For Vice President Dick Cheney, the question of how to deal with would-be nuclear powers in Iran and North Korea is disarmingly simple.

"We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it,'' Cheney reportedly pronounced, dismissing a State Department bid in late 2003 to make a deal with North Korea. A similar prescription was offered when moderates in the Iranian regime made a secret approach that year to begin talks with the United States.

The long history of the Cold War is replete with the issue of whether -- and how -- to talk with a mortal foe. U.S.-Soviet relations froze time and again. For two decades, there was no dialogue at all with Communist China. But in the end, American policymakers have always chosen the path of negotiation.

For Cheney -- and for President George W. Bush -- sitting down at a table with the likes of North Korea's Kim Jong Il would be an act of weakness, a lessening of American power and prestige that granted undeserved legitimacy to despised regimes.

In recent months, and most prominently last week, the Bush administration has appeared to reverse its stance, opening the door to direct talks with North Korea and Iran.

These moves are carefully constrained, reflecting in part the ongoing divisions in the Bush administration about the advisability of going down this path. Contacts with both regimes will take place only within the framework of multilateral talks and focused solely on the issue of their nuclear programs. One-on-one talks on a broader agenda, including establishing basic diplomatic relations, have been explicitly ruled out, for now.

The decision to talk seems driven in large part by the realization that defeating evil has proven to be more difficult than some in the administration assumed. After Iraq, the use of military force against Iran -- and even more so against a North Korea already probably armed with nuclear weapons -- is highly unlikely. Potential allies in imposing economic and political sanctions -- the Europeans, Russians and Chinese, along with South Korea and Japan -- won't even consider such steps without a greater show of American willingness to negotiate with the evil enemy.

Limited as it is, the significance of this shift has to be seen against the backdrop of deep resistance to such diplomatic engagement in the Bush administration.

"There is a fundamental disagreement over how to approach the North Korea problem,'' explained Richard Armitage, who served as deputy secretary of state from 2001-05.

"'Those of us at the State Department concluded: From the North Korean point of view, the nuclear issue is the only reason we Americans talk with them,'' Armitage recounted in a recent interview with the Oriental Economist newsletter. "Therefore, the North Koreans would be very reluctant to let go of the nuclear program. We knew it was going to be a very difficult process. But you have to start somewhere. You start by finding out what their needs and desires are, and seeing if there is a way of meeting those needs and desires without giving away something that is sacred to us.''

But the White House and others in the administration blocked at every turn their attempts to open direct dialogue with Pyongyang. "There is a fear in some quarters, particularly the Pentagon and at times in the vice president's office, that if we were to engage in discussions with the North Koreans, we might wind up with the bad end of the deal,'' Armitage said. "They believe that we should be able to pronounce our view, and everyone else, including the North Koreans, should simply accept it. This is not a reasonable approach.''

Six-party talks

The compromise was the decision, through the good offices of China, to convene six-party talks that included surrounding countries such as Russia, South Korea and Japan. Administration officials have argued that this format rallies others to back the United States in pressing the North Koreans, effectively isolating them.

The same argument was made for the United States to support, but not directly join, until this past week, European negotiations with Iran. As recently as April, Bush was still publicly wedded to this logic.

"With the United States being the sole interlocutor between Iran, it makes it more difficult to achieve the objective of having the Iranians give up their nuclear weapons ambitions,'' Bush said in answering questions following an April 10 speech. "It's amazing that when we're in a bilateral position, or kind of just negotiating one on one, somehow the world ends up turning the tables on us.''

Arguably, however, the opposite has been true. In the case of Iran, the Europeans, including Great Britain, have consistently urged the United States to talk directly to Iran.

An excuse not to talk

All the other partners in the six-party talks, including the closest U.S. ally, Japan, have held their own direct talks with Pyongyang and pushed the United States to do the same. Ultimately, it is the United States that has found itself isolated.

North Korean experts in the State Department had warned against relying only on this approach.

"In the case of negotiating with North Korea, more is not merrier and certainly not more efficient,'' says Robert Carlin, a longtime CIA and State Department intelligence expert on North Korea who participated in virtually all negotiations with the North from 1993-2000. "The more parties and people at the table, the greater the likelihood of posturing, and the harder it is to make concessions.''

In his view, the insistence on a multilateral approach was initially an excuse not to talk. "They didn't want bilateral talks with Pyongyang and they certainly didn't trust the State Department to conduct any such thing.''

These divisions have persisted. Last September, with the backing of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the State Department's chief negotiator was finally allowed to meet his North Korean counterpart. This led to an agreement in the six-party talks last September, a compromise that conceded in principle the North Korean right to have a nuclear power reactor.

That deal prompted a backlash from Cheney and others, according to senior officials within the administration, and fresh curbs on direct contacts with Pyongyang. But the new proposal to Iran apparently also includes an offer to supply power reactors.

What still has resonance is the belief that direct talks with North Korea and Iran amount to acceptance of the regimes in power in both countries.

Resistant to deal

"Ultimately the president is, on this issue, very, very resistant to the idea of doing a deal, even a deal that would solve the nuclear problem,'' Flynt Leverett, who dealt with Iran for the Bush National Security Council, said in a recent interview. "You don't do a deal that would effectively legitimate this regime that he considers fundamentally illegitimate.''

The administration may calculate that this offer of talks will only serve to isolate Iran and shore up ties with Europe. But it may have stepped onto a slippery slope toward a bargain that will necessarily involve painful concessions to Iran and lead toward a resumption of diplomatic relations broken off almost three decades ago.

Opposition to negotiating with the enemy is deeply embedded in the Bush administration. There is, however, a precedent for a sea change -- Ronald Reagan. President Reagan came to office in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Dialogue with the Soviets was halted and the staff of the Reagan National Security Council opposed any contacts with Moscow.

Reagan himself, in a famous 1983 speech, referred to the Soviet Union as an ``evil empire,'' followed two weeks later by the launching of the "star wars'' missile-defense program. Soviet leaders, we learned later, were convinced that the United States might launch a first strike. In August of that year, Soviet fighter aircraft shot down a Korean Airlines passenger jet that had strayed from its flight path, a sign of sharply increasing tension.

In the Reagan administration, against fierce internal opposition, Secretary of State George Shultz pushed to resume dialogue with the Soviets, beginning with achievable steps such as resuming grain sales. Reagan ultimately agreed, starting down a road that led to the series of dramatic summits from 1985 with incoming Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Reagan's willingness to sit down with the "evil'' foe flowed from a sense of conviction in American strength. It is not yet evident that his Republican successor shares the same sense of confidence.

North Korea's nuclear facility at Yongbyon, which had been "frozen" under international inspection since 1994, was reactivated this January for the production of plutonium. Just last week the North Koreans announced that they intended to use the resulting plutonium to make nuclear weapons, which only confirmed what we always believed.

If it keeps on its present course, North Korea will probably have six to eight nuclear weapons by the end of the year, will possibly have conducted a nuclear test and may have begun deployment of some of these weapons, targeted against Japan and South Korea. By next year, it could be in serial production of nuclear weapons, building perhaps five to 10 per year.

This is a nightmare scenario, but it is a reasonable extrapolation from what we know and from what the North Koreans have announced. The administration to this point has refused to negotiate with North Korea, instead calling on the countries in the region to deal with the problem. The strategy underlying this approach is not clear, but the consequences are all too clear. It has allowed the North in the past six months to move from canned fuel rods to plutonium and, in a few more months, to nuclear weapons. And the consequences could extend well beyond the region. Given North Korea's desperate economic condition, we should expect it to sell some of the products of its nuclear program, just as it did with its missile program. If that happens, a nuclear bomb could end up in an American city. The administration has suggested that it would interdict such transfers. But a nuclear bomb can be made with a sphere of plutonium the size of a soccer ball. It is wishful thinking to believe we could prevent a package that size from being smuggled out of North Korea.

How did we get into this mess?

For several decades North Korea has aspired to have nuclear weapons. During that period successive administrations have, through a combination of threats and inducements, curtailed their program but never their aspirations. In the late 1980s the first Bush administration saw the potential danger and persuaded the Soviet Union to pressure North Korea to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and subject its nuclear facilities to international inspection. The North Koreans complied, but they stalled long enough to give them time to make and store enough plutonium for one or two nuclear bombs before the inspectors arrived.

Shortly after the Clinton administration took office, they tried again. As spent fuel was being taken from the nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, the North Koreans ejected the inspectors and began preparations for reprocessing. This would have given them enough plutonium for five or six additional nuclear bombs. President Clinton considered this sufficiently dangerous that he declared reprocessing a "red line." In response, I had the Joint Chiefs prepare a plan to use military force if necessary to prevent this outcome. When Kim Il Sung offered to negotiate the issue, Clinton responded that he would negotiate only if the North Koreans froze all activity at Yongbyon during the negotiation. In the end, military force was not necessary. The agreement that ended this crisis was far from perfect, but in its absence North Korea could today have 50 to 100 nuclear weapons.

But the North Koreans never gave up their desire for nuclear weapons. Even as they complied with the freeze at Yongbyon, they covertly started a second nuclear program at a different location. American intelligence discovered signs of this program and last fall confronted the North Koreans, who did not dispute the charge. The administration responded by stopping fuel oil deliveries called for under the old agreement, to which the North Koreans responded by reopening Yongbyon and racing to get nuclear weapons.

There are three basic approaches for dealing with this dangerous situation. The administration can continue to refuse to negotiate, "outsourcing" this problem to the concerned regional powers. This approach appears to be based on the hope that the regional powers will be able to prevail on North Korea to stop its nuclear program. But hope is not a strategy. If their hopes are not realized and North Korea continues on its present course, it will soon have a significant nuclear arsenal. And while the regional powers could play a role in resolving this crisis, they are unlikely to succeed in the absence of a clear American negotiating strategy in which they can participate.

A second alternative is to put economic pressure on North Korea and hope for "regime change." Or the United States could take military action to bring this change about. But while the regime may one day collapse, with or without economic pressure, there is no reason to believe that it will happen in time - the nuclear threat is imminent. Taking military action to force a timely regime change could result in a conflict comparable to the first Korean War, with casualties that would shock the world.

The third alternative is to undertake serious negotiations with the North Koreans to determine if there is a way to stop their nuclear program short of war. The administration is clearly reluctant to negotiate with the North Koreans, calling them loathsome and cheaters. It is easy to be sympathetic with this position; indeed, the only reason for considering negotiation with North Korea is that the other alternatives are so terrible. The administration, seeing the danger, has said that it "would not tolerate" a North Korean nuclear arsenal. The North Koreans responded to this declaration by accelerating their program. The conflict between our views and their actions is a formula for drifting into war. It is imperative that we stop that drift, and the only clear way of doing that is by negotiating.

Any negotiations with the North Koreans are likely to be difficult and protracted, so they should be predicated on a prior agreement that North Korea will freeze its nuclear activities during the negotiations. For negotiations to have a chance of success, they would need to have a positive dimension, making it clear to North Korea that forgoing nuclear weapons could lead it to a safe and positive future. But they would also need a negative or coercive dimension, both to induce North Korea to take the right path and to give us and our allies more credible options if diplomacy should fail. President Kennedy said it best: "We should never negotiate from fear, but we should never fear to negotiate."

Even when the European-Iranian agreement to halt Iran's uranium-enrichment program looked solid, the United States was blunt in its disapproval. The ink was barely dry on the accord when the Bush administration, it appears, began trying to derail it.

First, rather than endorse the accord, Secretary of State Colin Powell essentially accused the Iranians of lying when they said their nuclear program was for peaceful purposes. He announced that new intelligence showed Iran is developing a nuclear warhead to arm its Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Then, at a Nov. 20 meeting of heads of state in Santiago, Chile, President Bush stated unequivocally that Iran is trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Why would the administration take such a combative stance? Because hard-liners within the administration thought Tehran would use the settlement to buy time for building nuclear weapons, and that the United States would be better off bombing Iran's suspected weapons sites.

Proponents of using military force against Iran have not yet won the argument within the Bush administration. But the past two weeks of strong pronouncements about the threat Iran poses suggest that the military option may be gaining ground. And Iran's last-minute attempts to maintain some enrichment capabilities -- which by press time Friday were threatening to kill the European agreement -- no doubt strengthened the hard-liners' hand.

Before the United States even considers such a drastic step as airstrikes against suspected nuclear weapons sites -- or even trying to compel the United Nations to endorse new economic sanctions against Iran -- it is essential that our leaders be clear about what they are trying to accomplish in Iran and whether such actions will help or hurt.

If the ultimate goal is to create a democracy -- one that would not fear the United States and therefore have less use for the bomb -- then dual-track diplomacy with Iran's government and with its people is more likely to work than military action.

Probably the most important question the administration's leaders should ask themselves is whether Iran, even a nuclear-armed Iran, poses a direct threat to the United States and its allies.

The answer, we believe, is no.

The mullahs who rule Tehran long ago gave up their ideological quest to "export'' revolution. Like the last generation of octogenarians who ruled the Soviet Union, Iran's leaders today want nuclear weapons as a means to help them preserve their power, not to help them spread their model of theocratic rule to other countries.

Deterrence works

In other words, even if Iran's rulers succeeded in building nuclear bombs, they would be very unlikely to take on the United States and its vast nuclear arsenal or to attack Israel. (The mullahs in Tehran understand that any nuclear attack against Israel would trigger full retaliation from the United States.) In dealing with Iran, deterrence works.

Tehran would also be unlikely to pass a bomb to Islamist terrorists, despite its support of Arab terrorist organizations that continue to attack Israel. One reason, again, is deterrence. Iran's rulers know that the United States would probably be able to trace the weapon back to them and retaliate.

The threat of a nuclear Iran comes, instead, from the reaction it is almost sure to spark in the region and the world, possibly sending Egypt and Saudi Arabia on their own quests for nuclear weapons.

Such an arms race would undermine the longstanding Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, an agreement signed by nearly 190 countries, that has proved indispensable in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.

Bush administration hard-liners want to save that arms-control treaty by using arms. In advocating a "surgical'' military strike against Iran's most important nuclear facilities, including the once hidden enrichment plant in Natanz, they cite Israel's airstrike against Iraq's nuclear complex at Osirak in 1981 as a model of success. They argue that an American (or Israeli) strike would not end Iran's nuclear aspirations, but would dramatically slow its program and make the mullahs reconsider the costs of trying to restart it.

Attack would backfire

But a pre-emptive military strike would instead do just what the hard-liners in Tehran hope for: It would unite their people behind them.

Even a precise bombing campaign would kill hundreds if not thousands of innocent Iranians; destroy ancient buildings of historical and religious importance; trigger an Iranian counterstrike, however feeble, against American targets and friends in the region, and spur the mullahs to increase their direct support for American enemies in the Shiite part of Iraq.

Even more important, an attack would only encourage Tehran to redouble its efforts to build a bomb, just as Saddam Hussein sped up his efforts after the 1981 strike. It would also hurt the democratic opposition movement inside Iran, which is already in retreat and cannot afford another setback. After an attack, Iranians, not unlike Americans, are sure to rally around the flag and their government.

If the administration decides, in the end, that American military options are limited and counterproductive, the only serious way to impede the development of Iranian nuclear weapons is through negotiation. Iran's recent accord with France, Britain and Germany is only temporary, and negotiations are expected to continue.

If the United States were to jump in now, it could try to ensure that our European allies accept nothing less than a permanent and verifiable dismantling of Iran's enrichment capabilities, as well as banning any plutonium production.

Allowing the Iranians to enrich even some uranium, which they say will be used merely to feed their nuclear power plant, makes it too easy to cheat. To make the deal work, the United States would need to join with Europe, Russia and China in pledging to guarantee Iran a permanent and continuous supply of enriched uranium. To make the deal even more attractive, the fuel could be offered at reduced prices.

Even under the strictest inspection regime, Iran's leaders will cheat, as they have often done in the past, and they will eventually divert enriched uranium from peaceful to military purposes. But the harder and more transparent the allies can make it, the longer it will take Iran to begin building bombs.

In the long run, the world's only serious hope for stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons is the development of a democratic government in Tehran. A democratic Iran will become an ally of the Western world no longer in need of a deterrent threat against the United States.

Democracy in Iran therefore obviously serves U.S. national interests. Yet Bush administration officials (as well as their predecessors in the Clinton, Bush and Reagan administrations) have not succeeded in developing a strategy for advancing the cause of Iranian democracy.

New strategy

What is needed is a radical new approach that would nurture change from within the country, in alliance with Iran's democratic movement, rather than impose change from without.

A first step would be to establish an American presence in Tehran, as many in Iran's democratic opposition have proposed. Now decades old, the U.S. policy of isolating Iran has not weakened but instead strengthened its autocratic government.

Of course, we are not suggesting that the United States open an embassy in Tehran and turn a blind eye to human rights abuses; that would only contribute to the further consolidation of the mullahs' hold on power. But we are suggesting a new strategy that would allow American government officials, as well as civic leaders, academics and business people, to engage directly with Iranian society.

This engagement cannot occur on a widespread scale without some level of diplomatic relations and some revision of the American sanctions against Iran. Then, more Western foundations would be able to make grants to pro-democracy Iranian organizations, while business people -- and especially the Iranian-American business community in the United States -- would be able to leverage their capital and know-how to influence economic and political change inside Iran. A U.S. presence in Iran would, not incidentally, also enhance the West's ability to monitor Iran's nuclear program.

Critics of engagement argue that diplomatic relations with Iran will reward this "axis of evil'' member for years of supporting terrorism and pursuing nuclear weapons. In fact, an American presence in Iran is the mullahs' worst nightmare.

Iran's government has long used its ongoing tensions with the United States, as well as the embargo, as an excuse for the economic difficulties that are, in fact, the direct results of the regime's incompetence and corruption. Tehran's leaders have conveniently labeled nearly all of their opponents as "agents of America.''

Most important, part of the regime's self-declared legitimacy lies in its claim to be the only Muslim country fighting what it sees as U.S. imperialism. If the United States could prove it's not an enemy of the Iranian people, the legitimacy of Iran's leaders would diminish.

Reagan's course

In the first years of his presidency, Ronald Reagan labeled the Soviet Union the "evil empire'' and went out of his way to avoid contact with such a regime.

Over time, however, Reagan charted a new course of dual-track diplomacy. He engaged Kremlin leaders (well before Gorbachev) in arms control, while also fostering contacts and information flow between the West and the Soviet people in the hope of opening them up to the possibilities of democracy.

In the long run, it was not arms control with the Soviets, but democratization within the Soviet Union, that made the United States safer.

If George W. Bush desires a foreign-policy legacy as grand as Reagan's, now is the time to think big and change course as dramatically as Reagan did.