What name do you need to know to understand how North Korea and Iran became the nuclear threats that they are?

Wendy Sherman.  She has been involved in appeasing the Kim dynasty for many years:

Sherman displayed a disturbing tendency to gush about Kim Jong-il, the North Korean dictator with whom she negotiated. Apparently flattery of politically powerful people was a career strategy she mastered. Foreign Policy Magazine noted in 2011:

Sherman, who served as State Department counselor and North Korea policy coordinator under former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, traveled to Pyongyang with Albright in 2000. Here's how the NPR obit on Kim, who died this past weekend, described her take on Kim:

 Wendy Sherman, a special adviser to President Clinton on North Korea, accompanied then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Pyongyang in 2001, and met Kim along with Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson.

"We shared similar impressions of meeting him. He was smart and a quick problem-solver," Sherman says. "He is also witty and humorous. Our overall impression was very different from the way he was known to the outside world."

Sherman sat next to Kim at a stadium to watch a huge festival of synchronized dancing. She says she turned to Kim and told him she had the sense that in some other life, he was a "great director."

"He clearly took such delight in putting these performances together," she says. "And he says, yes, that he cared about this a great deal and that he owned every Academy Award movie, he had watched them all, and he also had every film of Michael Jordan's NBA basketball games and had watched them as well."

Fast forward to 2014:

The brutal and repressive dictatorship may now have the ability to hit the western United States with a nuclear warhead, not to mention the ability of hit Japan. That nation’s response is yet to be seen, but one can expect the Japanese “nuclear allergy” to fade even more in the face of a potential mortal threat.

Even more ominously:

Gen. Scaparrotti said North Korea may have gained know-how on warhead-miniaturization technology through its relationships with Iran and Pakistan.

Iran does not yet possess nuclear weapons.  What are the odds that North Korea, hard-pressed for foreign exchange, will sell missiles, warheads, and related technologies to Iran?

And guess who is on the job negotiating with Iran on preventing that country from obtaining nuclear weapons? None other than Wendy Sherman, now head of the US negotiating team, bringing her appeasement approach to the mullahs.

And what qualifies her to be in such a position?

Ms. Sherman brings just the sort of credentials you would expect in a Clinton and Obama appointee, currently the fourth-ranking employee in the Department of State:

• A degree and work experience in social work;
• The former director of EMILY’S list, the abortion-supporting political fundraising organization contributing almost exclusive to Democrats;
• Former head of the DC office of the failed Dukakis presidential campaign;
• The former director of the office of child welfare of Maryland
• Founding president of the Fannie Mae foundation, a money-dispensing offshoot of the quasi-governmental agency that more than anyone else was responsible for the 2008 mortgage crisis.

A quintessentially FHer curriculum vitae.

This passes for serious national-security and foreign-policy conduct with the post-American overlords.