Although relations have warmed somewhat between the two Koreas in recent years, that trend appears to be retreating -- rapidly.

Last month, a North Korean soldier shot an unarmed South Korean tourist while she was visiting Mt. Kumgang, a tourist area in the North operated by a South Korean company (shown at right). In response, South Korea suspended future tours to Mt. Kumgang and ordered all South Korean residents to leave the resort.

Now, the North Koreans have returned the favor, changing the wording on their official invitation to South Korean tourists. Chosun Ilbo's editorial board has more:

The words 'We invite' and 'guarantee the safety' of the visitor has been changed to 'agree' (to the visit) and 'offer accommodation.'... Without a formal safety guarantee, whether it is for Mt. Kumgang or Pyongyang, it has become dangerous for South Koreans to set foot on North Korean soil simply hoping that nothing will go wrong."

I guess it is now, if not impossible to travel to Mt. Kumgang, at least highly inadvisable.

While Kim Jong Il tries to throw his weight around on the world stage, one North Korean has actually done it. Today, Pak Hyon Suk won her country's first Olympic gold medal in Beijing, beating out the favorites in the 63 kg women's weightlifting category. This is the first time a North Korean has won a gold in women's weightlifting since the event started in 2000 (China, by contrast, has swept all five of the weightlifting categories it has entered in these games).

Pak was nearly eliminated after failing at her first two attempts. But, with a little help from "Dear Leader" (who declined an invitation to attend the games), she made it through. Says Pak:

[W]hen I was about to do my third attempt, I kept in my head the thought that my dear general's eyes will be upon me ...And that thought by itself was great encouragement, and that's how I managed to lift the last weight."

Pak may be the first North Korean on the medal stand this year but her country has picked up eight golds over the years, putting it well ahead of the chronic Olympic underperformers on FP's recent list. At least India finally broke its gold medal curse with a win in 10-meter air rifle on Monday.

The Hoover Institution, the conservative-leaning think tank located at my alma mater Stanford University, is finding itself in a bit of hot water over some 7 million pages of Baath Party records that both Iraqi and American archivists now say were taken by an "act of pillage" and must be returned to Iraq immediately.

The documents came to Stanford as part of a deal with the Iraq Memory Foundation, a nonprofit group run by Kanan Makiya (above left) -- an Iraqi exile known for his outspoken advocacy for the war in Iraq. Makiya, who stumbled upon the documents during the invasion's nascent period in 2003, maintains the information they contain is too dangerous for general view because they explicitly mention individuals who collaborated with the Hussein dictatorship:

This was not stuff for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to have access to," he said in a recent interview. "This stuff was dynamite."

While the last thing Iraq needs is more dynamite, this episode is yet another example of the United States and a certain cabal of Iraqi exiles thinking they know what's best for the country. As long as there's a reasonable enough guarantee that the documents will be safe, I agree with Jon Weiner's op-ed in Friday's Los Angeles Times: "It's up to the Iraqis to decide what to do with them."

Speculation is growing that Kim Jong Il will soon make a few pitstops around the Pacific. First up for the North Korean president? Beijing. China's Vice President Xi Jinping, who visited Kim in Pyongyang last week, reportedly asked Kim to attend the Olympics opening ceremony -- though there's been no word yet on Kim's response. Another unconfirmed Kim stop is Vietnam, where North Korea's ties have grown closer in recent months.

For Dear Leader, Beijing probably looks like a good platform for improving his global image and expressing support for China, his chief patron. And U.S.-North Korean relations, which have warmed of late, could be advanced by a hint of greater openness from Pyongyang. (Wouldn't it be interesting if Kim rubbed elbows with Dubya at the games?) There's even talk of the two Korean teams marching together at the opening ceremony in a "gesture of peace."

I'm guessing that Kim's real motive would be aid, much of which comes from China and Vietnam. Food shortages have prompted Kim and Co. to slash citizens' rations in recent months, prompting fears of massive starvation. Kim's recently strained relations with South Korea, which provides hundreds of millions of dollars of yearly aid to the North, certainly makes it necessary for the despot to seek help elsewhere.

As if North Korea could be any less tourist-friendly (see a recent FP list on the subject), today a North Korean soldier reportedly shot and killed a 53-year-old South Korean woman vacationing in the scenic Diamond Mountain region. The woman apparently entered a fenced-off area near the popular Mount Kumgang resort, which more than a million South Korean tourists have visited since its opening in 1998.

In response, South Korea has ordered the nearly 1,300 tourists who were staying at Mount Kumgang to pack their bags and come home. This is bad news for the impoverished North, as tourists are one of its few legitimate sources of foreign currency.

South Korea has handled the shooting pretty poorly. The South Korean government reportedly got word of the affair late Friday morning but didn't make an official announcement about it until 4 p.m., Seoul time. Problem is, the announcement came after President Lee Myung-bak gave a 2 p.m. address about his plans to resume talks with North Korea and didn't mention the shooting, though he already knew about it. That's not the sort of thing you want to do when one of your citizens has just been shot by your chief adversary.

As the Chosun Ilbo put it, "The incident could prove disastrous for inter-Korean ties." But it could also prove disastrous for the increasingly unpopular Lee Myung-bak, coming on the heels of the massive protests against his decision to resume imports of U.S. beef. Watch this space.

Yesterday, Pyongyang submitted a long-overdue declaration of its nuclear programs to China, in accordance with agreements made during the six-party talks. U.S. President George W. Bush welcomed the move as "one step in the multi-step process laid out by the six-party talks," immediately lifted the application of the Trading with the Enemy Act, and notified Congress of his intent to remove North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

What does all this mean in practice? The Bush administration's moves are highly symbolic, and unlikely to have any immediate, practical impact. Most U.S. sanctions based on the Trading with the Enemy Act (pdf) were already lifted in 2000, and most of those still in place are authorized by an overlapping hodgepodge of other laws and regulations. Minor changes will go into effect -- for instance, some imports from North Korea will no longer require licenses -- but for the most part trade policies will remain unchanged.

Bush's intention to remove North Korea from the state sponsors of terror list is a similarly symbolic gambit; the actual removal cannot go into effect for 45 days after the notification to Congress, and in any case it is probably contingent on verifying North Korea's nuclear declaration. Countries on the terror list cannot receive, among other things, U.S. economic aid or loans from the World Bank and other financial institutions. Removing North Korea from the list may allow more money to flow in, but, as a U.S. Treasury spokesman noted yesterday, sanctions aimed at preventing money laundering, illicit finance, and weapons proliferation will remain firmly in place.

Practicalities aside, this development has rightly been hailed as a diplomatic success; the New York Times today declared it a "triumph." The path to a denuclearized North Korea is still long and the process could easily be derailed at any point, but it is nice to finally have some reason, however slight, for optimism.

Via Mike Nizza, North Korea blows up the cooling tower at its now-defunct Yongbyon reactor:

You're going to hear a lot in the coming days, I expect, about how the "North Korea model" can be applied to negotiations with Iran. Forgive me for raining on the parade here, but there are some important differences that we need to keep in mind.

1. Iran is not on the brink of mass famine.
2. Iran has enormous oil and gas resources; North Korea is in desperate need of imported fuel oil and has few legitimate sources of foreign exchange.
3. Iran can stir up trouble in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Gulf, and the Palestinian territories.
4. Iran has the ability to launch sophisticated terrorist attacks all over the world; North Korea did not.
5. Iran's nuclear program has broad support in a regime where decision-making is diffuse and opaque; Kim Jong Il had much more lattitude to make the big decision to come in from the cold.

It's also worth noting that North Korea is keeping the nuclear weapons it has already produced, whereas Iran is still in the enrichment and research phase. It's by no means clear the regime has decided to go for the bomb, as opposed to latent nuclear capacity.

I'm not saying the United States shouldn't engage Iran, but just trying to point out that the Islamic Republic is a much tougher nut to crack.

In an op-ed he coauthored in Monday's Wall Street Journal Asia, McCain placed himself to the right of President Bush's policies on North Korea:

We must use the leverage available from the U.N. Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang's 2006 nuclear test to ensure the full and complete declaration, disablement and irreversible dismantlement of its nuclear facilities, in a verifiable manner, which we agreed to with the other members of the six-party talks.

The key words here are "full and complete," since the Bush administration has shown flexibility on that front. And as Glenn Kessler notes, "leverage" in this instance is code for "threaten sanctions," an approach the Bush team abandoned in favor of direct diplomacy. Conservatives are increasingly critical of the current plan, under which Pyongyang would merely acknowledge U.S. concerns about uranium enrichment but admit to nothing.

In his speech in Denver Tuesday, McCain again took a hawkish line, saying, "It is a vital national interest for the North Korean nuclear program to be completely, verifiably and irreversibly ended."

Matt Yglesias thinks this illustrates that, "on national security policy, McCain is, if anything, more hard core than Bush." But I don't think he's so easy to pigeonhole. The candidate's speech is sprinkled with words like "multilateralism" and "allies" often enough to make Charlie Kupchan's heart flutter. He even spoke about working more closely with Russia to reduce nuclear stockpiles. That doesn't sound like Bush 2.0 to me.

Think your job sucks? Try walking a mile in the shoes of Christopher Hill, who has been the U.S. envoy to the six-party talks since February 2005. For more than three years, Hill has been trying to convince North Korea to shut down its nuclear program and come clean about its nuclear activities.

He's had some success at the former, with the North Koreans agreeing to the dismantling of their plutonium reactor at Yongbyon. But Kim Jong Il's irascible regime has been notoriously coy about acknowledging just what it's been up to on the uranium and proliferation fronts. So, Hill negotiated a delicate workaround: North Korea would acknowledge U.S. concerns but admit to nothing. Then, the United States would remove North Korea from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism, a designation that has all kinds of other legal and financial ramifications. On balance, it seemed like a good idea to at least mothball Yongbyon and learn as much as possible about the nuclear program. Why let the perfect become the enemy of the good? And on a factual level, North Korea hasn't actually sponsored terrorism since 1987.

But now, Hill's careful game of diplomatic Jenga may be coming apart. For months, North Korea has stalled, appearing to want to wait for a better deal from the next president. Last week's allegations about North Korea's nuclear cooperation with Syria appear to have only inflamed building congressional anger against the deal. And it's not just Republicans who were upset. Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee voted unanimously to require that the White House certify it has gotten a "complete and correct declaration" from Pyongyang. Hill's plan was, to be frank, to fudge it.

One congressional staffer told the Financial Times the White House would go "ballistic" over the committee's move, but the Bush administration still has a chance to convince the full House and the Senate to scuttle it. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has noticed, however, that the White House has let Chris Hill run point on these negotiations for a reason. If things fall apart -- as it seems they might -- he can be hung out to dry and blamed for the failure. That would be a shame, because Hill is a real star of the diplomatic corps and somebody America needs to keep around.

Many commentators have wondered why the Bush adminstration chose last Thursday, of all days, to disclose the intelligence community's findings on North Korea's nuclear collaboration with Syria. Well, Glenn Kessler and Robin Wright of the Washington Post have an answer:

Key lawmakers nonetheless made it clear that unless the intelligence about Syria was described to them in detail, they would block funding for the deal and oppose a key waiver of a law preventing U.S. aid to a country that detonates a nuclear weapon.

Officials said the timing of the administration's disclosure was also influenced by a provision of the U.S. law governing state sponsors of terrorism, a list that has long included North Korea. Under the proposed nuclear disarmament deal, Washington has agreed to remove North Korea from the list, but the law requires that it first demonstrate that North Korea has not assisted another country on the list for at least six months. The intelligence presented this week indicated that North Korea helped Syria in removing equipment from the site through early October, meaning the six-month window only recently closed.

Far more often than they get credit for, U.S. officials do things that seem mysterious to outsiders when in reality they're just following the law. In this case, the aim was ostensibly to move North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism so that a deal could go forward. The irony is that with this disclosure, Republican lawmakers may be much less inclined to give North Korea a pass, and even leading establishment figures want the Bush administration to teach Kim Jong Il a lesson. What seems especially damning is the intelligence showing that North Korea has been dealing with the Syrians all along while pretending to negotiate in good faith.

As an aside, I owe Kessler an apology for this post and this one questioning his early reporting on the Syrian nuclear site. It turns out Kessler's reporting was spot-on and appropriately caveated, and continues to be invaluable. His biography of U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is excellent, too.

Earlier this week, intelligence officials released new evidence confirming that the "Box on the Euphrates" near al-Kibar in Syria was in fact a nuclear reactor. They also released photographs that they used to argue that North Korea was providing significant levels of assistance to the reactor project in Syria.

 

The Syrian facility apparently contained a gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactor (a derivation from the Calder Hall design) extremely similar to the reactor at Yongbyon. It's a relatively simple design, extensively described in the public domain, and one that's capable of producing plutonium useable in nuclear weapons. Despite the surfeit of publicly available information on the reactor, the intelligence community firmly asserts that, in this case, the design information came from North Korea.

Noting that the Syrian reactor seemed ill-suited to electricity production (not least because there were no detectable power lines leading away from the site), intelligence analysts also concluded that it would have few uses other than for producing plutonium for an illicit nuclear weapons program. Israel came to a similar conclusion and, judging this to be a potentially existential threat, bombed the reactor as a result.

These revelations raise more questions than they answer. For instance, why release this evidence now? The analysts said it was hoped that, among other things, releasing this information would prod the North Koreans to be more forthcoming in the six-party talks. It seems just as likely that they may just be infuriated and walk away from negotiations (there is no public sign of such a reaction yet, though).

Perhaps most notable in the briefing on Thursday was how coy the analysts were being about the possibility that Syria has a covert nuclear weapons program. They noted very specifically that "there is no reprocessing facility in the region of al Kibar," but refused to elaborate when asked whether the Syrians might be building such a facility elsewhere. They also refused to comment on how Syria might have been planning to acquire the natural uranium required to fuel the reactor and they dodged a question about how North Korean diplomats have so far reacted to this disclosure.

These omissions could be designed to minimize diplomatic blowback -- perhaps the administration simply hoped to nudge the North Koreans gently, rather than shove them -- or perhaps the spooks simply don’t have much more information. Hopefully the North Korean and Syrian reactions over the next week or so will provide more insight. Watch this space.

North Korea has been stepping up incendiary rhetoric in the past few days, ostensibly in response to South Korean comments that it would attack the North's nuclear installations in the event that Pyongyang launched atomic weapons. Once the North's preemptive attack is underway, the Korean Central News Agency declared, "everything will turn to ashes, not just a sea of flames."

Coupled with missile tests and diplomatic maneuvers, these comments are worrisome but not necessarily out of the ordinary for Pyongyang. Nevertheless, North Korea's claim is worth investigating: Can it really turn "everything" into ashes, or even "just" a sea of flames, given its relatively miniscule nuclear arsenal?

If "everything" means all of South Korea, the answer is definitely no. If it means Seoul, the question requires a bit more examination. Basically we need to know how many nuclear weapons Pyongyang has and how powerful they are. Knowing these facts allows some projections that, while extremely rough, are nonetheless interesting.

Very little reliable information exists, but based on aggregated seismic data from North Korea's 2006 nuclear test, Harvard analyst Hui Zhang estimates (pdf) that the yield of that explosion was between 0.5 and 2 kilotons (for comparison, the yield of the weapon used at Hiroshima was about 15 kilotons, while other countries' first nuclear tests generally yielded 9 kilotons or above). For simplicity’s sake, let's assume North Korea's test yielded about a kiloton. It is even more unclear what the weapon was designed to yield, but it was probably supposed to be between 4 and 20 kilotons.

As for the number of weapons, North Korea has recently declared (pdf) that it has 30 kilograms of separated, potentially weapons-usable plutonium. More almost certainly exists, but all of Pyongyang's usable plutonium has probably not been made into weapons. Since an implosion-type weapon requires (pdf) about 5 kg of plutonium, North Korea likely has at most six weapons.

Excluding fires and making some other simplifications, if we assume that Pyongyang can do no better than a 1-kiloton air burst, each explosion would kill about 50 percent of the population within a fifth of a mile. Six bombs would therefore kill half the population within about two thirds of a square mile -- an area encompassing not even half a percent of Seoul, which is about 234 square miles.

If, on the other hand, North Korea has six 10-kiloton bombs, it could kill 50 percent of the population in just over 3 square miles of Seoul -- slightly over 1 percent of the city's area. These calculations are probably very conservative, but even if the damages wildly exceeded expectations it seems unlikely more than 10 percent of Seoul's area would see widespread destruction. I certainly do not intend to minimize the horror of that level of death and destruction. But if North Korea wants to burn all of Seoul to ash, it is going to need more than a tiny nuclear arsenal to do so.

I've seen this man protesting outside the Sudanese Embassy, just up the street here on Massachusetts Ave. Apparently, his name is "Start Loving":

An anti-war protester who identified himself as Start Loving takes part in a demonstration titled 'March of the Dead' near Arlington Cemetery's Women's Memorial, March 19, 2008, in Arlington, Virginia.

Over at Democracy Arsenal, a blog about foreign policy from a Democratic perspective, Michael Cohen says he thinks all the excitement over the New York Philharmonic's trip to Pyongyang is a bit ridiculous:

Look, I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon... but I really don't see how this event does anything to impact the terrible existence of the North Korean people. It seems instead to me as if the Philharmonic (well meaning as they certainly are) was played for a patsy.

That's certainly the tenor of comments you'll get from folks like Brian Meyers, the dean of international studies at Dongseo University in Pusan, who believes the trip was a propaganda boon to Kim Jong Il's regime.

I wonder, though, who was really making the claim that the trip would help the North Korean people? The question at hand is whether the Philharmonic's performance could somehow help move the nuclear negotiations along. For some answers on that front, check out FP's interview with Nam Sung-wook, a top "North Koreanologist" at Korea University in Seoul.

I had an interesting discussion earlier this week with Michael Goldfarb, my counterpart at the Weekly Standard, regarding growing speculation about a North Korean collapse. You can catch my Bloggingheads.tv debut here, in which we also chat about missile defense, Iran, neocon dreamboat John McCain, the next U.S. president's Bush-like foreign policy, and the possibility of a coup in Pakistan (I'm the handsome, if orangish-looking fellow on the left).

In the "diavlog," I mention an interesting article in Military Review (pdf) that argues that the Chinese are making aggressive, serious contingency plans for the fall of Kim Jong Il's regime.

Since our discussion, Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shumbun has looked into the matter further and has this to report:

Security specialists of the Chinese People's Liberation Army have been discussing the possibility of sending troops to North Korea should the present regime of Kim Jong Il collapse, to prevent armed refugees from entering the northeastern part of China, sources close to China-North Korea relations revealed Monday.

China fears that, in addition to ordinary North Korean refugees, armed members of the country's military and security forces might also become refugees, entering the border area in the northeastern region in China. Chinese troops sent to North Korea would help maintain security and safeguard the country's nuclear facilities.

According to the sources, China considers the situation in North Korea to be stable for the time being, but is hastily formulating emergency measures to cope with unexpected circumstances nonetheless.

How likely is a North Korean implosion? Who the heck really knows? But the regime is definitely under a lot of stress lately, so it's a situation that bears close watching. I hope smart people at the Pentagon are thinking hard about the possibility.

Do also check out Andrei Lankov's memo to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, "How to Topple Kim Jong Il." Folks tell us it was making the rounds at the State Department back in March 2007 when it was first published, though we can't say for sure whether Condi herself read it.

If you took the FP Quiz in our November/December 2007 issue, you would know that 23 countries maintain embassies in North Korea. But in how many countries does the Hermit Kingdom maintain an embassy? According to the listings for North Korea on the Embassy Information Web site, the answer is currently 56. Ask that same question at end of this month, however, and the answer will drop to 55.

North Korea's embassy in Australia is slated to close at the end of January because the country can no longer afford it. North Korea's most senior diplomat in Australia, Pak Myong Guk, blamed the high cost of the recent flooding in North Korea for the closure, and said that "When our financial situation is... resolved, then I think our embassy will be re-established again here in Canberra."

It's a plausible reason, but as an Aussie, my instinct is to wonder: Why Australia? Why not, say, Austria, given the relative strength of the euro? In any case, I'm surprised that North Korea is in financial trouble. With all the business opportunities offered by the country, you would think the won would be rolling in.

North Korea is not a normal country. Its leaders and state mouthpieces rarely directly say what they mean. Instead, they resort to the same sorts of tactics a truculent toddler might use to get what he wants: screaming, refusing to budge, and so on. The latest? The country threatened to bolster its "deterrent capabilities" to counter "U.S. attempts to initiate nuclear war."

Faced with such bizarre outbursts, many reporters seem mystified as to why Kim Jong Il's regime would suddenly appear to renege on its commitment to disclose all of its nuclear programs. Just being fickle and untrustworthy? But when it comes to North Korea, there's always something else going on behind the craziness. Facing rising inflation back home, China has cut off food exports to the struggling North Koreans:

In Dandung, Liaoning Province, near China’s border with North Korea, food exports to the impoverished country have been completely suspended. Up until now, an average of approximately 1,200 tons of food has crossed the border every day, but as of the beginning of the year, the Chinese government has not issued any new permissions for exports. [...]

China began blocking grain exports in late December of last year in order to stabilize domestic food prices. On December 20, 2007, Beijing suddenly abolished tax incentives for grain exports. Since then, food assistance to North Korea has been completely stopped. As China has refused to permit food exports, officials are finding it useless to try to pay duties on grains.

Not knowing any other way to communicate, the North Koreans tend to lash out when their food supplies run low. And we could be talking about a humanitarian catastrophe soon:

Almost 80-90 percent of food aid to North Korea is delivered via Dandung. If the current situation continues for an extended period of time, North Korea’s food supplies are expected to deteriorate quickly.

The official in Dandung noted that the demand for food will climb in North Korea owing to what is anticipated to be another season of poverty in the spring. "If external shipments of food aid are blocked, North Korean residents will be forced to depend on smuggling or flee the nation," the official added.

Perhaps there's something more nefarious going on, but Occam's Razor suggests that an impending famine is the main reason for the North's latest tantrum. Until the country's leaders learns how to address such problems in a forthright manner, I'm afraid, this is the kind of thing we can expect.

Are you looking for a hot new business opportunity that's sure to excite? Look no further than... North Korea.

According to the Official Business Webpage of the DPRK, North Korea "will become in the next years the most important hub for trading in North-East Asia." Forget China. North Korea not only provides the lowest labor costs in Asia (which is quite simple when your economy is impoverished and that pesky business of human rights protection is completely out of the picture), the government also ensures that foreigners will not have to deal with middlemen: "All business made directly with the government, state-owned companies." Moreover, North Korea offers tax incentives, particularly for high-tech operations, and a "stable" political environment (one of the benefits of a strong-fisted dictatorship) that claims to be corruption-free.

So what type of products does the DPRK sell abroad? The country's exports in goods include ship parts, computer machinery, cosmetics, garments, vehicles, and more. North Korea also offers services internationally, sending IT engineers and programmers, historical site restorers, construction workers, doctors, and "organizers of mass gymnastics" abroad. Examples of business success stories working with the North Koreans include the export of ginseng to Spain and the United States, the production of a cartoon series for Denmark, and V.I.P. tours from the Netherlands.

The strangeness of some of the country's specializations aside, this effort by North Korea to open up (albeit slightly) economically and engage the international business community may just be a positive development for the country and the region. Even if skeptics of "constructive engagement" are right and these business links don't lead to political and regime change, there's still the hope that any increase in employment in North Korea will help the general population. As many as two million North Koreans died during the famine a decade ago in the Hermit Kingdom. Opening up is surely a better option. And with progress being made on the nuclear front, will it simply be a matter of time before North Korea sheds its pariah status?

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Christopher Hill, speaking in Seoul on Friday, had this to say about sanctions levied against North Korea for its nuclear test last year:

The sanctions are there until the DPRK (North Korea) gets out of the nuclear business. That is when they ought to be revisited.

Taken at face value, Hill's comments are an enormous hedge on the agreement with the North. The sanctions will stay in place at least until North Korea's nuclear program no longer exists—a process that could take years. A U.S. team is beginning to disable North Korea's Yongbyon reactor today and is expected to complete its work by the end of 2007, but "gets out of the nuclear" business is a broad phrase that could be interpreted any number of ways.

There is also some interesting subtext to Hill's quote. In early September, Israel destroyed an alleged Syrian nuclear facility that was thought to have been built with North Korean help. It looked to many like the North Koreans were negotiating with Hill in bad faith, threatening to torpedo the six-party talks. But anonymous Bush administration officials told the New York Times last week that the Syrian site had existed as early as 2003; hence, cooperation between Syria and North Korea existed long before the current diplomatic breakthrough with Pyongyang. As the Times' William J. Broad and Mark Mazzetti put it:

If North Korea started its Syrian aid long ago, the [Bush administration] officials could argue that the assistance was historical, not current, and that diplomacy should move ahead.

This hasn't been enough to ease concerns that the United States is treating Pyongyang with kid gloves. Hill's comments might be an attempt to assuage critics of the North Korea deal. First, they make clear to North Korea that providing nuclear assistance of any kind would violate the deal. Second, Hill implies that sanctions will not go away until Pyongyang's nuclear program is completely nonexistent—and even then, the sanctions will merely be "revisited," not lifted automatically. Whether this will be enough to reassure those who believe the United States is taking it easy on North Korea is unclear. I get the sense that some people in the U.S. government won't be happy until the deal with North Korea is dead and buried.