“I CAN SEE Pyongyang from my house!” … Well, not quite.

North Korea might be facing international condemnation in the wake of Tuesday’s artillery shell attack on Yongpyeong Island, but it has found an unlikely – albeit mistaken – ally in Sarah Palin.

The Tea Party figurehead, who is likely to seek the Republican party’s presidential nomination to take on Barack Obama in 2012, was giving a radio interview to conservative pundit Glenn Beck (link opens an MP3 recording) when she was asked about her opinions on the burgeoning Korean conflict, and how she would handle such a conflict as a prospective President.

Her response was as follows:

Well, North Korea… this is stemming from, I think, a greater problem when we’re all sitting around asking, ‘Oh no, what are we going to do’, and we’re not having a lot of faith that the White House isn’t going to come out with a strong enough policy to sanction what it is that North Korea’s going to do.

So it speaks to a bigger picture here, and it certainly scares me in terms of national security policy.

Obviously, we’ve gotta stand with our North Korean allies – we’re bound to, by treaty…

Acknowledging Beck’s prompt – after he corrected her by saying, ‘South Korea’ – with a simple ‘Yeah’, Palin continued:

Yeah, and we’re also bound by prudence to stand with our South Korean allies. And, in order to… remind North Korea we’re not gonna reward bad behaviour and we’re not gonna walk away. And we do need to press China to do more to increase pressure on North Korea.

Palin was speaking while on tour publicising her new book, ‘America by Heart’.

She has previously been ridiculed for making up the word ‘refudiate’ in a Twitter message, writing prompt notes on her hand, and falsely claiming that she could see Russia from her home in Wasilla, Alaska.

Her Republican colleague Arnold Schwarzenegger, who will retire as governor of California in January, had tweeted in September that he was flying over the Alaskan capital Anchorage, but couldn’t see Russia from his improved vantage point.