Yesterday's performance by Sen. John Kerry at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing for John Bolton was a classic. Aside from lecturing Bolton on the virtue of the 1994 Framework Agreement with North Korea - an agreement he evidently didn't know required Pyongyang to forgo all nuclear weapons development and an agreement that allowed the North to keep the same fuel rods they may now be reprocessing - Kerry also invoked Reagan to hammer the Bush administration and asked Bolton to envision the world through Kim Jong Il's eyes:
BOLTON: Senator, really, it's hard to understand how you can't look at the notion of conducting the bilateral conversations in the six-party talks and not say that North Korea has an opportunity to make its case to us. KERRY: Sir, with all due respect, I mean, you know -- what I've seen work and not work over the course of the years I've been here depends on what kind of deal you're willing to make or not make and what your fundamental policies are. If you're a leader in North Korea, looking at the United States, and you've seen the United States attack Iraq on presumptions of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, if you announce a preemptive strategy of regime change, if you are pursuing your own new nuclear weapons, bunker busting nuclear weapons, and you're sitting in another country, you would have a perception of threat that makes you make a certain set of decisions. And historically throughout the Cold War, that drove the United States and the then-Soviet Union to escalate and escalate. And first one did and then the other. In fact -- in fact -- in every single case, we were the first, with the exception of two particular weapons systems to develop a nuclear breakthrough first. They followed -- until ultimately, President Reagan, a conservative president, and President Gorbachev said we're going to come down in Reykjavik to no weapons. So we reversed 50 years of spending money and chasing this thing.
Of course, back in the Reagan years, Kerry led the charge against the very policies that led to the sweeping arms reduction agreements. He backed a nuclear freeze, opposed the Reagan defense build-up and aligned himself with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party on most other national security issues. So, John Bolton is in pretty good company in having Sen. Kerry as a critic.