out, the dissenters were right. Iran’s leaders took notice, and hard-liners redoubled their efforts to scuttle negotiations over the country’s nuclear program, warning that they could otherwise share Qaddafi’s fate. Similarly, Pyongyang’s news agency laid out its analysis: that the nuclear deal with Qaddafi had been a trap which, using “such sweet words as ‘guarantee of security’ and ‘improvement of relations,’” had caused Libya’s regime to disarm and “then swallowed it up by force.” To which the official U.S. response was something like, “Well, yeah, but . . . we didn’t destroy Qaddafi until he displeased us, and that was, like, eight years later.”

To be fair, sentiments here were running strong. If I recall my own thoughts correctly, for instance, I considered the effects of our actions on nuclear proliferation but still, I confess, felt only mildly opposed to the intervention. That was because thoughts about incentives or broken deals or sovereignty seemed legalistic and hypothetical, while the threat of bloody suppression in Libya seemed immediate and visceral. But that’s precisely the problem. After all, what’s theoretical today becomes visceral tomorrow. Qaddafi’s oppression bothered us, but a nuclear exchange with North Korea will bother us even more.