Wendt Scholar Nicholas Eberstadt

Once and for all: Can we please stop pretending that Kim Jong Il is negotiating with us in good faith? The only surprise about North Korea's latest missed deadline--and broken promise--in the ongoing "six-party talks" is Washington's seemingly unending tolerance for this diplomatic masquerade.

Well into the fifth year of negotiations on denuclearizing North Korea, what tangible results do our arms control conferees have to show for their efforts? Only a temporary shutdown of the North's Yongbyon plutonium facility. (State Department happy-talk notwithstanding, that facility has not yet been fully "disabled," much less "dismantled.")

What about the covert uranium enrichment program, whose exposure back in 2002 triggered today's nuclear drama in the first place? Pyongyang still officially denies its very existence. Indeed, breaking pledges signed last February, North Korea has not yet even bothered to offer an accounting of its past nuclear activities to its "negotiating partners" (China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States).

Our response to that violation has been, yes, a request for more talks! In the no-penalty wonderland of conference diplomacy, it would appear Kim Jong Il can blow us off whenever he wants--confident we'll always shuffle back to the table. But the unseemly charade of denuclearization negotiations with North Korea is worse than an embarrassment. It is, in fact, compromising the security of America and her allies.

During the six-party talks, the North Korean government continued to amass plutonium for weapons. Over those same years, Pyongyang went from hinting it had nuclear weapons, to explicitly declaring it possessed nukes, to test-blasting a nuclear weapon.

Viewed without illusion, these vaunted denuclearization talks with North Korea have in practice provided diplomatic cover for Pyongyang to achieve its long-desired status as a nuclear weapons state. And, by the way, any American official who thinks Kim Jong Il wouldn't dare sell his nuclear wares abroad is off in a dream world.

The Bush team apparently has no benchmarks for failure in its nuke talks with Pyongyang--so the conferencing continues. But it continues at our peril.

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI.