Recently in Foreign affairs/National security Category

Should we be shocked that North Korea is jailing two U.S. journalists? Time's Bill Powell says that it's business as usual for the regime:

The nightmare that began on March 17 for the two American journalists kidnapped by the North Koreans along the Chinese border got worse Monday: Euna Lee, 36 years old and the mother of a four year old, and Laura Ling, 32, were sentenced to 12 years in prison by North Korea's highest court. Their crime: illegal entry into the country and "hostile acts." The sentence -- "reform through labor" -- raises the prospect that the two could be sent into North Korea's notorious system for political prisoners -- the so called kwan li so, which are infamous for their mistreatment of prisoners. [..]

Though Americans will wake up this morning shocked at the harshness of the verdict, they shouldn't be. This is, sadly, business as usual for the North. The regime in Pyongyang is nothing if not a mafia state -- a family run dynasty that funds itself in part through a variety of illicit businesses, such as illegal arms sales and counterfeiting U.S. currency. For decades, international kidnapping has been in its playbook.

Powell goes on to list details of several international kidnapping incidents involving North Korea; do read the whole article if you can. I found his conclusion particularly apt:

North Korea, in the mind of many Americans, is often seen as a kind of crazy aunt in the attic -- an entity no one pays attention to until she pops out and does something vaguely nutty. Sometimes Kim Jong-Il is even portrayed as a figure of comic relief, as in South Park's Team America: World Police. Indeed, Google 'North Korea' and up pops up a site entitled: "6 Reasons North Korea is the Funniest Evil Dictatorship Ever."

Strike "funniest." Other adjectives are more fitting. The families of the two young journalists headed now into the grips of what is arguably the world's worst penal system aren't laughing today. And neither, most assuredly, is anyone in Barack Obama's White House.

We have had a tendency, some of us, to minimize the threat that North Korea is capable of being by poking fun at Kim Jong-Il's dictatorship. But this act of aggression against two American journalists is not a laughing matter, and I hope very much that the Obama administration will be able to create pressure for the swift release of Lee and Ling, who are caught up in a nightmare few of us could ever imagine.

What a surprise it will be to Obama's legion of foreign admirers when they realize that the American president is an American, after all. What I mean is covered very well in Daniel Larison's parsing of the bipartisan "Ideology of National Security" -- a term that originated with Andrew Bacevich, as Daniel says. Daniel starts with this brilliant Daily Show video picking out lines from Obama's inaugural that sounded a lot like lines from Bush speeches:

Then Daniel says:

Prof. Bacevich writes in The Limits of Power:

Four core convictions inform this ideology of national security. In his second inaugural address, President Bush testified eloquently to each of them.

Here are the four convictions at their most basic:

According to the first of these convictions, history has an identifiable and indisputable purpose....History's abiding theme is freedom, to which all humanity aspires.....

According to the second conviction, the United States has always embodied, and continues to embody, freedom....

According to the third conviction, Providence summons America to ensure freedom's ultimate triumph....Unique among the great powers, this nation pursues interests larger than itself. When it acts, it does so on freedom's behalf and at the behest of higher authority....Only cynics or those disposed toward evil could possibly dissent from this self-evident truth. [bold mine-DL]

According to the final conviction, for the American way of life to endure, freedom must prevail everywhere..\

Daniel adds, in part:

What does this have to do with Obama? Well, of course, Obama accepts the ideology of national security completely, and it has been clear that this is the case for years. Even if you could not locate all four convictions in his Inaugural Address (and I think you might be able to do this), you can certainly find them in his public speeches and written statements over the years. It is doubtful that he could have been elected President had he not accepted this ideology, and it is important to understand that this is an ideology shared by essentially the entire political class. In that respect, it is "mainstream," regardless of how crazy it seems to some of us.

Read the whole thing. Illuminating. It will be interesting to observe how many on the left who excoriated Bush's foreign and national security policy will find themselves defending Obama when he does the same things, as he almost certainly will, for the reasons Larison and Bacevich point out.