Obama's Unreality Tour

* BRET STEPHENS

Barack Obama vowed to turn to the U.N. Security Council for strong action following North Korea's weekend missile launch. He would have done better by turning to Dr. Phil.

So, as the good doctor likes to say: Get real. Get real about North Korea. Get real about the U.N. Get real, also, about NATO, arms control, Russia, the global financial system, and every other item headlining the president's unreality tour through the capitals of Europe. Start with North Korea. What was the purpose of the missile test? Surely not (or not mainly) to showcase the efficacy of North Korean technology, which Dear Leader Kim Jong Il must have known was likely to fail. The real test conducted Sunday was of Mr. Kim's international position. And here he scored a direct hit.

At the U.N., China's ambassador counseled a "cautious and proportionate" response, which is tantamount to no response at all. Russia wondered, in a style worthy of Andrei Gromyko, whether Pyongyang had actually violated the terms of Resolutions 1695 and 1718, which demand, inter alia, that the North "not conduct any further nuclear test or launch of a ballistic missile." (My emphasis.)

But the greatest prize for Mr. Kim was the reaction from President Obama. "Rules must be binding," the president told his audience in Prague on Sunday. "Violations must be punished. Words must mean something." But how are words supposed to mean anything if all the administration proposes to do is offer up yet another resolution -- which is to say, more words?

To nobody's surprise (except, perhaps, Mr. Obama's) the Security Council has so far failed to agree on a resolution. But that's the U.N. for you, as opposed to a serious organization like NATO, at whose 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg . . . nothing much was accomplished, either.

Well, not nothing. A new NATO secretary-general was named. And France returned to NATO as a member of the military command, just a few decades too late for it to matter one way or the other.

Then again, on the pivotal question of Afghanistan, where it is often said that the future of NATO stands or falls, European members agreed to deploy a mere 5,000 additional troops, most of whom will be back following Afghan elections in August. So much, then, for the pretense that the reason the U.S. had previously failed to get better cooperation and support from Europe was that George W. Bush was president and Guantanamo wasn't being shut down.

In fact, the Europeans (minus Britain) are looking for the out-door from Afghanistan. As perhaps they should: No country should ask its soldiers to risk their lives in a faraway place for what amounts to an act of political symbolism.

Then again, no U.S. president should hazard America's security for political symbolism, either. That's just what Mr. Obama proposed in his Prague speech, calling for an arms control treaty with Russia, the ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and another treaty to end the production of weapons-grade nuclear material. "As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon," said the president, "the United States has a moral responsibility to act."

Now there's a line to linger over. Implicitly, it suggests that the nuclear challenges we now face from North Korea and Iran all stem from America's original sin of using atomic bombs to bring World War II to the swiftest possible conclusion. Never mind the estimated one million American and Japanese lives saved as result, or the peace kept and the prosperity built for six decades thereafter under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

It's also worth considering just what a new round of arms control is meant to accomplish. In his speech, Mr. Obama painted it as a matter of setting an example to the wider world.

But as the journalist Walter Lippmann observed in 1943, the disarmament movement of the interwar years only proved "tragically successful in disarming the nations that believed in disarmament." Mr. Obama himself noted that "some countries will break the rules" of nuclear nonproliferation, adding that "That's why we need a structure in place that ensures when any nation does, they will face consequences."

And what kind of structure is that? See above for the consequences now being devised for North Korea.

In fairness, not everything about Mr. Obama's trip was unfortunate. At the G-20 Summit in London, the Europeans failed to get the U.S. to sign up to a new global regulatory agency, and the U.S. failed to convince the Europeans to dig themselves even deeper into debt -- a win for both sides, albeit unintentionally. Mr. Obama also got an ovation from reporters after a press conference in London. Call them fair and balanced.

Media sycophants may consider themselves duty bound, à la Chris Matthews, to work for Mr. Obama's success. Kim Jong Il and friends take a different view. In the real world, theirs are the views that count.

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