A good friend of mine who is terribly shrewd about foreign policy, and opposes an Iraq war from a foreign policy realist perspective, tells me that the problems in North Korea could be one of the consequences. The idea is that our hyperfocus on Iraq distracted us from our responsibilities in Asia, got us into this jam, and now keeps us floundering in it. Somehow though that just doesn’t quite add up. I mean, I know it’s supposed to be hard to fight two, simultaneous regional wars, as our war-fighting doctrine still envisions. But should it really be so hard to fight two simultaneous diplomatic offenses?
