Why we must continue to negotiate with Pyongyang and Tehran.

The nuclear-arms talks with Iran and North Korea—the two remaining spokes on the axis of evil—are both stalled. However, a distinction should be drawn. There's a good chance that some kind of an accord can be reached with Pyongyang, while the odds are slim for any success with Tehran. So, what to do about both?

The most important thing about the negotiations with North Korea is that they're taking place at all. Throughout his first term, President George W. Bush strictly forbade any contact. His policy was to wait for Kim Jong-il's dread regime to tumble. To engage in diplomacy would be to acknowledge Kim's legitimacy; to offer him inducements toward a treaty would perpetuate his reign.

If Condoleezza Rice has done nothing else as secretary of state, she has persuaded Bush to revive diplomacy as a tool of foreign policy—emphatically so, it turns out, on North Korea. Christopher Hill, Rice's assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, recently wrapped up 13 sessions of talks with North Korean officials in Beijing, including face-to-face bilateral talks. They didn't result in an accord, but no one expected them to, and the talks will resume next month.

It's worth noting that the Clinton administration slogged through 50 sessions of talks before signing the Agreed Framework of 1994, the accord that placed Pyongyang's nuclear program under lock and key for nearly a decade. They were all maddening sessions, apparently, with North Korean diplomats time and again agreeing to some provision, then reneging on it within days or even hours. In his fascinating account of those talks, Negotiating on the Edge, Scott Snyder describes North Korea's diplomatic style as "a prolonged cycle of crisis, intimidation, and brinksmanship."

In other words, Hill's 13 sessions should be seen as the mere beginning—and, by some reports, they were conducted with far less Sturm und Drang than those of a decade ago. Their major accomplishment was the acceptance of Kim's most innocuous but basic demands—the recognition of North Korea as a sovereign state, a pledge not to attack its territory, and an agreement to provide energy assistance in exchange for Pyongyang's nuclear disarmament. Compared with this major breakthrough, the remaining disputes are minor—which is not to say trivial or easy to resolve.

The biggest of these disputes concerns the precise form of energy assistance. Kim Jong-il wants the United States and its partners in these "six-party talks" (the other parties are China, South Korea, Russia, and Japan) to give him two light-water nuclear reactors—which were promised, but never delivered, as part of the '94 accord. The Bush administration refuses to revive this element of the deal, noting that North Korea has been secretly enriching uranium at a similar type of reactor. Instead, Washington and Seoul are offering Pyongyang free electricity from extended South Korean power lines.

But the main reason for guarded optimism is that, all along, North Korea has developed nuclear weapons primarily as a bargaining chip for security and foreign aid. This seemed to be the main motive behind the country's first nuclear crisis, which Kim Il-Sung (Kim Jong-il's late father) fomented in 1993, a crisis that was resolved with the following year's Agreed Framework. And Kim fils seemed to have the same goal in mind when he launched a replay of that crisis in 2002.

If some accord is reached now, it will be implemented in step-by-step phases. (The '94 agreement was supposed to work this way too, but both sides reneged after Phase 1.) Some of the fiercest disputes are, and will be, over timing—which side takes which steps first in the back-and-forth between disarming nukes and dispensing rewards.

The knottiest problem, though, will be verification. Two and a half years have passed since the Agreed Framework fell apart and the North Koreans resumed reprocessing plutonium. How can any disarmament treaty ensure that all their nuclear materials are destroyed or secured? This is especially troubling given that North Korea is the world's most closed society and that its military is famously adept at tunnels and underground facilities.

One hope is that, as North Korea opens up its economy to more aid and trade, it may open up in other ways as well—and that this Far Eastern glasnostmight parallel the phased steps of a disarmament treaty. But this is a wishful vision; nothing in the annals of Kim Jong-il's rule—or that of Kim Il Sung—offers any grounds for supposing it might come true.