John McCain has a plan for North Korea. To deal with the impudent northern half of the Korean Peninsula, McCain suggested yesterday that it might be time to dig into the Bush administration playbook for the Middle East, circa 2003. On CNN’s State Of The Union, McCain called for “regime change” in Pyongyang as soon as possible — though he didn’t say how exactly anyone would go about it.
One option appears to be off the table in McCain’s mind, a military strike like the one America used the last time “regime change” was bandied about by high-profile Republicans.
“I think it’s time we talked about regime change in North Korea,” McCain told CNN’s Candy Crowley, “and I do not mean military action, but I do believe that this is a very unstable regime.”
Earlier in the interview, McCain suggested that if someone was to get their regime change on in North Korea, it would probably be China:
“We’ve got to understand that China is not what we want it to be, but is not playing a responsible role on the world stage, much less in — on the Korean Peninsula. They could bring the North Korean economy to its knees if they wanted to. And I cannot believe that the Chinese should, in a mature fashion, not find it in their interest to restrain North Korea. So far, they are not.”
Though Crowley moved the interview ahead to Afghanistan shortly after McCain’s “regime change” comments, in a CNN post-mortem webcast after the show she and State Of The Union producer Tom Bettag seemed to scratch their heads over just what it was McCain meant when he said “regime change” during the show.
“That’s why you always want an hour and half with these guys,” Crowley said. “‘Cuz you want to say, ‘And, so, how would we go about doing that?'”
Watch McCain talk regime change:
Watch Crowley and Bettag wonder about what McCain meant:
