A friend sends along a couple of thoughts on recent news events that I think are worth sharing.

First, he asks, “What G-_ is meeting to address the global financial crisis? The same G-_ that denounced Russia’s invasion at the Foreign Minister level: The G-7.” This is significant because of all the flack John McCain has caught for suggesting that Russia be booted out of the G-8 — a tiny club of rich democracies to which it has done nothing to earn membership. The fact that it is the G-7, and not the G-8, that mobilizes to tackle major crises would seem to offer vindication of McCain’s much-maligned proposal.

Second, my friend points out, lost in the controversy over the North Korean nuclear deal is that “the whole episode just proves the terrorist list is about politics, not about actions that support terrorism. What does nuclear verification have to do with terrorist support? Nothing.” This is hardly the first time that an administration has played politics with the list. The Reagan administration did so in 1982 when it removed Iraq from the list in order to be able to sell arms to Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran. Such brazen zig-zags only undermine the point of the entire
exercise — which is to force states to actually end their support for terrorism if they want to be taken off the list. If North Korea has genuinely ended its relations with terror groups and the states that sponsor them, fine; take it off the list. But don’t remove Pyongyang in return for concessions in another realm — especially not when those concessions are, in all likelihood, nonexistent.