Morning Joe: Isolating North Korea

Stories we're following today:

Clinton: North Korea Is Running Out Of Options On Nukes - Associated Press [link]

• Faced with a fresh refusal by North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Thursday the communist regime has "no friends left" to shield it from punishing U.N. penalties.
• Clinton said the U.S. will continue to insist that North Korea return to the bargaining table and verifiably dismantle its nuclear program. At the same time, she held out the prospect of restoring U.S. diplomatic ties to North Korea and other incentives -- actions the Obama administration would be willing to consider only if the North Koreans take irreversible steps to denuclearize.
• "There is a positive direction that we see with Burma," she said. She praised Myanmar's government for committing to enforce the U.N. sanctions against North Korea, calling it important in light of Myanmar's suspected secret military links to North Korea.

The Moscow summit: A positive first step - Pavel Podvig in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [link]

• The U.S.-Russian summit held earlier this month in Moscow marked a good beginning for the relationship between the Obama and Medvedev administrations. While the two presidents made promising progress on the most urgent issue on the table--replacing START--it wasn't the only important agreement they made.

Iran: Recent Developments and Implications for U.S. Policy - Testimony by Suzanne Maloney of Brookings [link]

• The Obama Administration’s interest in engagement was never predicated on the palatability of the Iranian leadership – indeed, until very recently the conventional American wisdom tended to presume a second Ahmadinejad term – but on the urgency of the world’s concerns and the even less promising prospects for the array of alternative U.S. policy options.
• Any forward-looking U.S. policy needs sufficient dexterity to adjust to the inevitable changes that will buffet Iran over the forthcoming months. Iran is in a period of great flux, and there simply can be no certainty about the final outcome of the current dynamics. As events inside Iran shift toward either compromise or confrontation, Washington must be ready to respond accordingly.

A View from the Dark Side

Obama Just Made Us More Vulnerable… Again - "The Foundry" by the Heritage Foundation [link]

• The fighter gap is often considered to be far in the future, but the reality is that future shortfalls must be addressed today. The President’s fighter cuts would eliminate one of the two remaining fifth-generation fighter production lines
• The steep decline in the [number of air-to-air kills by fighter pilots] is no accident. They are the residue of a purposeful strategy to avoid war through unquestioned strength.