North Korea’s lesson from Libya is that if you give up your WMD programs peacefully, you may have lost your best defense from invasion.
Coming to terms with NATO’s intervention in the Libyan civil war is a little like wresting a grizzly bear: big, hairy, and likely to make one pretty uncomfortable no matter where you grab a hold of it. Is it a humanitarian endeavor? A grab for oil resources? Or an election ploy by French President Nicolas Sarkozy?
But regardless of the motivations — and there are many — the decision to attack Muammar Gaddafi’s regime has global consequences, some of them not exactly what NATO had in mind. Certainly, the Libyan intervention means we should forget the idea of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula. Moreover, a global push for wider adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) now seems crippled.