Once was the time that the US and a starving, belligerent North Korea were working directly to satisfy the ailing nation’s energy needs without giving North Korea the opportunity or incentive to develop nuclear weapons.

Now, seven years and seven North Korean nuclear warheads later, we are almost back to that point. North Korea remains a fugitive from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has made no binding agreements as to working towards a non-nuclear Korean peninsula, and has only just today set a date to allow the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) back into the country. There’s no telling what they’ll find or, rather, what their unsmiling handlers will allow them to find.

What happened in the intervening years? What dismantled the hard-won “Agreed Framework” of the Clinton era that had kept North Korea without a weapon or effective delivery system?

Not to point fingers or anything…

The Agreed Framework got tossed out the window little after Clinton’s successor took office. Things went rapidly downhill from there, with the US Administration speaking with censure against the DPRK and then sitting around, doing nothing to back it up. What commenced was a tete-a-tete with the North Koreans creeping closer to their weapons program ways and the White House waving its finger while still refusing to talk.

Vice-President Cheney allegedly summed up the policy well by saying “We don’t negotiate with evil. We defeat evil.”

North Korea is really evil. Its enormous army - nearly the size of our entire armed forces combined - is designed for the sole purpose of conquering the Korean peninsula. It has huge counterfeiting organizations, kidnaps people for the sexual delight of its autocratic leader and maintains a seedy presence in classic espionage settings such as Macao. And yes, it aids and abets terrorists. If there actually had been an Axis of Evil - and give it time; could happen - it surely would have been the “Dr. No” of the organization. However, shutting it out and refusing direct talks with it - the only kind of talks that have ever worked to achieve something of dire significance with North Korea - only isolated its mighty resources for nasty deeds. It kicked out inspectors, enriched uranium, developed a delivery system that could strike the US, and sold all manner of this weaponry to such “rational actors” as Libya. And the fact is that with weapons inspectors there, with the incentive of being able to prop up its hellish robot state with foreign-financed energy, these things might have been prevented. Limited oversight was still better than no oversight. Limited incentive to comply with international will was still more than no incentive.

And as for “defeating evil”? And “not negotiating with it”? Well, after North Korea’s downplayed nuclear test, talks resumed mighty fast, and now the beginnings of another assistance “framework” have been formed.

The point of this is not that inspections in the 90s were foolproof - or autocrat-proof. Surely the IAEA was deceived. It was not until the dismissal of inspectors that the DPRK undertook its boldest acts, at a pace now unrestricted, but the IAEA presence alone may not have been enough to keep the Korean Peninsula nuclear-free. The point is that the US forgot a basic principle of foreign relations - as with Iraq, with Afghanistan and with the ABM Treaty:

Do not break something before you know how to rebuild it.

Now, seven years and seven warheads on, we are returning to the North Koreans with an even more limited, more sweetened offering in order to get them to restore what, a long time back, was not really working in the first place.