North Korea's Threat

IF NORTH KOREA'S declaration of itself as a nuclear power was intended, as it seems to have been, to shock the world and thereby pressure the United States into making unwarranted concessions, then the Bush administration responded well by playing it down. The erratic Pyongyang regime, officials pointed out, has made similar statements before. U.S. intelligence has credited the North with a couple of bombs for a decade, and in the absence of a nuclear test, there's no way to know whether it has workable warheads. The administration is also right to dismiss, again, North Korea's attempt to insist on bilateral negotiations with the United States. The Bush administration's recruitment of China, South Korea, Japan and Russia for "six-party" talks was its sole success on the Korean front in the past four years and should be preserved. The latest declaration nevertheless underlined the distressing truth that as the threat from North Korea grows steadily worse, the administration lacks an effective strategy to counter it.

One symptom of the problem is that the latest North Korean move took Washington and its allies by surprise. They had expected the regime of Kim Jong Il to grudgingly agree to a new round of the six-party talks next month. It's possible, even probable, that the North wants to avoid delivering the answers it would be asked for at those talks. These include its response to an eight-month-old U.S. offer of political and economic concessions following the disclosure of its nuclear facilities, and an explanation of evidence, recently supplied by a U.S. envoy to the Asian governments, that North Korea supplied Libya with uranium suitable for processing into bomb material. Unsatisfactory answers by Pyongyang would risk alienating not only the Bush administration -- which anyway may not be willing to strike a deal with Mr. Kim -- but China and South Korea, which have the ability to strangle the North by cutting off supplies of food and energy or even to cause its collapse by opening their borders to refugees.

North Korea has been trying, with some success, to convince its neighbors that the United States is the obstacle to progress because of its refusal to offer the North greater concessions. The Bush administration, in turn, hopes to convince the Chinese and South Koreans that Pyongyang will never yield its nukes without far greater external pressure -- pressure that only those countries, or the U.N. Security Council, can effectively apply. In fact, a diplomatic success is hard to imagine without a little of both: more determined action by North Korea's neighbors and an unambiguous decision by the Bush administration to settle for detente with the North, rather than regime change.

Neither development seems likely. The Chinese leadership of Hu Jintao appears far more concerned with suppressing any hint of political change at home than promoting it in North Korea. The leftist South Korean government, meanwhile, clings to a strategy of subsidizing Mr. Kim. Bush administration hard-liners brandish the North's latest manifesto as proof that negotiations are a waste of time.

Meanwhile, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, North Korea probably continues to build weapons and process nuclear material. It may be looking beyond Libya for new customers for such products. Maybe there is no way to neutralize this threat, but the Bush administration needs to rethink its own failing policy.