The six-party agreement reached last week in Beijing to cap North Korea's nuclear program was a triumph for diplomacy. But contrary to much of the conventional wisdom in recent days, the fruits of the victory fall mostly to the North Koreans.

In the short term, the deal will halt the country's production of nuclear materials, limiting its ability to expand a nuclear arsenal tested in October. But for this concession, the North Koreans get to keep that arsenal intact, at least for now, and stand to make significant economic and political gains in relations with the United States, China and South Korea.

Some critics say the Beijing agreement is a lesser version of "the Agreed Framework" reached in 1994 by the Clinton administration, later cast aside by President Bush. Former Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Perry, speaking Tuesday at the Asia Society, characterized the new agreement as "thin gruel," while backing it as "a small but a very important step forward."

The ultimate judgment will await the uncertain implementation of numerous crucial, but still vaguely defined, steps down the road. The North Koreans are certain to exploit every ambiguity in the text and to drag out the phase that calls for actual dismantlement of their nuclear program and weapons.

Unfortunately, the process that led to this moment suggests that this will not go well. Contrary to the administration's version of events, Pyongyang was not dragged to this deal by pressure -- not from Washington and not from North Korea's angry patrons in Beijing.

"We don't have the North Koreans on the ropes," a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who has watched that closeted country for decades said. "We don't have them on the run."

On the contrary, there is ample evidence that this agreement is yet another demonstration of North Korea's uniquely successful brand of negotiation via escalation: a use of brinkmanship and willingness to go up to and over the line that converts weakness into leverage.

Against that approach, the Bush administration's preference for using tools of coercion and threat, even of pre-emptive war, failed. If anything, it brought about the very opposite outcome than the United States envisioned: it encouraged North Korea to move even more rapidly to develop and test a nuclear weapon.

The pattern of brinkmanship was already clear during the Clinton years -- what Korea expert Scott Snyder famously termed "negotiating on the edge." When confronted, Snyder noted, the North Koreans typically responded by accelerating the crisis, unworried by the consequences. The fear of appearing weak has underlined all North Korean behavior.

The Bush administration came into office almost seeking a confrontation, as the president and many of his advisers were convinced the 1994 deal was fatally flawed. Ironically, the North Koreans thought they were on the verge of strategic breakthrough, after a deal to halt missile tests and preparations for President Clinton to visit Pyongyang in the final weeks of his administration. An improved relationship with the United States would balance the power of its Chinese patron, whom North Korea deeply distrusts, and give it legitimacy in an ongoing struggle with South Korea for leadership on the Korean peninsula.

Instead Bush froze the Clinton framework and sought a new, tougher approach. In January 2002, Bush delivered his famous State of the Union depiction of North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil," along with Iran and Iraq. That October, U.S. negotiators confronted Pyongyang with accusations of cheating by pursuing a clandestine uranium-enrichment program.

The 1994 agreement collapsed amid a tit-for-tat series of escalatory moves -- beginning with a U.S. cutoff of heavy fuel oil and leading to North Korea ousting international inspectors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and restarting its reactor and recycling facility to produce plutonium. Bush vowed that the United States would not "be blackmailed."

Meanwhile, preparations for war in Iraq were mounting. The Bush administration was convinced the awesome display of U.S. power would successfully intimidate the other two points on the axis of evil, North Korea and Iran.

"We are hopeful," then senior State Department official John Bolton dryly said as the invasion came to a close, "that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq -- that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their interest."

American threat

The North Korean officials drew an entirely different conclusion: they could not afford to seem weak in the face of what they perceived as an American threat to terminate their regime.

"Only tremendous military deterrent force powerful enough to decisively beat back an attack supported by ultra-modern weapons can avert a war and protect the security of the country," said an official statement issued April 6. "This is the lesson drawn from the Iraqi war."

A drawn-out process of negotiations began later that month, beginning with a three-way meeting in China and moving that summer to six-party talks that also included South Korea, Japan and Russia. The U.S. position was to deny Pyongyang what it wanted most -- direct talks with Washington -- and to demand verified dismantlement of its nuclear program, on the model of Libya, before any rewards, economic or political, were provided.

As the war in Iraq wore on, and the threat of military force became less credible, the administration looked for other coercive tools. It forged a multinational agreement to intercept suspicious cargoes and launched a crackdown on illicit North Korea trafficking in drugs and counterfeit currency and goods, which are believed to be the main source of support for the regime's elite.

The North Koreans countered with their own demands, offering a plan to freeze their nuclear program, with compensation, followed by a coordinated series of reciprocal steps leading toward eliminating the program. Their offers were accompanied by statements that they already had the bomb and were prepared to test it.

When the Bush administration started its second term in 2005, it attempted to escalate pressure -- this time with charges that North Korea was exporting nuclear materials to the Middle East and calls for China to put pressure on its difficult clients. Pyongyang moved to unload a second set of spent fuel from its reactor and reprocess it -- American experts believe North Korea created six to eight bombs worth of plutonium after 2002.

Agreement sours

A return to the bargaining table in September 2005 yielded an agreement on the principles that would underlie a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. But that sign of progress disappeared within hours as both sides sparred over the meaning of a pledge to build nuclear power reactors for North Korea as compensation for it dismantling its nuclear weapons.

The imposition of measures to curb the flow of North Korean "illicit" money through Chinese and other banks added to the acrimony. Administration officials described this as a legal issue driven by Treasury Department efforts to curb counterfeiting. But as Bush admitted recently, it was used as leverage in the nuclear talks.

Throughout the past year, Bush administration officials expressed confidence that these measures were causing serious pain to the North Korean leadership. Some even talked boldly of "turning out the lights" in Pyongyang through such sanctions.

But Pyongyang could read the news from Iraq as well as any American voter. Instead of having its lights turned out, North Koreans put up their own light shows. On July 4, a date chosen with apparent intent, they carried out a test of a battery of ballistic missiles, in defiance of warnings, including one from China. A U.N. resolution condemning the action -- and other steps, including a South Korean suspension of food and fertilizer aid and Chinese attempts to slow trade -- followed.

In October, again in defiance of pressure from all fronts, the North Koreans tested a nuclear device. This prompted another U.N. resolution, backed by China, to impose limited economic sanctions. But although China was clearly angered, there is little evidence it moved to cut off the lifeline of trade, particularly energy supplies.

North Korea's willingness to cross what everyone believed was a "red line" changed the equation permanently. It allowed Pyongyang to return to the six-party talks, stalled for more than a year, but now from a position of strength. At the meeting in December, the North Koreans refused to discuss any other issues unless the U.S. financial sanctions were removed. North Korean officials hinted of preparations for a second test.

The United States blinked, agreeing to hold long-sought direct talks, held in Berlin in mid-January. The talks yielded the outlines of the Beijing deal but also a separate U.S. concession to lift the financial measures within 30 days of signing a broader deal.

The Beijing agreement more closely resembles North Korea's June 2004 freeze proposal than it does the U.S. insistence that dismantling nuclear weapons precede any substantial rewards. Clearly, this is a deal the Bush administration would not have made, says Scott Snyder, "if it were not tied down with so many other problems."

North Korea made its own concessions in the Beijing agreement. But "it doesn't necessarily mean Pyongyang is backing down or preparing to abandon its nuclear weapons," argues Kim Sung Han, a senior analyst at the South Korean Foreign Ministry's research institute.

N. Korea's rewards

Administration officials point out that the initial freeze of North Korea's nuclear program, to be implemented in two months, yields only minor compensation, about 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. But that is not what Pyongyang sees as its real reward. The lifting of financial measures will facilitate its rapidly growing trade with China and South Korea. Even more important, the South Korean government has already signaled it will now lift the ban on large-scale fertilizer and food shipments -- which are crucial to North Korea's spring planting.

Less visible, but no less vital, the North Koreans are trying to hold off a conservative comeback to power in the South Korean presidential election in December. A North-South summit meeting may take place, which would be part of an effort by the progressive South Korean government to shore up its support.

Ultimately, the Beijing agreement may yield a trade of nuclear facilities for economic and political relations, leaving the nuclear arsenal capped but still intact. For some U.S. experts, that is sufficient.

"It will limit the size of the nuclear arsenal and the amount of bomb fuel," observes former Los Alamos nuclear laboratory director and Stanford scholar Siegfried Hecker. And that, he says, should make it less likely North Korea would sell its nuclear materials or expertise to Iran.

The bargain made in Beijing flows inexorably from North Korea's skillful playing of the escalation game. But it may be the best outcome possible, given that North Korea has already crossed the nuclear threshold and that the Bush administration has squandered U.S. power in the deserts of Iraq.

Reprinted with permission from the San Jose Mercury News.

The Administration's North Korea policy of "ABC"--Anything But Clinton--needs revision. When North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003, President Bush responded by refusing to talk to Pyongyang for fear of rewarding bad behavior. As an initial gut reaction to abhorrent North Korean behavior in 2003, this response may have been understandable. But from a perspective of accomplishing the goal of denuclearizing North Korea, this policy continues to be a demonstrable failure.

The decision to play chicken with the North Koreans in 2003 gave them precisely what they wanted--plenty of time to develop their own nuclear capabilities. Finally after nearly a year had elapsed, the Administration belatedly embarked upon substantive multilateral talks spearheaded by Secretary Rice. Now, three years later, North Korea has finally demonstrated its nuclear capability. Nonetheless, the Administration continues to reject calls for direct, bilateral talks with the North Koreans, a condition North Korea has said would be a precursor to implementing the denuclearization agreement of September 2005.

Ideally the current UN sanctions will force North Korea to understand that it must denuclearize. But what if sanctions fail to persuade Kim Jong Il? Does the Administration have a second order strategy to deal with a nuclear North Korea?

With bilateral talks the Administration would be taking the first confidence building step to break the stalemate in what has been over a year without dialogue. This gesture would send a clear signal: the U.S. is not trying to topple the regime and it is serious about stabilizing relations between the two countries.

So what are the risks of initiating such direct talks?

First, the Administration has argued that multilateral talks are necessary because the U.S. needs the influence of China and South Korea. But there is no reason that bilateral and multilateral talks cannot co-exist. The Administration should continue to encourage coordinated Six Party Talks but also engage with North Korea on a one-on-one basis at the track-II diplomatic level. This way, the U.S. leverages Chinese and South Korean support on North Korea while still engaging with Pyongyang in a direct dialogue. Bilateral talks would also show our partners in China and South Korea that we are responsive to their preferences for a more diplomatic approach. Such an approach might give Kim Jong Il a face-saving way to say "yes" to reasonable incentives. At the same time, such a move would help rehabilitate the Administration's poor reputation for diplomacy in the international community.

Second, there are hard-liners who fear that the U.S. might look weak by acceding to a precondition of talks that President Bush has refused since the beginning of his presidency. If this Administration had a track record of being bullied, a world reputation for timidity, we might worry about the second-order effects of such a move. However, the concern of the world is not that the Bush Administration is soft, but rather that it does not listen.

This presidency's foreign policy is at a crossroads. A mid-term correction, animated by a unilateral openness to bilateral talks, however it may seem to the unsophisticated observer, is not weak. After all, our strongest asset during bilateral talks is our power to say "no"--to refuse demands that fail to meet American economic and security interests. Sitting down to listen and talk knowing that we reserve the full right and ability to say "no" at any moment, gives up nothing. It is a sign of our power, not our weakness; our maturity as the world's strongest democracy, not our churlishness as a schoolboy on the playground of world politics.

Negotiating is not about refusing to blink first. The best outcomes occur when there are candid exchanges and confidence building measures that tip the balance toward peace. Bilateral talks should not be regarded as rewards for bad behavior, but as another powerful tool--along with sanctions and continuing Six-Party Talks--by which we may secure our policy aims.

Some may question the advisability of bilateral negotiations if we believe that North Korea will not denuclearize. The truth is the stakes are too high to make such assumptions. Until we sit down and talk directly with Pyongyang, we cannot be certain of its true intentions. It is possible that North Korea will flout our direct gestures, signaling to the world its unwillingness to renounce nuclear weapons. If that happens, the Administration's hand will be strengthened in its diplomatic efforts with its allies to adopt a harder stance toward Pyongyang. But it is also possible that the Administration will have traded the insignificant "concession" of listening to the North Koreans in a bilateral forum for the end result of a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, the avoidance of an Asian arms race, and the reduced threat of nuclear proliferation to terrorist groups.

There are times when the hard line is necessary. We should never fear to take that path. But we should not confuse toughness on the real-life issues with stubbornness on pre-conditions for dialogue. It's high-time that the Administration understand that listening and talking--at bilateral, multilateral, and second-track levels--are tools that may yield better results than playing a silly game of chicken.

Robert C. Bordone is the Thaddeus R. Beal Assistant Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Director of the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Albert Chang is a first-year student at Harvard Law School with expertise in U.S. foreign policy toward East Asia. A Harry S. Truman Scholar and Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow, Albert graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University in Political Science and International Security Studies.

North Korea's declared nuclear bomb test program will increase the incentives for other nations to go nuclear, will endanger security in the region and could ultimately result in nuclear terrorism. While this test is the culmination of North Korea's long-held aspiration to become a nuclear power, it also demonstrates the total failure of the Bush administration's policy toward that country. For almost six years this policy has been a strange combination of harsh rhetoric and inaction.

President Bush, early in his first term, dubbed North Korea a member of the "axis of evil" and made disparaging remarks about Kim Jong Il. He said he would not tolerate a North Korean nuclear weapons program, but he set no bounds on North Korean actions.

The most important such limit would have been on reprocessing spent fuel from North Korea's reactor to make plutonium. The Clinton administration declared in 1994 that if North Korea reprocessed, it would be crossing a "red line," and it threatened military action if that line was crossed. The North Koreans responded to that pressure and began negotiations that led to the Agreed Framework. The Agreed Framework did not end North Korea's aspirations for nuclear weapons, but it did result in a major delay. For more than eight years, under the Agreed Framework, the spent fuel was kept in a storage pond under international supervision.

Then in 2002, the Bush administration discovered the existence of a covert program in uranium, evidently an attempt to evade the Agreed Framework. This program, while potentially serious, would have led to a bomb at a very slow rate, compared with the more mature plutonium program. Nevertheless, the administration unwisely stopped compliance with the Agreed Framework. In response the North Koreans sent the inspectors home and announced their intention to reprocess. The administration deplored the action but set no "red line." North Korea made the plutonium.

The administration also said early this summer that a North Korean test of long-range missiles was unacceptable. North Korea conducted a multiple-launch test of missiles on July 4. Most recently, the administration said a North Korean test of a nuclear bomb would be unacceptable. A week later North Korea conducted its first test.

It appears that the administration is deeply divided on how to deal with North Korea, with some favoring negotiation and others economic and political pressure to force a regime change. As a result, while the administration was willing to send a representative to the six-party talks organized by the Chinese in 2003, it had no apparent strategy for dealing with North Korea there or for providing leadership to the other parties. In the meantime, it increased economic pressure on Pyongyang. Certainly an argument can be made for such pressure, but it would be naive to think it could succeed without the support of the Chinese and South Korean governments, neither of which backs such action. North Korea, sensing the administration's paralysis, has moved ahead with an aggressive and dangerous nuclear program.

So what can be done now that might have a constructive influence on North Korea's behavior? The attractive alternatives are behind us. There should and will be a U.N. resolution condemning the test. The United Nations may respond to calls from the United States and Japan for strong sanctions to isolate North Korea and cut off trade with it. But North Korea is already the most isolated nation in the world, and its government uses this isolation to its advantage. Stronger sanctions on materials that might be of use to the nuclear program are reasonable, but the horse is already out of the barn. Economic sanctions to squeeze North Korea would increase the suffering of its people but would have little effect on the elite. In any event, they would be effective only if China and South Korea fully participated, and they have shown no inclination to do so.

There will be calls to accelerate our national missile defense program. But the greatest danger to the United States from this program is not that North Korea would be willing to commit suicide by firing a missile at the United States, even if it did develop one of sufficient range. Rather, it is the possibility that the North Koreans will sell one of the bombs or some of their plutonium to a terrorist group. The president has warned North Korea not to transfer any materials from its nuclear program. But the warnings we have sent to North Korea these past six years have gone unheeded and its acts unpunished. It is not clear that this latest one will have any greater effect. If a warning is to have a chance of influencing North Korea's behavior it has to be much more specific. It would have to promise retaliation against North Korea if a terrorist detonated a nuclear bomb in one of our cities. It must be backed by a meaningful forensics program that can identify the source of a nuclear bomb.

This test will certainly send an undesirable message to Iran, and that damage has already been done. But it is important to try to keep this action from precipitating a nuclear arms race in the Asia-Pacific region. Both Japan and South Korea have the capability to move quickly to full nuclear-weapon status but have not done so because they have had confidence in our nuclear umbrella. They may now reevaluate their decision. We should consult closely with Japan and South Korea to reassure them that they are still under our umbrella and that we have the will and the capability to regard an attack on them as an attack on the United States. This may be necessary to discourage them from moving forward with nuclear deterrence of their own.

Our government's inattention has allowed North Korea to establish a new and dangerous threat to the Asia-Pacific region. It is probably too late to reverse that damage, but serious attention to this problem can still limit the extent of the damage.

The writer was secretary of defense from 1994 to 1997.

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To read the seismic signal sent from an abandoned coal mine in the mountains of North Korea's coast, you must first recognize that it represents four major failures, two grave dangers, and one big opportunity.

The apparent explosion of a nuclear device, coming after two decades of trying to stop North Korea from achieving this goal, is a manifest failure of policy on four fronts -- a failure of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy, a failure of international diplomacy, a failure of Chinese leadership and a failure of South Korea's strategy of engaging the North.

Having failed so completely, the world now faces two grave dangers. The first is the very real threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, triggered by a series of escalatory actions in the wake of the bomb test. The second is the danger that North Korea will proliferate its nuclear technology, materials or know-how to others -- not the least to another nuclear hopeful, Iran.

But there remains a lone and tenuous opportunity. Having removed all ambiguity about its nuclear ambitions, North Korea may finally have created a common sense of threat that will galvanize the kind of concerted international action that so far has been absent.

THE FOUR FAILURES

Non-proliferation failure

The United States has spent two decades trying to stop North Korea from going nuclear, a turbulent period of crisis and negotiation that even went to the brink of war. At least three administrations confronted this problem and none, certainly not the Bush administration, can escape blame.

North Korea agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985, but it stalled before signing an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1992 to place its nuclear facilities under international safeguards and inspections. During that time the North Koreans reprocessed some spent fuel from their reactor into plutonium - an amount that American intelligence believes was enough for building one or two warheads.

North Korea's resistance to full inspections, while it kept pulling spent fuel rods out of its reactor, provoked a crisis in 1994 and led the Clinton administration to ready military forces to strike the North's nuclear facilities. In a last-minute deal, North Korea froze its reactor and reprocessing facilities, effectively halting plutonium production under IAEA supervision. In exchange, the United States, Japan, South Korea and others agreed to construct two light-water reactors for North Korea and to supply fuel oil until the reactors came online.

The deal was troubled from the start. Neither party was satisfied with the compromise or the way it was to be implemented. By the late 1990s, the North had begun a secret effort to acquire uranium-enrichment technology from Pakistan and, in 1998, tested a long-range ballistic missile. Despite this, the plutonium freeze remained in place. But it did not survive the Bush administration.

The Bush administration came into office challenging the value of the agreement and froze contacts with the North. After receiving intelligence showing moves to build enrichment facilities, it confronted North Korean officials at an acrimonious meeting in Pyongyang in October 2002.

The United States halted fuel shipments a month later, and, in early 2003, the North Koreans expelled IAEA inspectors and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They proceeded to reprocess the fuel rods they had stored for a decade, producing enough plutonium, intelligence estimates say, for four to six nuclear warheads. In February 2005, the North Koreans announced they had manufactured nuclear weapons. Last week, they apparently made good on that declaration.

Blame aside, North Korea's emergence as the world's ninth nuclear power may be the most serious failure in non-proliferation history. Unlike India and Pakistan, which remained outside the system of international treaties, North Korea acted in defiance of those controls. Who might be next?

Diplomatic failure

Unlike Iraq, the attempt to stop North Korea's nuclear program has relied on the tools of diplomacy, accompanied by economic incentives and coercive sanctions.

But serious questions have been raised from the start about the sincerity and methods of the diplomatic efforts, particularly on the part of the United States and North Korea. The Bush administration has insisted -- and the president continues to make this argument -- that direct talks with North Korea do not work. Pyongyang has tried to frame everything as an issue with Washington, undermining talks that involved others, including South Korea.

Bush's stance lends credibility to those who charge the administration seeks "regime change," not a compromise that it believes will lend legitimacy to Kim Jong Il. The North Koreans now appear to have used the talks to buy time and build bombs.

Diplomacy has, at American insistence, consisted of six-party talks, held under Chinese auspices and including both Koreas, Japan and Russia. In truth, little real negotiating went on at these gatherings, at least until the last full round of talks in September 2005. In contrast to the thousands of hours of negotiations between Americans and North Koreans that led to the 1994 deal, there have been only tens of hours of actual give and take.

It is intriguing that the September agreement on a statement of principles for denuclearization came only after the State Department's chief negotiator was finally allowed to talk to his North Korean counterpart at length. Even then, their agreement evaporated almost immediately as they dueled publicly over the deal's meaning. American financial sanctions against North Korean currency counterfeiting further clouded the atmosphere, and direct contacts ground to a halt.

China's failure

The North Korean nuclear crisis is also a failure of China's bid for regional, if not global leadership. North Korea is an ally of China, a relationship that goes back more than half a century to the Korean War, when Chinese "volunteers" poured across the border to prevent an American victory. Their relationship has become more difficult since China embarked on market reforms while North Korea clung to its peculiar brand of Stalinism.

China has been torn between its loyalty to Pyongyang, its desire to maintain a stable balance of power in the region and its fear that the North's nuclear ambitions could provoke conflict on its borders. By becoming host for the six-party talks, Beijing stepped into an unusual leadership role.

The Bush administration was eager to move the burden of the North Korean problem onto the Chinese. Some administration hard-liners argued that China had the power to trigger the collapse of Kim Jung Il's regime by cutting off energy and food supplies.

Time and again, Beijing dragged the North Koreans back to the negotiating table, while also pushing Washington to engage Pyongyang in the talks. But Chinese irritation over American inflexibility has now been trumped by North Korea's defiance. Chinese policy-makers now wonder how they can punish the North without creating chaos, or war.

Failure of engagement

The final failure lies on the doorstep of South Korea's 10-year-long policy of engagement. The "sunshine policy" asserted that the North could be induced to give up its nuclear option by opening up the isolated communist state and promoting the forces of Chinese-style reform.

After a historic summit meeting in 2000, South Korean aid and trade, even tourists, flowed into the North. South Koreans lost their fear of a former foe, seeing it more as an impoverished lost brother than a mortal threat. Tensions with their American allies rose because of a gap in the North's perceived threat. The United States wondered why its troops should continue to defend South Korea.

Now South Koreans must confront the possibility that the North may have used engagement only to buy time.

THE TWO DANGERS

Threat of war

With eyes on Iraq and the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula has been far from the center of American attention. American forces based in South Korea and Japan have been dispatched to Iraq.

Yet the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas remains the most militarized frontier on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of well-armed soldiers poised against each other. Clashes along that frontier used to be commonplace and there are signs of a renewal of tensions. The danger of unintended escalation cannot be dismissed.

What might happen if a U.S. naval vessel, moving to inspect a North Korean freighter - as the U.N. resolution may authorize - is fired on or even captured, as the USS Pueblo was in 1968? It is a frightening scenario already worrying some at the Pentagon and the State Department.

Risk of proliferation

More than anything else, American policy-makers fear that North Korea, emboldened by its nuclear success and perhaps desperate for funds amid economic sanctions, might sell its nuclear expertise to Iran and others, including terrorist groups.

For Pyongyang, an alliance with Iran is a logical response to American and global pressure. The North Koreans have sold ballistic missiles to Tehran since the 1980s and rumors of nuclear cooperation persist.

An American effort to interdict the movement of ships and planes to Iran -- with possible U.N. backing - is probable. But the most likely transit is across the long and loosely controlled land border with China. The amount of plutonium needed to make a warhead is the size of a grapefruit and hard to detect - creating yet another nightmare scenario.

THE OPPORTUNITY

In this otherwise bleak landscape, there is an opportunity. For the first time, there is a chance of a consensus among the key players -- China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. The passage of a U.N. resolution is a small step in that direction. But the real test will come next, as the nations must cooperate to put pressure on North Korea, while coolly navigating the perils of war and making sure to leave open a diplomatic exit.

There is a slim chance of such concerted action, and a limited window for achieving it. Not everyone sees the dangers the same way. Signs of rethinking errors of the past are no more evident in Beijing and Seoul than they are in Washington or Tokyo. Ultimately, however, if they are to seize this moment of opportunity, all parties must face up to the fact that the policies of the past have failed.

As a model of a democratizing and secular Muslim state that has been a stalwart ally for more than 50 years, Turkey is of enormous strategic importance to the United States and Europe, especially at a time when the widening chasm between the West and the Islamic world looms as the greatest foreign policy challenge. Yet Ankara's relations with Washington are strained - over Iraq, Cyprus, Syria, Iran and Hamas - and Turkey's prospects for joining the European Union remain uncertain.

As Washington prepares for a visit Wednesday by Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, the United States and Turkey should explore three initiatives to repair and revitalize their relationship.

First, although the United States and Turkey share broad goals in Iraq, the situation there threatens a potential breach in relations. The Turks feel the war in Iraq has undermined their security by stirring Kurdish nationalism. It also coincided with renewed terrorist attacks mounted by the Kurdistan Worker's Party from inside Iraq. To address this challenge, the United States should initiate a trilateral dialogue on the future of Iraq with Turkey and representatives of the Iraqi government, including Kurdish leaders.

If the effort to build a functioning Iraqi government is successful, this trilateral consultative process will support the common goal of a unified and sovereign Iraq; should the Iraqi government fail, the dialogue will provide a mechanism for managing some of the worst potential consequences.

Second, Washington must make it a diplomatic priority to persuade skeptics in Europe to take a more positive approach toward Turkey. Peering into the future and considering the strategic implications of a Turkey unmoored - or, more darkly, a Turkey that turns against its traditional partners, aligning itself more closely with Damascus, Moscow or Tehran - should be instructive.

Washington needs to make the case to its European allies that delaying Turkey's accession to the EU could harm their security. The longer accession takes, the more likely it is that Turks will become disenchanted with the EU and look elsewhere for opportunities; it is also more likely that Turkey's impressive political reform process, which began in 2002, will stall.

Further, Washington should take a leadership role in working to resolve the Cyprus conflict, which threatens to create further obstacles to Turkish EU membership. Rather than waiting for a new UN or EU initiative on the future of the island, America should catalyze a renewed negotiation process. A special Cyprus coordinator would work with the UN and EU to develop a new plan for reuniting the island, encourage European leaders to use their collective clout to require more constructive behavior from the Cypriot government, and coordinate Washington's political, diplomatic and economic steps to break Turkish Cypriots from their international isolation.

Third, the United States and Turkey should establish a high-level commission that meets twice a year and provides a structured mechanism for interaction across agencies of government, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. At the outset, three working groups should be launched, focusing on security, economic and commercial ties, and educational and cultural exchanges.

A U.S.-Turkey cooperation commission could facilitate the re-establishment of the sustained interaction that characterizes America's strongest partnerships, and provide a foundation for keeping Turkey aligned with the West should Ankara's bid for EU membership ultimately fail.

As tensions over the outcome in Iraq mount, the prospects for generating positive momentum in U.S.- Turkey relations are diminishing. The consequences of a disoriented Turkey would be even greater than a failure in Iraq. America and Europe must do everything they can to ensure that Turkey remains firmly anchored in the West.

Steven A. Cook and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall are fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.