That said, do you expect Kim to just stop because the US (or for that matter the UN) wagged their finger at them and said so? If the situation were reversed, would the US?

I know it seems sound to think “if we play along they will just do what they did before and keep raising the rent, so we should just stop”. But what is the outcome of that position – that they continue to build the amount of knowledge, experience, and plutonium.

More importantly, it makes the idea of destabilizing the regime even more difficult because whether you do attack them (and I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t because that is a whole other debate) or let them collapse under their own weight they are now 1) nuclear armed, and 2) able to lose control of their materials to other folks we don’t want to have them.

In an ideal world they would stop because we said so, but in the real world we have to trade them something to do what we want. Their were lots of problems with the 1994 agreement – for instance it didn’t say anything about uranium, which is what got this whole thing started again – but at least we knew that as long as the money was flowing the American safeguards were in place.

As far as the impact of the UN, I use a simple test. If they didn’t exist would the situation be better, worse, or the same. I think this is definitely a case of the last category – the sanctions that Ambassador Bolton was able to get China, Russia, France, and Britain to agree to (and in the Security Council it is those 5 countries, not the “UN” that decides and does things) are simply irrelevent to moving closer or further to a final outcome.