This article appeared in The Hill on August 20, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
August 20, 2017

Yet another tumultuous week in domestic affairs, starting with the Charlottesville tragedy and ending with Steve Bannon departing the Trump White House, drove the continuing threats of international terrorism and nuclear proliferation off America’s front pages. The media’s vicissitudes may be inevitable, but they constantly produce “surprising” strategic developments that were both predictable and long in the making.

In that vein, one of the Trump administration’s principal legacies could well be that North Korea (and Iran) became full-fledged nuclear-weapons states on its watch. If so, the risks of radical Islamic terrorism will also increase correspondingly. Certainly, President Trump’s predecessors made critical blunders in counterproliferation policy, thereby laying the foundation for this potentially massive failure. But historical blame rests inevitably with the administration that missed the last clear chance to prevent it.

The mortal risk that terrorists will acquire nuclear (or chemical and biological) weapons is all too clear. ISIS claimed responsibility for Thursday’s deadly terrorist attack in Barcelona, which now appears part of a larger, more complex effort, foiled in part by Spanish authorities. Friday’s terrorist knifings in Finland added to the grim news. Imagine these or other terrorist attacks that deployed weapons of mass destruction.

Ironically, North Korea warranted media attention last week only because of Bannon’s remark, in an interview just before he left government, that no real military option exists against Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities. The media, however, largely bungled the significance of his comments, determined instead to prove broader intra-administration disagreements on national-security policy. Unfortunately, whatever the internal dynamics, President Trump’s nuclear-proliferation advisers appear far closer to Barack Obama’s views than anyone would have predicted.

The press quickly contrasted Bannon’s “dovish” remark that “there’s no military solution here” with Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s “hard line.” But note carefully what Mattis actually said last week: “There are strong military consequences if the DPRK initiates hostilities.” That statement is not “hard line.” It simply expresses what nearly every American believes: If we are attacked, we will retaliate, presumably with devastating force. I don’t understand Bannon to be anywhere close to opposing retaliation if North Korea were to obliterate New York.

Paradoxically, on Iran, press reports portray Bannon as nearly alone among Trump’s senior advisors in advocating U.S. abrogation of Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal. Whether Trump now pursues his personal inclinations to withdraw, repeatedly expressed publicly, or whether he will be smothered a third time by internal administration advocates of the deal, remains to be seen.

Mattis’s statement is consistent with what he and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wrote in a Wall Street Journal column last week: They want to eliminate the North’s nuclear and missile programs through “carrots and sticks” diplomacy, and they ask North Korea to seek “international acceptance,” an approach that has repeatedly failed for 25 years.

Instead, U.S. policy on North Korea and Iran should turn on one central point: Will America and its allies be safe employing Cold War-style policies of containment and deterrence, or are we safe only if rogue states’s nuclear and missile capabilities are eliminated?

The Trump administration is now the fourth in a row whose stated objective is the latter, but its policies are indistinguishable from its three predecessors, the failure of which have brought us to the current crisis. Maintaining these policies will enable Pyongyang to continue building an extensive nuclear and ballistic-missile arsenal. History will record today’s events as the “First North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” soon followed by the “Second North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” and so on into the indefinite future.

Even as the authors of prior administrations’s failed efforts are forced to confess their failure, they blithely propose instead, as Obama adviser Susan Rice recently did, that we “tolerate” a North Korean nuclear-weapons capability. And surely, that is where we will finish if we fall for dangerously facile Cold War analogies. A series of nuclear standoffs with the likes of North Korea and Iran, whose cost-benefit analyses in no way resemble Moscow’s back in those good-old Cold War days, is hardly a scenario we should wittingly embrace.

The preferred outcome is resolving the threat by eliminating its source, namely North Korea’s regime, preferably by reuniting the two Koreas under the South’s model, or failing that, by a coup replacing as much of the current leadership as possible. North Korea is manifestly more than a Northeast Asia problem. Kim Jong Un would unhesitatingly sell any technology it possessed, including nuclear, to anyone with hard currency. Iran is one such potential customer. Terrorist groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, befriended by wealthy governments or individuals, could also be buyers.

Accordingly, if the regime-change options fail, then a preemptive military strike to eliminate the North Korean and Iranian programs may well be the only way to avoid decades of nuclear blackmail by Pyongyang, Tehran and inevitably others, including the terrorist groups who might acquire weapons of mass destruction. Israel has twice before reached this conclusion, in 1981 against Iraq and in 2007 against Syria. It was not wrong to do so.

The terrorist and weapons-of-mass-destruction threats are converging. Fortunately, no terrorists have yet laid hands on these assets (that we know of), but the complexity of terrorist attacks, as Barcelona demonstrates, may again be on the increase. Short media attention spans may be a contemporary inevitability, but the disease should not spread to U.S. national-security decision makers. President Trump’s unwavering objective should be to stop the birth of two new nuclear-weapons states. If he fails, we are all at risk.

This article appeared in The Hill on August 13, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
August 13, 2017

Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice acknowledged last week that America’s policies regarding North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program over the last three administrations had failed. She said, rightly, “You can call it a failure. I accept that characterization of the efforts of the United States over the last two decades.”

Former Vice President Al Gore said much the same. They should know. They served under President Bill Clinton, who started things rolling downhill with the Agreed Framework of 1994. This misbegotten deal provided Pyongyang 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil annually and two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for the North’s promise to abandon its nuclear-weapons efforts.

Pyongyang violated its promise before the ink was dry. In 1999, former Secretary of State James Baker denounced Clinton’s approach as “a policy of appeasement.” Baker’s characterization also applies to much of the subsequent U.S. diplomacy. North Korea has always been willing to promise to abandon its nuclear ambitions to get tangible economic benefits. It just never gets around to honoring its commitments.

After 25 years of failure, we need not tarry long (or at all) on more diplomacy with Pyongyang. Fred Ikle once characterized the North as capable of “boundless mendacity.” He was being charitable. Talking to North Korea is worse than a mere waste of time. Negotiations legitimize the dictatorship, affording it more time to enhance its nuclear and ballistic-missile capabilities.

Today, only one diplomatic option remains, and it does not involve talking to Pyongyang. Instead, President Trump should urge President Xi Jinping that reunifying the Korean Peninsula is in China’s national interest. This is a hard argument to make, requiring reversal of decades of Chinese policy. It should have been broached years ago, but it is still doable. There is now growing awareness in China that maintaining the two Koreas, especially given the current nuclear crisis, does not benefit China long-term.

Historically, the Korean Peninsula’s 1945 partition was always intended to be temporary. Kim Il-Sung’s 1950 invasion of South Korea and three years of ultimately inconclusive war resulted in hardening the bifurcation into its current manifestation. Beijing has backed the status quo, believing that North Korea provided a buffer between Chinese territory and U.S. military forces.

Maintaining its satellite, however, has been expensive and risky. China has long supplied more than 90 percent of the North’s energy needs, and vast quantities of food and other assistance to sustain Pyongyang’s gulag. China has also expended enormous political and diplomatic energy, costing it precious international credibility, to protect the North’s erratic regime.

Initially, China saw the North’s nuclear and ballistic-missile programs as a problem for America, Japan and South Korea rather than itself. That notion has disappeared, however, under the harsh prospect that today’s nuclear crisis will be merely the first of many with North Korea. Moreover, Japan is now increasingly likely to seek its own nuclear capability, a nightmare for China in some respects more troubling than America.

Confronted by this new, deeply threatening reality, Beijing’s views on Korean reunification are ripe for change. China has never applied its uniquely strong economic leverage on Pyongyang because it feared so doing could cause catastrophic collapse of the North’s regime. That would in turn produce two unacceptable consequences: massive Korean refugee flows across the border into China, and American and South Korean troops crossing the DMZ and quickly reaching the Yalu and Tumen Rivers.

The answer to China’s fear of uncontrolled collapse is a jointly managed effort to dismantle North Korea’s government, effectively allowing the swift takeover of the North by the South. China can start by quietly bribing the Kim regime’s top military and civilian officials, offering political asylum and a safe exile for them and their families in China, while simultaneously cutting off energy and other supplies to the North. Seoul can also offer inducements to key North Korean leaders, reminding them what life could be like in a post-Kim world.

Simultaneously, massive information efforts should be launched throughout the North to spread word quickly on what is happening. The population may lack cell phones and the Internet, but they are far more aware of the outside world than conventional stereotypes. The end of North Korea, and hence the end of its nuclear threat, would be inevitable. The process will undoubtedly be dangerous and somewhat chaotic, but far less so than a completely uncontrolled collapse. And whatever the risks, they pale before the risks of nuclear conflict emanating from the erratic Kim regime.

Washington can offer Beijing two assurances to assuage its concerns. First, we would work closely with China to prevent massive refugee flows either into China or South Korea. Our common interests here are clear. Second, as the North begins to collapse, allied forces would necessarily cross the DMZ to locate and secure Pyongyang’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and to maintain civil order.

These forces would ultimately reach China’s border, but we can commit to Beijing that Washington will not station troops there for a sustained period. Instead, we would pledge to base virtually all U.S. military assets near Pusan at the Peninsula’s southern tip, to be available for rapid deployment around Asia. They would not constitute a watch on the Yalu.

The alternative to this last available diplomatic play is military force. The imperative of protecting innocent American civilians from the long-term threat of North Korea’s nuclear capability dictates that we should be willing to strike those capabilities pre-emptively. But before that, who will argue against this one last realistic diplomatic effort?

John R. Bolton served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs at the U.S. Department of State under President George W. Bush.

Some sort of strike is likely unavoidable unless China agrees to regime change in Pyongyang

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on August 3, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
August 3, 2017

North Korea test-launched on Friday its first ballistic missile potentially capable of hitting America’s East Coast. It thereby proved the failure of 25 years of U.S. nonproliferation policy. A single-minded rogue state can pocket diplomatic concessions and withstand sustained economic sanctions to build deliverable nuclear weapons. It is past time for Washington to bury this ineffective “carrots and sticks” approach.

America’s policy makers, especially those who still support the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, should take careful note. If Tehran’s long collusion with Pyongyang on ballistic missiles is even partly mirrored in the nuclear field, the Iranian threat is nearly as imminent as North Korea’s. Whatever the extent of their collaboration thus far, Iran could undoubtedly use its now-unfrozen assets and cash from oil-investment deals to buy nuclear hardware from North Korea, one of the world’s poorest nations.

One lesson from Pyongyang’s steady nuclear ascent is to avoid making the same mistake with other proliferators, who are carefully studying its successes. Statecraft should mean grasping the implications of incipient threats and resolving them before they become manifest. With North Korea and Iran, the U.S. has effectively done the opposite. Proliferators happily exploit America’s weakness and its short attention span. They exploit negotiations to gain the most precious asset: time to resolve the complex scientific and technological hurdles to making deliverable nuclear weapons.

Now that North Korea possesses them, the U.S. has few realistic options. More talks and sanctions will fail as they have for 25 years. I have argued previously that the only durable diplomatic solution is to persuade China that reunifying the two Koreas is in its national interest as well as America’s, thus ending the nuclear threat by ending the bizarre North Korean regime. Although the negotiations would be arduous and should have commenced years ago, American determination could still yield results.

Absent a successful diplomatic play, what’s left is unpalatable military options. But many say, even while admitting America’s vulnerability to North Korean missiles, that using force to neutralize the threat would be too dangerous. The only option, this argument goes, is to accept a nuclear North Korea and attempt to contain and deter it.

This article appeared in USA Today on April 28, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
April 28, 2017

For 25 years, U.S. presidents, Republican and Democratic alike, have tried persuasion (through diplomacy) and coercion (through economic sanctions) to induce North Korea to abandon its nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs. All these efforts have failed. Pyongyang happily commits to denuclearize in exchange for economic benefits, but never honors its commitments.

A 26th year will also fail. North Korea sees deliverable nuclear weapons as its ace in the hole, synonymous with regime survival. When we say “give up your nukes,” Kim Jung Un and his generals hear “give up your regime (and your lives).” They won’t do it.

Barack Obama’s gutting of our nascent missile-defense capabilities has made pre-emptive action more likely. More robust detection and missile systems, although far from perfect, would provide more time and confidence that we could protect innocent American civilians from a terrorist nuclear strike by Pyongyang.

Only one non-military alternative now exists: convincing China that reuniting Korea, essentially by the South peacefully absorbing the North, is in both of our best interests.

China fears that truly applying its enormous economic leverage would collapse the Pyongyang regime, resulting in millions of refugees flowing into China, and American troops positioned on the Yalu River. Washington can assure Beijing that we (and Seoul) also fear massive refugee flows, and would work with China to stabilize the North’s population as its government disintegrated, and provide humanitarian assistance. And China can rest assured we don’t want U.S. forces on the Yalu, but instead want them near Pusan, available for rapid deployment across Asia.

There is a deal here, not based on Pyongyang renouncing its nuclear program, but on China and America ending the North’s threat by peacefully ending the North.

Ironically, a pre-emptive U.S. attack would likely have the consequences Beijing fears: regime collapse, huge refugee flows and U.S. flags flying along the Yalu River. China can do it the easier way or the harder way: It’s their choice. Time is growing short.

This article appeared in the Washington Times on March 27, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
March 27, 2017

With North Korea threatening its sixth nuclear test, and the pace of its ballistic-missile tests quickening, Pyongyang’s global threat is ever more imminent. Twenty-five years of self-defeating American efforts to negotiate with the world’s only hereditary Communist dictatorship have, not surprisingly, proven fruitless.

The North’s persistence and duplicity, U.S. naivete and diplomatic incompetence, and political and economic backing over the years from China, Russia and Iran have all contributed to the current crisis, where good options are scarce. After decades of rhetoric and failed diplomacy, Republican and Democratic alike, we have all but run out of time to prevent a nuclear North Korea by peaceful means.

Accordingly, national-security strategists are now examining American military options to protect our innocent civilians, and those of regional allies South Korea (inconveniently enmeshed in a constitutional crisis) and Japan. Given Seoul’s vulnerability to Pyongyang’s chemical and biological weapons (which its choice of VX nerve agent to assassinate its leader’s half-brother has recently reminded us), the choices all embody significant risks. Moreover, the consequences of one of Barack Obama’s worst legacies, his gutting of America’s national missile-defense program, now leave us painfully vulnerable at home.

Do any diplomatic avenues remain open? Only one offers any possibility of a lasting solution, as opposed to resuming talks with North Korea in the diaphanous expectation that the 26th year of such negotiations will produce results not discovered in the first 25. That possibility — peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula — Washington has all but ignored these last decades, although the upside of potential success is enormous.

The case for Korean reunification is not an appeal to China to help America. It is an argument for China to look to its own national interest, and to act accordingly. Consider these postulates:

First, the Korean Peninsula will be reunified. Its division in 1945 was purely expedient, intended to be temporary, and just as unnatural as Germany’s contemporaneous partition. The only questions are when and how Korean reunification will occur: Will it be through war or the North’s catastrophic collapse, or will the United States, South K
Korea, China and others manage the South absorbing the North coherently?

Second, China may actually believe what it says in opposing a North Korean nuclear-weapons capability because it destabilizes East Asia and therefore harms China’s own economic development. For years, however, Beijing’s behavior has been schizophrenic, fostering, for example, the inevitably doomed Six-Party Talks, while disingenuously arguing that the real solution had to be found between Washington and Pyongyang.

In fact, China, through its massive economic power over North Korea, could itself quickly remove any Pyongyang regime. Communist ideology, embodied in the unappetizing metaphor that their respective Communist parties are as close as lips and teeth, has for years impeded Beijing’s leaders from contemplating Korean reunification. Today, however, younger Chinese leaders understand and talk openly about the ugly piece of baggage the North represents for China itself.

Skeptics believe China will reject reunification principally on two grounds. Beijing dreads with good reason that Pyongyang’s collapse could produce a refugee flood across the Yalu River into Manchuria, a humanitarian emergency taxing China’s resources and also risking political and economic destabilization. (Seoul fears a similar refugee tide into the Demilitarized Zone.) In response, Washington and our regional allies should pledge full cooperation with Beijing to avoid massive refugee flows from North Korea as its prison-camp structures dissolve.

This will doubtless involve complex, fraught issues like deconflicting intervening foreign forces in the region as the North’s regime collapses, and securing its missile facilities and stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. In addition, we need a communications program urging North Korea’s population to remain in place, plans for the substantial and expeditious distribution of humanitarian aid, and other steps to help steady the North’s population even before significant refugee flows begin. While there are unquestionably political implications in these issues, they are fundamentally technical, and ultimately manageable.

China’s real objection to a managed reunification obviously rests on strategic concerns, namely what America’s role in a reunited Korea will be. Most importantly, Beijing does not want U.S. forces along the Yalu River. China didn’t like that movie in 1950, and doesn’t like it any better today. Fortunately, Washington doesn’t want our troops deployed on the Yalu, either, any more than today it wants them pinned down in the DMZ as a trip wire. Being fixed in essentially indefensible positions is bad tactics and worse strategy, especially given the attractive alternative of redeploying U.S. forces to the southern tip of the Peninsula. From Pusan, they could be rapidly deployed in Korea as events might require, or elsewhere across East Asia. China may not like that, either, preferring complete U.S. withdrawal to Japan or points further east, but that is simply Beijing dreaming. China should be satisfied with our forces stationed near Pusan, far more desirable for both powers than standing watch on the Yalu.

One final consideration for Washington is that we should long ago have stopped considering North Korea as merely an Asian problem. What Pyongyang has today in terms of deliverable nuclear weapons, Iran can have tomorrow by making a simple wire transfer. The North’s cooperation with Iran on ballistic missiles, intended to be used as delivery systems for their respective nuclear weapons, extends back 25 years, just as long as our fruitless negotiations. And there is every reason to believe the two rogue states are also cooperating on nuclear-weapons technology, such as Iran’s possible financing of the Syrian reactor destroyed by Israel in 2007. Moreover, since North Korea will sell anything to anybody for hard currency, international terrorists need only take a number.

Reaching agreement with China on Korean reunification will not happen overnight, which is why we should have broached the subject 15 years ago or more. But if we wish to avoid resorting to the military option, we must move immediately today. Better ideas are welcome. What should not be welcome is blithely sitting down with Pyongyang for a 26th year of diplomatic failure.

This article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 17, 2017. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
January 17, 2017

The People’s Republic of China sent its aircraft carrier, Liaoning, through the Strait of Taiwan early this month, responding at least in part to Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen’s phone conversation congratulating US president-elect Donald Trump.

That’s Beijing’s style: make an unacceptable long-distance phone call, and an aircraft carrier shows up in your backyard. It is akin to proclaiming the South China Sea a Chinese province and constructing islands in international waters to house military bases; to declaring a provocative Air Defence Identification Zone in the East China Sea; and to seizing Singaporean military equipment recently transiting Hong Kong for annual military exercises on Taiwan.

It is high time to revisit the “one-China policy” and decide what the US thinks it means, 45 years after the Shanghai Communique. Donald Trump has said the policy is negotiable. Negotiation should not mean Washington gives and Beijing takes. We need strategically coherent priorities, reflecting not 1972 but 2017, encompassing more than trade and monetary policy, and specifically including Taiwan. Let’s see how an increasingly belligerent China responds.

Constantly chanting “one-China policy” is a favourite Beijing negotiating tactic: pick a benign-sounding slogan; persuade foreign interlocutors to accept it; and then redefine it to Beijing’s satisfaction, dragging the unwary foreigners along for the ride. To Beijing, “one China” means the PRC is the sole legitimate “China”, as sloganised in “the three nos”: no Taiwanese independence; no two Chinas; no one China, one Taiwan. For too long, the US has unthinkingly succumbed to this wordplay.

Even in the Shanghai Communique, however, Washington merely “acknowledges” that “all Chinese” believe “there is but one China”, of which Taiwan is part. Taiwanese public opinion surveys for decades have shown fewer and fewer citizens describing themselves as “Chinese”. Who allowed them to change their minds? Washington has always said reunification had to come peacefully and by mutual agreement. Mutual agreement hasn’t come in 67 years, and won’t in any foreseeable future, especially given China’s increasingly brutal reinterpretation of another slogan — “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong.

Beijing and its acolytes expected that Taiwan would simply collapse. It hasn’t. Chiang Kai-shek’s 1949 retreat was not a temporary respite before final surrender. Neither the Shanghai Communique nor then US president Jimmy Carter’s 1978 derecognition of the Republic of China persuaded Taiwan to go gentle into that good night — especially after congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979.

Eventually Taiwan even became a democracy, with the 1996 popular election of Lee Teng-hui, the peaceful, democratic transfer of power to the opposition party in 2000, and further peaceful transfers in 2008 and last year. So inconsiderate of those free-thinking Taiwanese.

What should the US do now? In addition to a diplomatic ladder of escalation, we can take concrete steps helpful to US interests. Here is one prompted by China’s recent impoundment of Singapore’s military equipment. Spoiler alert: Beijing will not approve.

America could enhance its East Asia military posture by increasing US military sales to Taiwan and by again stationing military personnel and assets there, probably negotiating favourable financial terms. We need not approximate Douglas MacArthur’s image of Taiwan as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”, or renegotiate a mutual defence treaty. Basing rights and related activity do not imply a full defence alliance. Our activities would not be dissimilar to Singapore’s, although they could be more extensive. The Taiwan Relations Act is expansive enough to encompass such a relationship, so new legislative authority is unnecessary.

Some may object that a US military presence would violate the Shanghai Communique, but the language of the Taiwan Relations Act should take precedence. Circumstances in the region are fundamentally different from 1972, as Beijing would be the first to proclaim. Nearby Asian governments would cite the enormous increase in Chinese military power and belligerence. Most important, effectively-permanent changes in the Taiwan-China relationship have occurred, making much of the communiqué obsolete. The doctrine of rebus sic stantibus — things thus standing — justifies taking a different perspective than in 1972.

Taiwan’s geographic location is closer to East Asia’s mainland and the South China Sea than either Okinawa or Guam, giving US forces greater flexibility for rapid deployment throughout the region should the need arise. Washington might also help ease tensions with Tokyo by redeploying at least some US forces from Okinawa, a festering problem in the US-Japan relationship. And the current leadership of the Philippines offers little chance of increasing military and other co-operation there in the foreseeable future.

Guaranteeing freedom of the seas, deterring military adventurism, and preventing unilateral territorial annexations are core American interests in East and Southeast Asia. Today, as opposed to 1972, a closer military relationship with Taiwan would be a significant step towards achieving these objectives. If China disagrees, by all means let’s talk.

This article appeared in the New York Post on September 11, 2016. Click here to view the original article.

By John Bolton
September 11, 2016

North Korea’s fifth nuclear test signals continuing progress and sophistication in its decades-long effort to possess deliverable nuclear weapons. Moreover, both US and South Korean military experts assess that the increasing range of Pyongyang’s ballistic missiles, and its ability to miniaturize nuclear devices in order to mate them with its missiles, means targets across America will be vulnerable in just a few years.

The North’s weapons program perfectly embodies Winston Churchill’s warning about “perverted science,” where humanity’s highest intellectual achievements fall into the wrong hands.

The test is yet another fire bell in the night. North Korea’s leaders may have been trying to get President Obama’s attention, but their odds of success are small. For nearly eight years, his resolute indifference to Kim Jung-un’s advances demonstrated that nuclear proliferation is just not one of his priorities.

While Obama’s rhetorical response to the North’s evident progress is sometimes vigorous, it never extends to meaningfully tightening sanctions or anything more robust. And Pyongyang doesn’t even slow down.

Why should it, given Obama’s lack of interest? Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has also been thoroughly indifferent, although her rhetoric, especially as she runs for president herself, tends to torque somewhat higher than Obama’s. Nonetheless, if humor is permitted in these dire circumstances, Clinton’s just deserts will be having to deal with the consequences of their mutually failed North Korea policy if she wins.

Conversely, Japan and South Korea need little incentive to worry about Pyongyang’s growing threat. Their intense interest in missile-defense technology is less about China’s aggressive investment in nuclear and ballistic-missile programs than the North’s ongoing menace. In stark contrast, Obama and Clinton have consistently opposed vigorous national missile defenses for America — a mistake Donald Trump should emphasize.

Obama’s defenders argue the Iran nuclear deal demonstrates his nonproliferation bona fides. Instead, the Iran accord proves the opposite. New information emerges daily about the agreement’s inadequacies, both in its own right and in side arrangements like the cash-for-hostages ransom debacle. Plus, there’s increasing evidence of clear Iranian violations of the deal itself, which its verification mechanisms are insufficient to detect, especially considering that major Iranian cheating may be underway in hidden facilities in North Korea.

The unfortunately long, bipartisan history of negotiations with Iran and North Korea contains important lessons for the next president.

First, once launched on the path to nuclear weapons, Tehran and Pyongyang both demonstrated they had made irreversible strategic decisions. These were not lightly taken, nor the potential consequences ignored. Accordingly, once they were underway, negotiations to induce them to abandon their nuclear objectives were inevitably doomed to failure.

Gaining nukes had become essential not just for military purposes but for regime political survival. And just as diplomacy could never succeed, no “agreement” reached with the proliferators ever had serious prospects of being adhered to. Cheating was always central to the rogue states’ strategies. Once they had fixed on acquiring nuclear weapons, duplicity was an automatic reflex.

Second, our intelligence on North Korea has been negligible for so long, and obviously so to the rest of the world, that Tehran would’ve been foolish not to explore the possibility of cooperating with Pyongyang on developing nuclear weapons. We’ve known for at least 20 years of their extensive collaboration on ballistic missiles; why wouldn’t they also collaborate on nuclear weapons, the intended payloads of such delivery systems?

We should’ve long ago stopped “stove-piping” the North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats as if they were unrelated. We need dramatically improved intelligence about the North, in considerable measure for what it could reveal about cooperation with Iran and other possible nuclear proliferators. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and others might well pay Pyongyang handsome premiums to counter the potentially existential threat of a nuclear Iran.

Quite rightly, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is a central issue in the 2016 campaign. Nuclear proliferation and other national-security issues should be as well.

Candidates who demonstrate mastery over these matters, and persuasively explain their strategic thinking, would be tapping a rich, politically helpful and widespread concern among American voters.

They are looking for leaders who truly understand that our government’s most important job is keeping their fellow citizens secure from foreign threats.