Diplomacy

If you read enough Tom Clancy, you know that diplomacy is the art of one nation screwing another. (Or words to that effect).

So, the world's response to North Korea claiming to have detonated a nuclear device?

Diplomacy, baby.

"The draft [Security Council resolution] obtained by The Associated Press would only allow non-military sanctions such as economic penalties, breaking diplomatic relations or banning air travel."

In case you're thinking that's about the most craven, useless, limp-wristed response physically possible, you're wrong:

"It also eliminates a previously proposed blanket arms embargo."

Well that's reassuring. Not only did the Security Counsel take less than 24 hours to vitiate its own (already useless) finger-waiving resolution, but it specifically protects Russia's and China's right to sell bullets to the bushy-haired freak who repeatedly defies them.

North Korea's actions are actually not terribly surprising -- after all, who can take seriously the threat of sanctions, when they haven't worked for the past fifty years? Kim Jong-Il knows the west is full of gutless cowards who don't mean what they say, and so another piece of paper doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. The real disappointment (although again, regrettably not a surprise) is that Russia and China are more concerned with their ability to make a buck off of the Norks, and to use them as a pawn to check American and Japanese influence in the region, than they are with keeping a nuclear-armed psychotic out of their backyards. That's the same mentality that kept France and Germany from allowing serious UN action against Iraq -- they were making money off of him, so who cares if he was murdering his own people?