We've Seen This Blunder Before

Jimmy Carter and North Korea's Kim Il Sung Dictator 

Iran Deal: The Tehran agreement has a familiar ring; 21 years ago, President Carter was dispatched to North Korea, and the result was a failed pact that ultimately led to a nuclear-armed Pyongyang.

The echoes are eerie. The world's most isolated and oppressive terrorist state in 1994 had long been giving United Nations nuclear arms inspectors the runaround. President Clinton was justly afraid that the mysterious communist regime would follow through on its repeated threats to arm itself with the bomb.

This was a job for ... James Earl Carter.

Clinton sent Carter to meet with then-North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung, whose cult of personality was the center of life for the nation's starving masses. (The cover story was that Carter was going on his own initiative.) But Carter, typically, was enthralled by his own cult of personality. Without authorization from the Clinton administration, he publicly announced the outlines of a treaty.

And so the ball was rolling. It all led to the "Agreed Framework," which like the current effort to make a deal with Iran, was contractually ambiguous, being neither a treaty nor even a binding agreement between the two countries

Under the arrangement, North Korea's plutonium reactors were to be replaced by 2003 with light water reactors, to be built by South Korea and Japan. Exhausted nuclear fuel would be disposed of. The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency would conduct routine inspections. And North Korea would receive half a million tons of fuel oil a year.

How did it go? Here is none other than Ashton Carter, President Obama's new defense secretary, writing in Harvard Magazine in 2003:

Less than a decade after the Agreed Framework was agreed to, North Korea "admitted to having launched a uranium-enrichment program in parallel with its frozen plutonium program, withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and declared itself a nuclear power."

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