Speaking to the Herald de Paris last week, Gotham Chopra recalled one of his last conversations with his friend Michael Jackson, in which Chopra and Jackson discussed the two American journalists still being held in North Korea. Learning that one of the journalists, Euna Lee, has a four year-old daughter, an “anguished” Jackson apparently contemplated going to North Korea to ask Kim Jong Il to free them:

“Do you think,” he said hesitantly, “that the leader of North Korea could be a fan of mine?”

Watch Chopra almost manage not to take this seriously:

I didn’t really know how to respond. Not much is known about the reclusive Kim Jong Il or “Dear leader” as he is called in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Over the years it’s been alleged he has a thing for Hollywood, certain NBA stars, Elvis, and specific liqueurs. Still, I’d never heard about any connection between Michael Jackson and Kim Jong Il.

Michael said he had seen some pictures on the internet of the Dear Leader. “You know, he wears jackets like mine.”

If someone made this up, it wasn’t me. I still wouldn’t disqualify Michael Jackson as a Special Envoy to Kim Jong Il just because he’s deceased. He’s still more charismatic than Al Gore, looks more alive than John Kerry, has a cleaner ethical record than Bill Richardson, is less of a national embarrassment than Joe Biden, and has more influence with President Obama than Hillary Clinton. By a happy coincidence, the “Eternal President” of North Korea also happens to be a dead guy; indeed, Kim Il Sung’s mummified corpse may well be North Korea’s largest stockpile of preserved meat. A Michael Jackson-Kim Il Sung summit could make for some of the liveliest conversation since Ban Ki Moon and Warren Christopher were still alive. And then, who has seen recent pictures of Kim Jong Il, looking as spent as Jagger sneaking out the back door of a Vegas casino the morning after? He may not be far from meeting Michael Jackson after all.

Actually, I’m not convinced the Michael Jackson story isn’t a parody or a hoax, but it’s never been harder to tell what isn’t. Take Hillary Clinton’s visit to the APEC Summit last week. Who else remembers the dark times before Smart Diplomacy (TM)? Back then, diplomats let slip undiplomatic truths about Kim Jong Il being a “tyrannical dictator” who subjected his people to a “hellish nightmare?” In those times, Presidents would openly “loathe” tyrants, causing foreign service officers and left-wing bloggers to call for their smelling salts (the reason for the loathing never evoked much of a reaction). Thank goodness change has come at last:

“Maybe it’s the mother in me,” [Secretary Clinton] told ABC News, “the experience I’ve had with small children and teenagers and people who are demanding attention: don’t give it to them.”

Like me, you’re probably thinking that it was beneath the North Koreans to respond, rather than rising above this and holding the high ground.

“We cannot but regard Mrs. Clinton as a funny lady, as she likes to utter such rhetoric, unaware of the elementary etiquette in the international community,” the North Korean statement said. “Sometimes she looks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.”

Since at least February, when Mrs. Clinton publicly speculated about North Korea’s potential for a succession struggle, she has shown herself as adept at offending Kim Jong Il though inadvertence as ably as John Bolton was at doing so by design. Suddenly, those who criticized President Bush’s undiplomatic criticism of Kim Jong Il’s God-given right to deny 23 million North Koreans theirs are very quiet (which is for the best).

Please don’t take this as an objection to the idea of insulting Kim Jong Il with malice aforethought and by deliberate design, in the way Bolton might have. In November of 2005, while Bolton was serving as U.N. Ambassador, I was one of a small group that met with him to discuss North Korea policy. Bolton’s denunciations of North Korea drew bitter criticism from the Administration’s opponents and from within the State Department, which so clearly distrusted Bolton that it assigned some rather obvious minders to his office. Bolton, as it turned out, never really spoke for President Bush. If and when it finally occurs to this administration that Kim Jong Il will never negotiate away his nukes or abstain from proliferating them, we might decide, as a matter of policy, to challenge his aura of invincibility, de-legitimize him in the eyes of his subjects, and subvert his rule. Some badly underfunded defector-run broadcasting services are standing by to help us do it. That would certainly inflame North Korea to new hysterics for the very reason that it would put real pressure on its regime, and more importantly, on China’s.

Is Mrs. Clinton really that devious? She can be, just not this time.

A politician who campaigns on a platform of Smart Diplomacy (TM) implies that (a) her predecessors’ diplomacy wasn’t smart, and (b) that her diplomacy will be. Given her cold, controlled, Nurse Ratched image, who would have expected her to make so many gaffes in her short tenure? To be fair, the “reset button” fiasco probably wasn’t her fault. To go above and beyond fair, one New York Times reporter even sacrificed the last full measure of his credibility by trying to pass some of the first gaffes as “tossing away the script” and introducing a refreshing new candor to diplomacy. Clinton’s performance probably isn’t unrelated to her reported loss of influence in the power struggle between State and NSC. Not that sidelining the State Department is necessarily a bad thing.

(Mrs. Clinton has caught one lucky break: Joe Biden. The White House could just about employ a full-time spokesman just to explain, inter alia, that Joe Biden didn’t really mean to sow public panic, green-light Israeli air strikes on Iran, or drool on the nubile Ukrainian hotties, for whom the Vice President holds immense respect, of course. Yes, that should throw the dogs off for a while.)

This isn’t a criticism of President Obama’s North Korea policy; quite the opposite, in fact. The last thing I’d want to do is repeat the left’s common error of conflating policy with diplomacy. That error is never greater than in the peculiar case of North Korea, which is seldom influenced by what our diplomats say, but which knows that it’s vulnerable to what our bankers and lawyers do. The irony of Obama’s response to North Korea is that the broader policy (which he didn’t campaign on and probably didn’t even plan) has been as shrewd as its diplomacy (which he did campaign on) has been inept. I’m happy to admit that President Obama has proven me at least half wrong in my prediction that he’d fail to harness the Treasury Department’s power to suffocate Kim Jong Il’s palace economy. Instead, he’s teamed Ambassador Philip Goldberg with Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey to impose what looks like a far tougher economic blockade than Bush ever conceived, perhaps comprehensively enough to break Kim Jong Il for good. No objective observer can deny that President Obama’s North Korea policy has been much tougher than George W. Bush’s endless stream of unrequited concessions — concessions that gained nothing from North Korea, alienated Japan, and caused the South Koreans to quietly question our sanity. Polls notwithstanding, President Obama deserves to be recognized for getting this right. And what could be wrong with anything that draws hisses of Barack Hus-Same Obama from shameless Kim Jong Il stooges like Selig Harrison, Leon Sigal, and Christine Ahn?

As for those on the left and right who are calling for military strikes against North Korea, they’re only decorating themselves in clownish heraldry and making President Obama look more statesmanlike in comparison.

There are really only three criticisms I can offer for Obama’s North Korea policy. First, it’s probably too good to last. Second, the President should have re-listed North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism for reasons of principle alone. Third, the policy still lacks a realistic end state, which Kim Jong Il’s negotiated disarmament is not. Specifically, the policy lacks a subversive outreach to the North Korean people — people we’ll need to be on better terms with to have real influence on events in that country. But of course, to ask for a North Korea policy leading toward the only plausible end-state, the end of the Kim Dynasty itself, is asking too much. If, as is now rumored, Hillary Clinton is about to offer the North Koreans a massive new package of incentives — Agreed Framework III — there’s nothing smart about either the policy or the diplomacy.

If Mrs. Clinton’s true goal is to graciously invite Kim Jong Il into the loving arms of earthly civilization, it’s hard to see how her words serve that goal. Then again, maybe dumb diplomacy is the best antidote to what would be an even dumber policy.

Joshua Stanton is an attorney in Washington DC and formerly served as U.S. Army Judge Advocate in Korea.