Naively thinking that Pyongyang and Tehran could be sweet-talked out of their nuclear programs was one of President Obama’s earliest foreign policy blunders. Despite initial giddy expectations that the Obama Administration would achieve a breakthrough in the six-party talks, Pyongyang quickly sent clear signals that it would not adopt a more accommodating stance. But in response to its series of rapid-fire provocations in 2009, the Obama Administration realized that that approach was a failure and reversed its policy 180 degrees to adopt a two-track strategy of pressure and conditional negotiation. …
This week’s encouraging news—that the U.S. affirmed its security commitment to Japan under the 1960 bilateral defense treaty—sends exactly the right signal to China: that the U.S. will push back on Beijing’s increasing assertiveness in the region. Most notably, Washington went far beyond long-standing ambiguous diplomatic statements to publicly state for the first time that the Senkakus (which the Chinese call the Diaoyutai islands) were specifically protected under the defense accord. China claims sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, but the Japanese have administered them since the United States ceded control …
