If it is indeed true that N Korea conducted a nuclear test today, US foreign policy will truly be turned on its head. For everything about North Korea that is true will be like a mirror image of all in Iraq that was false. Washington will wish they only had to deal with the publication of Woodward’s State of Denial. For after Hastert’s denial, our denial vis a vis Korea will make our insistence on Iraq even more untenable. How can any administration project power, be it soft power, moral power, economic power, or the hard military stuff, if its own policies are bipolar? Back when the world was bipolar (read US and USSR), policies at least made some amount of sense. This version of bipolar owes more to psychiatry than it does to international relations! The White House has been living in a “reality” of its own invention, a projection (or transference?) of its own paranoid future, a reality show as seen on Fox News, a narcissism whose reflection on the surface of the world reads just as well backwards as forwards: State of Denial / Denial of State. You want reality tv? Stay tuned!
Technorati tags: politics, North Korea, nuclear test, Kim Jong Il, State of Denial, Bush