Senior Fellow John R. Bolton

For most Europeans, President Bush's second-term North Korea policy is a welcome relief from his earlier unilateralist cowboy-ism. Recent photos of the Yongbyon reactor's cooling tower collapsing are soothing evidence that Washington's foreign-policy establishment has reasserted itself. Can direct US negotiations with Iran be far behind? In fact, what is collapsing is not the North's nuclear program but President Bush's foreign policy.

North Korea has violated every significant agreement ever reached with the United States, and all indications are that the North is again following its traditional game plan. It is quite adept at pledging to give up its nuclear program, having done so several times in the past fifteen years. Not once, however, has it actually taken decisive steps to do so. Indeed, quite the opposite.

Almost from the moment the North signed the 1994 Agreed Framework, it set about violating it, seeking to offset the loss of plutonium produced in Yongbyon's spent fuel by pursuing uranium enrichment, the alternate route to nuclear weapons.

Only when America uncovered decisive proof that North Korea had embarked on a production-scope procurement effort for an enrichment program was that ruse broken. The North initially admitted to the enrichment program, but now firmly denies it. In fact, the evidence suggests the enrichment programme is still underway.

Much fanfare heralded the North's handover of 18,000 pages of documents on Yongbyon's operation, but those very documents are contaminated by particles of highly enriched uranium, probably from that enrichment program the North never had. Equally telling is that these records are incomplete and, given the North's economy in the truthfulness department, quite possibly fraudulent.

Gaps in the records preclude determining how much plutonium Yongbyon has produced during its lifetime, a critical issue in estimating how many nuclear weapons the North has.

The only real progress in de-nuclearising North Korea came via Israel's air force last September 6, when it pulverized a nearly-completed clone of Yongbyon on the banks of the Euphrates River in Syria. While the reactor is history, we still lack its vital details, most notably its likely customers. Was this a straight sale to Syria from the North, or was it in fact a North Korean reactor sitting on leased Syrian territory? Or was it a joint venture, perhaps with Iranian cooperation and financing? Iran has the same incentive as North Korea to hide its nuclear activities from prying international eyes, and what better place to hide than a place no one was looking? Or so they thought, until Israeli strike aircraft flattened the Yongbyon twin.

The world's nuclear proliferators are nothing if not determined. For them, diplomacy is not intended to solve common problems, but a very effective way to string along guileless Westerners, thus buying more valuable time to achieve their proliferation objectives. Iran has most graphically demonstrated this by using over five years of negotiations with Britain, France and Germany to perfect the critical nuclear technologies of uranium conversion and enrichment. As one keen observer put it, negotiating with Iran or North Korea is like the police sitting down with the Mafia to discuss their common interest in law-enforcement. President Bush's North Korea deal reflects the Administration's lame-duck status. Europeans appear overwhelmingly to favour the election this November of Senator Obama, in many respects because his foreign policy is so congenial to their tastes. It may be comforting now to think that the unilateralist cowboys are about to retire to their ranches. It will be less so when we are all confronted, as we will be inevitably, with the continuing reality of Iranian, North Korean--and other--nuclear weapons programs.

John R. Bolton is a senior fellow at AEI.