There Is No Making Deals With Dangerous Regimes

"Experience is a hard teacher, but fools will have no other." -- Benjamin Franklin.

God likes his little jokes. Not one week after Jimmy Carter received his Nobel Peace Prize, we learn that his most important post-presidential assignment ended the way most of his policies in offices did: in total disaster.

In 1993, the United States detected a North Korean nuclear weapons program. The dangers of allowing the world's looniest regime to develop nuclear weapons were obviously terrifying. On the other hand, the then-new Clinton administration abhorred confrontation and the use of force.

So rather than eliminate the North Korean weapons sites Israeli-style, President Clinton decided to negotiate. He sent Carter to North Korea as a special envoy, and in the summer of 1994, Carter and the North Koreans worked out a deal. North Korea would suspend its nuclear-weapons program. In return, the United States would build North Korea two nuclear reactors for energy production and would provide oil, food, and other aid to the self-isolated country's starving people.

At the time, many people criticized the naivet? of the Carter agreement. They warned that the food and fuel provided by the United States would be diverted to military purposes -- and so they were. Skeptics warned too that North Korea could not be trusted to honour the deal -- and this week they were proved right again. Earlier this month, the United States confronted the North Koreans with evidence that they had acquired nuclear-weapons technology from Pakistan (you remember them: our great allies in the war on terror). The North Koreans forthrightly admitted that they had cheated on their deal with Carter and formally repudiated it, dropping heavy hints that they now possessed nuclear weapons and that the United States had better watch its step.

Some optimists interpret the North Koreans' admission as a sign that the regime may be reforming. The thinking goes: Well the North Koreans may now be nuclear-armed, but at least they have stopped lying. But that's pretty cold comfort for the hundreds of millions of South Koreans, Japanese, Russians, Chinese, and American military personnel who find themselves within range of North Korea's ballistic missiles.

There are at least two urgent lessons here. One is that it is not easy to hide a nuclear-weapons program from American eyes --the North Koreans were caught in the end -- but it is not impossible either. The second follows from the first. A dangerous regime will acquire dangerous weapons, no matter what promises they make, no matter what safeguards are put in place. It is only a matter of time. And the time is often shorter than we think.

The new Korean regime of Kim Jong Il does, mercifully, seem to be less bent on aggression than the mad government of his father, Kim Il Sung. Quite possibly, the younger Kim will use his nuclear capacity, whatever it is, to extract money, not to wage war. Let's hope so. And let's hope while we are at it that the North Koreans are lying, and that U.S. intelligence caught them before their weapons became operational.

North Korea's hypothetical nuclear weapons are forcing the United States to treat the vicious little regime with care. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has already ruled out the use of force against North Korea. In this case, deterrence is working: for the North Koreans.

If we are not careful, deterrence will be working soon for the Iraqis. We could easily be talking now not about a North Korean nuclear weapon, but about an Iraqi bomb -- and if not now, then certainly within a year or two or three. And unlike the current North Korean regime, surrounded by vastly richer and more powerful neighbours, Saddam Hussein has large ambitions for himself and his regime. Protected by nuclear weapons, he could intimidate his neighbours with impunity. Perhaps he could frighten them into defying the UN sanctions against Iraq -- or into denying their territory to American forces -- or into raising the price of oil. Protected by nuclear weapons, he could rebuild his army to bully Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- or support plots and rebellions against pro-Western regimes in the Gulf -- or encourage even deadlier acts of terrorism against Israel and the United States.

I said a minute ago that there were at least two lessons here. Actually, there is a third -- and it is, that a deception like North Korea's is most likely to succeed when the deceived inwardly wish to be deceived.

Clinton did not want to act, and hoped that by negotiating even a bad deal he would postpone problems he lacked the nerve to face. And of course he knew the deal with the North Koreans was a bad deal: Bad deals are the only kind of deals Jimmy Carter ever makes.

A nuclearized Korean peninsula is the price the region and the world must now pay for Clinton's weakness -- but not the only price. In Iraq and with Osama bin Laden, Clinton's methods were the same. See nothing, do nothing, and then congratulate yourself.

We have had a hard lesson. Let us hope that there are no harder lessons to come.