As Singapore's Straight Times reports North Korea is taking advantage of America's situation overload in Iraq and Haiti to push the ante up on negotiations.
Which shows us why there is a need for restrained use of power, because much of American power is, in fact, used to deter nations like, say Pakistan, from pushing their advantages. We can't put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, we know that and knew that. However, this makes more urgent, not less, the need to be honest when we are acting out of a pressing need to remove a nuclear threat, and when we are not. Iraq was not a nuclear threat, and spending years of America's core military power on it has meant breathing room for others involved in proliferation.
The case of Libya is a simple example - a small amount of investment in atomic technology gets larger bribes from the US and help in opening Libya back to the West. A good deal. "It's a nice nuclear monopoly you have, pity something should happen to it." seems to work.
The lesson has not been lost on those who need to learn it.
What this means is that one of the most pressing projects for the next president is to end the war time mentality around the globe and being the process of removing the loose nuclear and biological material. War, and its near cousin perpetual war, do not respond as well as peace to the application of economic pressure. Booms provide their own logic - nations that invest in arms when times are good find themselves falling behind. It is not an accident that the most ardent disarmers in European history have been conservative governments in the midst of an economic boom - every dollar wasted on weapons is one less to be made.
Nations respond to this - when blackmail does not have the return on investment that development does, then development wins out. This is particularly pressing in the case of Pakistan, a country which, Janus like, looks back towards a feudal past of being a failed state, and also towards a future where it joins Malaysia and Indonesia as emerging powerhouses of the Islamic world.
The US needs flexibility to deal with this environment, to reward those who push forward, as well as deter those who look backwards. This is why a strong US economy is also essential. The almighty dollar is a much more powerful diplomatic lever when it is, in fact, all powerful.
By these measures, Bush is a failure. He has weakened the US currency - relying on Japan's willingness to soak up dollars to prop up a failed monetary policy. He has splayed US strength around the globe without real effect. He has sunk hundreds of billions into "defense" that provides no defense. He has squandered good will and alliances. He is now in the process of weakening America's image around the world by declaring defeat and going home in Iraq - leaving behind a state which will, if indications are correct, rapidly become another Islamic Republic in the model of Iran.
Hence, it is time to turn aside from the path of low growth and low investment in the world, and away from the unilateralist path taken in the last 3 years. Instead, the US must push to increase the top line - more prosperity - and to return to internationalism as its primary foreign policy consensus.