To many conservatives, there isn’t much to choose from between two of the most prominent liberal newspapers in the United States: the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both are considered biased beyond hope. On many key issues this simply isn’t true, however, and every once in a while a particularly clear example of the difference emerges on their respective editorial pages.
A case in point goes back to March 2003: the New York Times opposed Operation Iraqi Freedom; the Washington Post, with some justified reservations, supported it. And on Tuesday morning, we were treated to another clear example of difference. The Washington Post’s “Accord with North Korea” was a model of analytical sophistication and proper tone. The New York Times’ “Diplomacy at Work” was splenetic nonsense.
The Post was rightly happy (“good news”) but reserved about the new agreement signed on Monday, noting that the risks inherent in it are considerable. “If North Korea’s new promise is not a serious one”, the Post editorial warned, “the agreement will only forestall more concerted outside pressure on the odious regime of Kim Jong-il, while sustaining and enhancing the lifeline of food and energy it receives from its neighbors “ It goes on to argue – and this is the key passage: “History suggests that it is this outcome, rather than genuine nuclear disarmament, that the North is betting on.” Conclusion: put the North to the test sooner than later, because if Mr. Kim is not sincere, talks that continue to drag on will be “to the disadvantage of U.S. and global security.”
The New York Times doesn’t see things this way at all. Its main conclusion is that “diplomacy, it seems, does work after all”, as if the creation of the six-party talks in the first place was not an exercise in diplomacy, and as if the agreement is a self-enforcing done deal. The Times’ editorialists do toss in the phrase “if faithfully carried out”, but imply that a lack of good faith may be just as much an American as a North Korean debility. No, to the Times it is already clear that the agreement “seems to vindicate those who argued all along that North Korea wanted to end its costly diplomatic isolation . . . and that it was using its nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip.”
There isn’t time for any consideration of history here, as with the Post, because the Times cannot wait to bash John Bolton, identified as the ringleader of the administration’s prior “confrontational tactics”, and to praise Condoleezza Rice – as if Colin Powell and George W. Bush had nothing to do with Korean diplomacy these past three years.
The Times cannot resist attacking the President, too, saying that the big winner from the agreement “may well be the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty itself” despite Mr. Bush’s having “spent more than four years discounting the importance of international agreements.”
So the big winner is a document, a treaty, to the editorialists of the New York Times. For those of the Washington Post, the point of all this, the winner still to be determined, is the “U.S. and global security.” It’s hard to imagine a clearer distinction between a feckless, delusional liberal internationalism and a pragmatic clear-eyed realism. Conservatives, and others, take note.