The linked article does an OK job of documenting that contemporary news reports were too optimistic about how much Clinton’s 1994 deal would constrain North Korea’s bomb seeking. However, I don’t think that’s an adequate basis for “Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons” — not least because the article itself echoes, in apparent agreement, NBC’s contemporary claim that NK already had a nuclear bomb.
Even setting aside that claim, I wouldn’t be confident in inferring that “Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons” merely because Clinton made a deal and 12 years later (and 6 years after Clinton left office) NK set off a nuke. Given my original state of ignorance (I didn’t know anything about this 1994 deal before this thread), I can’t rule out the possibilities that (1) Clinton actually made smart moves which were later vitiated by Bush or a lower-ranked politician, or that (2) Clinton made the best of a bad hand, there being no reasonable counterfactual where a US president in 1994 could’ve ensured, without triggering some patently worse consequence, that NK’s first nuclear explosion happened substantially after 2006.
The linked article does an OK job of documenting that contemporary news reports were too optimistic about how much Clinton’s 1994 deal would constrain North Korea’s bomb seeking. However, I don’t think that’s an adequate basis for “Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons” — not least because the article itself echoes, in apparent agreement, NBC’s contemporary claim that NK already had a nuclear bomb.
Even setting aside that claim, I wouldn’t be confident in inferring that “Clinton let North Korea get nuclear weapons” merely because Clinton made a deal and 12 years later (and 6 years after Clinton left office) NK set off a nuke. Given my original state of ignorance (I didn’t know anything about this 1994 deal before this thread), I can’t rule out the possibilities that (1) Clinton actually made smart moves which were later vitiated by Bush or a lower-ranked politician, or that (2) Clinton made the best of a bad hand, there being no reasonable counterfactual where a US president in 1994 could’ve ensured, without triggering some patently worse consequence, that NK’s first nuclear explosion happened substantially after 2006.
(1/2)