It gave us a shudder to hear the new secretary of state rattling his saber this week about Korea. The policy of “strategic patience” with North Korea is over, he said, and “all options are on the table” – presumably including a preemptive military strike – to respond if North Korea threatens South Korea. Did he mean all options except strategic patience? In the middle of the Korean war a U.S. representative to the United Nations reminded college students that North Korea loves to provoke the United States. He urged avoiding the “human frailty of succumbing to impatience, frustration and cynicism. Those emotions play into the hands of the enemy.” We’ll go with Leo Tolstoy, who said, “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” –Fletcher Farrar, editor and publisher
This article appears in Mar 23-29, 2017.
