When President Bush said, "It used to be that it was just America dealing with North Korea," he was probably referring to the agreed framework that President Clinton's diplomats negotiated in 1993-94. This framework stopped a North Korean program to reprocess nuclear fuel rods into plutonium. Under its terms, the fuel rods were locked in a storage pond, which was kept under constant monitoring by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. As another part of the deal, the U.S. agreed to supply North Korea with two light-water reactors to produce electrical power, and to re-establish diplomatic relations. Eventually, under the multipronged agreement, North Korea would ship the reactor's spent fuel rods abroad, where they would be destroyed. Financing for the reactors collapsed; the relations were never re-established.

In any case, these negotiations were never completely bilateral. They were carried out in tandem with a multilateral organization called the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization.

When President Bush said that Kim Jong-il "said he was going to do something and he didn't do it, for starters," he was probably referring to Kim's secret project to enrich uranium—an alternative way to build nuclear weapons apart from reprocessing plutonium. U.S. intelligence detected signs of the enrichment in the fall of 2002. State Department officials informed their North Korean counterparts, who confessed. Tensions escalated, which led to the crisis two months later, when the North Koreans threatened to resume reprocessing and pull out of the NPT unless Bush resumed his commitment to provide aid and energy. Bush refused, calling the demand "blackmail" and saying he refused to "reward bad behavior." The North Koreans carried out their threat. For more than a year, they tried to reignite talks—as did Secretary Powell and some Asian allies—to no avail. I am not blaming Bush exclusively for this—the North Koreans behaved inexcusably—but I am blaming Bush for not picking up on their subsequent diplomatic cues, for confusing diplomacy with blackmail, concessions with appeasement