Shuffling to the right

John McCain moved to the right of President Bush today, over the administration's decision to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsor's of terrorism.

North Korea represents, without a doubt, one of the vilest regimes to ever stain the planet. Craving a legacy, Bush has pursued a slight thaw with North Korea since the micro-Stalinist state developed nuclear weapons, and this, two months before he leaves office may well be the culmination.

McCain has criticized the development as the product of "hasty and incomplete" diplomacy while his opponent has called it "appropriate".

This brings to mind the Georgia crisis recently, when Obama stood square with the president while McCain marched on to the right. McCain always seems to be a bit loose with his bellicose rhetoric but in each instance has been closer to the mark. Obama was overtly cautious when Russia invaded Georgia, where as McCain rightly called premeditated aggression as it was.

Given Obama's candidacy has partly been a product of the failure of Bush's foreign policy and when one considers his strategy of linking McCain to Bush, it is somewhat ironic that during two significant foreign policy developments of the general election, he has stood squarely with the president. This has everything to do with Bush having greatly moderated his positions, of course, and it is inconceivable that Obama is mimicking the president.

However, McCain's position is not to be brushed aside as some attempt to put distance between himself and the White House, or worse yet, some incarnation of the maverick galloping off into battle. He raised legitimate concerns about the agreement.

As McCain noted it is incredibly difficult to accurately assess developments inside Kim Jong-il's little ice kingdom, so the prospects of the US being fully aware of North Korea's true levels of disarmament are cloudy. McCain rightly asked how the US would gauge Pyongyang's disarmament.

More ominous is the timeline of events. The US effectively lavished aid upon the megalomaniac's regime in response for disarmament following the successful detonation of North Korea's first bomb. Recently, it was rumoured that North Korea threatened to resume its weapons programme if it were not removed from the list. Now it has been, and according the State Department, North Korea promises to resume disarmament. It is very difficult to really know what is taking place, but the fear remains that Bush is craving any success to sign off on. Up until recently, North Korea was that success. Then Pyongyang stopped playing along and started making demands. Now Pyongyang's out of the sin bin and back on the pitch. So the question arises, is North Korea exacting leverage over the United States? That would be a terrifying precedent.

US policy to North Korea is easily formulated: all efforts must be devoted to creating the perfect conditions for the soft collapse of the regime so as not to flood the region with calamity, refugees, and possibly war. Under no circumstances should Washington partake in prolonging the life-span of the anachronistic horror that is Kim's reign. If Washington believes that this deal will further push the tyrant to the wire - one fails to see how it could - than so be it. For now, the fear is it that it will do the complete opposite.