Did any of Clinton's foreign policy exploits produce any results on the scale of tearing down the Berlin Wall, reunifying Germany, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the iron curtain with almost no violence?
Being tough on "evil empires" (however silly the dumbed down rhetoric for the general public sounds) got those results. I don't really see a problem with continuing the politics of the Reagan-Bush era seeing as how they not only secured an unprecedented level of co-operation throughout the world but also set up the economic conditions that made Bill Clinton's terms look so good on the domestic side.
If the otherwise belligerent North Koreans were so willing to co-operate under Clinton diplomatic strategies, why weren't they re-unified during those 8 long years of his two terms? The North Koreans know how to play international chess as well as anyone. Like Vietnam and China, they will say whatever it takes to get U.S. economic benefits, but still continue to do whatever they want regardless of what they say. Any treaty the North Koreans would have been willing to sign unifying the two countries would have been as meaningul as the agreement with North Vietnam when the U.S. left South Vietnam in 1973.
We signed over South Vietnam to a situation that was so bad that in the late 1990s, Vietnamese officials have joked the best thing the North could have done after taking the South in 1975 was to surrender to the U.S. to get rebuilt like our other defeated opponents, Germany and Japan, into a world economic power.
We should not and probably will not allow South Korea to be subjugated by North Korea. If anything, we want to repeat what was done in Germany with improvements learned from the problems Germany has faced. Of course if I were a North Korean leader, I wouldn't want to give up my power to an imperialist/capitalist U.S. backed regime in the South either. Make no mistake, the Korean War did not end in 1955. It has been an uneasy truce maintained with a continuing loss of lives. Bill Clinton made no more progress in Korea (or any other aspect of foreigh policy!) than the students in China who died proving nothing has changed in China except its economic strategy.
