Republicans own the failure of North Korea. Especially George W. Bush.

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Amadeus

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Bush pulled back from the deal reached by the Clintons, which actually worked. Once the Bush Admin pulled from the deal, North Korea began accelerating their nuclear ambitions. The genie was out of the bottle when the Obama Admin took over, and were left with no options but previously-sabotaged diplomacy.

The Bush team didn’t like the concept of the deal itself. Giving things to the North Koreans to get them to do things we wanted was rewarding misbehavior, ‘appeasement’. The proper way to handle such a situation was to get them to fall in line by the threat of US power, which is to say US military power. This isn’t a crazy viewpoint. The North Koreans have used menacing or destabilizing actions to extract aid from great powers. In principle you should avoid rewarding ‘bad behavior’. Indeed, it was an unlovely arrangement. But even if there was some cheating in the background, the agreement demonstrably shuttered or at least stymied North Korea’s weapons development for years.
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The simple reality was that the Bush team didn’t like the deal but had nothing to replace it with. The threat of force wasn’t credible because of the costs of a military confrontation which the North Koreans were well aware of. So the US got to act tough (or rather feel tough) and not go in for ‘appeasement’ and the result was that North Korea became a nuclear power. Might they have become a nuclear power anyway? Maybe. But it seems very hard to argue that they would have gotten there as quickly as they did or would even be there today if the US had continued with the quite minor amounts of aid the Agreed Framework required. He didn’t argue this specifically. But last night TPM Reader ML raised the possibility that our actions really don’t matter here at all, that North Korea’s behavior is driven by internal factors. This may certainly be true. But in that case we have no impact or influence regardless.
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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-president-bushs-north-korea-failure-is-important-to-remember

I should also point out that Bush did the same thing with Iran, causing Iran to produce some 19,000 centrifuges when faced with Bush's "tough talk". Obama has put THAT genie in the bottle for now, but if you remove the Iran Nuclear Deal, you're left with much the same situation as you are with North Korea. Will Republicans learn from their mistake on that score? Highly unlikely.

Tough talk and an empty sack is worth the price of the empty sack.
 
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