Given the way real news anchors delivered their “Weekend Update” on former NBA star Dennis Rodman’s trip to North Korea, one could be forgiven for thinking they were substituting for comedian Seth Meyers on Saturday Night Live.
Rodman visited along with a film crew last week to shoot an exhibition basketball game as part of an HBO documentary featuring members of the Harlem Globetrotters. This exhibition was heartily welcomed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – whose love of the game apparently rivals that of any rabid fan in the United States. (He evidently inherited this love from his father who was known to be such a fan that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright decided in 2000 to deliver a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan as a “goodwill gift.” Alas, the goodwill dissipated when she departed.)
But everyone is ridiculing Rodman for hailing Kim as his new best friend forever (BFF) and sharing the message he claims Kim asked him to convey to President Obama:
He wants Obama to do one thing: Call him. He said, ‘If you can, Dennis — I don’t want [to] do war. I don’t want to do war.’ He said that to me.
(Rodman on ABC’s This Week, March 3, 2013)
I submit, however, that those scoffing at this basketball diplomacy are probably too ignorant to appreciate Rodman’s informed hope that it could do for U.S.-North Korea relations what Ping-Pong diplomacy did for U.S.-China relations…. Indeed, I challenge anyone to cite any words that any politician, pundit or diplomat has ever uttered about opening the “hermit kingdom” of North Korea to the world that are more instructive and pithy than these words Rodman uttered:
[Kim] loves basketball. And I said the same thing, I said, ‘Obama loves basketball.’ Let’s start there.
(“Bizarre,” TIME, March 4, 2013)
Hell, for all we know, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger might well have initiated his greatest foreign-policy achievement, opening the hermit kingdom of China to the world, by uttering similar seemingly innocuous words to President Richard Nixon in 1971, namely:
Mao loves ping-pong. Mr. President, you love ping pong. Let’s start there.
But let me hasten to concede that Rodman is a court jester who is having the time of his life strutting his stuff on the world stage. And it behooves us to remember that court jesters blurt out some of the wisest words in all of Shakespeare’s plays. Still I pity him for continually displaying the intellectual and emotional intelligence of an unloved, if not abused, child. Only this explains his delusional, solicitous declarations of personal friendship with Kim.
All the same, the joke is not on Rodman or Kim. It’s on Obama and other Western leaders who have been trying in vain to get Kim to stop flexing his nuclear muscle on the Korean Peninsula.
For nothing betrays the absurdity and fecklessness inherent in their efforts quite like Obama continually threatening Kim with sanctions without ever bothering to talk to him. This is the kind of ridiculous cowboy diplomacy we expected of George W. Bush, not Obama; not least because Obama himself promised a more sensible approach.
Here, for example, is what he pledged during his 2008 presidential campaign – courtesy of “Talk vs. Don’t Talk,” MinnPost, May 5, 2008:
The United States is trapped by the Bush-Cheney approach to diplomacy that refuses to talk to leaders we don’t like. Not talking doesn’t make us look tough – it makes us look arrogant, it denies us opportunities to make progress, and it makes it harder for America to rally international support for our leadership. Obama is willing to meet with the leaders of all nations, friend and foe.
To be fair, Obama appears to be finally laying the groundwork for direct talks with America’s number-one foe, Iran. But he has had over four years to pursue his new approach. Yet all he has done to date with respect to North Korea (and virtually every other foreign-policy challenge he inherited) is adopt the Bush-Cheney, cold-shoulder approach.
And after watching White House spokesman Jay Carney pour scorn on Kim’s request/plea yesterday, I fear Obama is determined to continue emulating Bush here too:
Instead of spending money on celebrity sporting events to entertain the elites of that country, the North Korean regime should focus on the well-being of its own people who have been starved, imprisoned, and denied their human rights.
(The Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2013)
Meanwhile, the ignorance inherent in Rodman dismissing reports about Kim repeatedly threatening war, starving his people, and putting others in prison camps is easily surpassed by the hypocrisy inherent in successive U.S. presidents, and now Obama himself, not just talking to, but actually dealing with Chinese leaders whose record of human rights abuses is far worse than Kim’s. Not to mention that, while U.S. presidents were having tea with Soviet leaders throughout the Cold War, thousands of political prisoners (like Natan Sharansky) were wasting away in Soviet prison camps.
So instead of just dismissing Rodman as Kim’s useful idiot and getting Americans to laugh at him, news anchors and political commentators should be pointing out what a laughing stock the United States has become when one freakish basketball player like him can provide more intelligence about and diplomatic access to a national foe than the CIA and the Department of State, combined.
For, despite high-profile visits by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Bill Richardson and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Rodman is the first U.S. citizen to actually speak with this enigmatic North Korean leader since he inherited power from his father, Kim Jung-il, in 2011.
Which is why it smacks of jealousy and spite that the Obama Administration suddenly announced new sanctions against North Korea today. Never mind that this move is bound to incite another temper tantrum in baby Kim, causing him to unleash even more bellicose rhetoric towards the United States and South Korea, the country that exists warily as the proverbial Abel to North Korea’s Cain. Or, for that matter, that it is bound to cause more North Koreans to starve to death more rapidly.
A (tragic) joke indeed!
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