In 1987, the “war on drugs” was in full swing. Americans — in particular, young Americans — were snorting and smoking all sorts of new concoctions. Not just the pot of the 1960s. Kids were now doing heroine and cocaine. And so, the Partnership for a Drug Free America responded with a public service announcement. You remember the ad. A dad walks into his son’s room to confront him with a box of drug paraphernalia found in the son’s drawers. “Who taught you how to do this stuff?” the dad demands. And in a classic, obstreperous retort, the son barks back, “I learned it by watching you!”

So as news hit that North Korea had performed its first nuclear test, all I could picture was George W. Bush marching into Kim Jong-il’s bedroom and demanding that his nuclear experimentation stop-right-this-minute-or-else. Then the narrator’s ominous voice comes in: “Countries that have nukes teach other countries to have nukes.”

Today, the United States, trying to play superpower parent to the world, is proposing a range of sanctions that would effectively lock North Korea in its room with no dinner. All that means is that average North Koreans will bear the brunt of punishment while Kim Jong-il and his totalitarian friends are still hauled up with a potentially significant stash of nukes.

Meanwhile, the United States is huffing with indignation that North Korea would do such a thing, shining a light on North Korea to avoid looking at itself in the mirror. After all, testing aside, the United States is the only nation in the history of the world to actually use nuclear weapons — actually twice, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. Today, the United States has almost 10,000 nuclear weapons, over half of which are armed and ready to launch at the flick of a switch. Sure, we’ve cut our habit since the height of the cold war, but we still have quite an addiction. So who are we to lecture about the straight and narrow?

Even more audacious is America’s claim to play global daddy in the first place. A safe world isn’t where one country holds all the power and weapons, but where power is shared democratically across nations and no one can unilaterally bully the others. After all, it’s the perception of that wanton bullying in Iraq that has degraded world opinion of the United States and, according to the National Intelligence Estimate, only emboldened would-be terrorists. And if the behemoth superpower has the power to wipe out entire nations in an instant, you’d better believe that nations who feel even vaguely threatened by us are going to want the same power. It’s a lose-lose equation for all of us.

Instead, the cornerstone of American foreign policy should be setting a good example. If we want others to practice democracy, we should have the most functional and transparent democracy on the globe. If we want others to tackle poverty and inequality, we should fervently address injustice on our own shores. And if we want others to be free of nuclear anxiety and military violence, we should rapidly cut our own nuclear stockpile as a critical first step.

We can’t go rifling through North Korea’s drawers when we have massive warehouses filled with nukes in our own backyard. The United States’ do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do diplomacy is not only hollow but hypocritical. We can’t be above the rules we set.

The path to a safer world isn’t just a non-nuclear North Korea. It’s a non-nuclear world. If we set a new course to demilitarize ourselves of these extremely dangerous and unnecessary weapons, eventually when North Korea says, “I learned it by watching you,” it will mean something entirely different.

Sally Kohn is director of the Movement Vision Project and author of a forthcoming book on the progressive vision for the future of the United States.

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