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JULY 29, 2004 : (BOLTON'S PSI ALLIANCE IS WORKING AGAINST PROLIFERATION)... thanks to the media and Democrats who insist on portraying the Bush administration as "unilateral," you have probably never heard of it.
Called the Proliferation Security Initiative, this results-oriented alliance is now just over a year old. The work of the much maligned Under Secretary of State for Arms Proliferation and International Security John Bolton, PSI is already a great success in bringing nations that disagreed bitterly over the Iraq war together under one flag to deal with larger weapons proliferation issues, especially those relating to the Korean Peninsula.
How It Works: The PSI is a bit of a strange bird, neither pure military alliance nor economic consortium nor intelligence agency, though it bears some of the features of all three. There is no guarantee among PSI members to come to the defense of any other member attacked by another party, for instance, such as exists in the NATO charter. It has no operating budget or swank headquarters building, and no jet-setting General Secretary or Supreme Commander. But most of the world's great navies -- America's, the UK's, Japan's, Australia's, and Russia's all play key roles. Many of the world's best intelligence assets, from spy satellites to human intelligence sources to financial investigators, are devoted to working with the PSI at some level.
What those navies do under the PSI is track and board ships suspected of trafficking in weapons of mass destruction, the components or systems to build such weapons, and any parts or materials associated with such weapons, with a focus on nuclear weapons in particular.
The PSI's naval power may also have played a key role in the mass defection last fall of a swath of North Korean nuclear scientists who abandoned Pyongyang's backward Stalinist regime and have been providing the West with details of Kim's nuclear programs since. The details of that maneuver, dubbed Operation Weasel, have been understandably kept closely guarded for nearly a year.---- "Dubya: Mr. Multilateral," by Bryan Preston, Tech Central Station, July 29, 2004