Last week, I led a group of Republican senators that wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to immediately relist North Korea as a State Sponsor of Terrorism and we also introduced an amendment to force the Obama Administration into action.
 
Yesterday on ABC’s This Week, I was pleased to hear Secretary Clinton’s response that they are now considering relisting North Korea. This is a very important step that I hope President Obama will agree to.
 
However, just days before Secretary Clinton’s statement, her spokesman bluntly claimed the State Department doesn’t believe there are any recent acts by North Korea that can be defined as supporting terrorism:
 

REPORTER: A group of Republican senators has written a letter to the Secretary urging her to relist North Korea on the terror list. They specify certain unnamed ongoing terrorist activities. Do you share that assessment, and where do you want to go with that?

STATE DEPT. SPOKESMAN PHILIP CROWLEY: …As for North Korea, I think we’re aware of that letter. But as far as I know, firing off missiles and over-heated rhetoric is unwise and unhelpful, but does not meet the legal definition of terrorism.

REPORTER: They seem to say – but they don’t refer to those tests as a terrorist activity – to say that other ones are ongoing, that those are — Is there anything else that you’re aware of?

MR. CROWLEY: To list a country on the terrorism list, there’s a legal requirement there. And what we’ve seen so far, I don’t think meets that legal test.
 

Based on this statement, I eagerly await the State Department to certify:
 

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A few hours after President Obama finished his Memorial Day round of golf with former Kerry “body man” Marvin Nicholson, North Korea officially entered the nuclear club.

We’ve all known this was going to happen for a lot of reasons. To a certain extent we’re lucky it has taken them this long to produce a nuke. They had a false start back in 2006 and perhaps an industrial accident in 2004, but there was never any doubt that eventually this day would come.

So what will the Administration do now?

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The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has declared itself to no longer be party to the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War and established the uneasy peace that has reigned on the southeast Asian peninsula for the last 56 years.

The announcement comes on the heels of a long-range missile test, a nuclear detonation, and multiple short-range missile launches, none of which represented physical attacks on neighboring states but all of which were very much intended to be seen as threats by those who would dare out pressure on the hermit kingdom to walk back its aggressive policies and live within the bounds of international consensus and agreements.

Though the Republic of Korea is used to such rhetoric and posturing from its northern neighbor, Pyongyang’s latest ratcheting up of tension on the peninsula comes as a direct result of the ROK announcing its decision to become a member of a program known as the Proliferation Security Initiative, or PSI.

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President Barack Obama nominated Second Circuit appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor as his first nominee to the Supreme Court. Sotomayor, when she is confirmed, will become only the third woman and the first Hispanic to serve on the Court, replacing the retiring Justice David Souter. No word yet on the reaction from Pyongyang.

Pyongyang? Yes, Pyongyang. North Korea test fired not one, not two, not even three, but five new missiles yesterday and today in response to the United Nations Security Council’s condemnation of its recent nuclear test. The two moves have sparked a new international nuclear crisis that has implications for Asia, the Middle East, and the United States.  This is North Korea week in capitals around the globe from Tokyo, to Beijing, to Seoul, to London, Moscow, and even Tehran.  But not in Washington.  The Obama Administration’s response is essentially to change the subject and distract media and public attention from the one thing it does not want to talk about, foreign policy.

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