A senior administration official said to me last Saturday that if the North Koreans end their current policy of blackmail and escalation, "we could be on a completely different road to more normal relations between the North and the United States." The official noted that last spring and summer, North Korea was seeking entry into the international community. Kim Jong Il met with the leaders of Russia and Japan. His foreign minister met with Colin Powell. For its part, the Bush administration had agreed to describe to the North Koreans "the alternate path" that the two countries could go down. In fact, even at Assistant Secretary of State James Kelley's meeting with North Korean officials in October, when he confronted them with evidence of their enriched-uranium program, Kelley sketched out that alternate scenario. "All this has been derailed by the North's recent behavior," said the official.

Of course, American behavior was part of the problem. At the very time that the administration was apparently moving toward dialogue, the president was telling Bob Woodward that he was happy to topple the North Korean regime. The administration's careless "Axis of Evil" rhetoric over two years spooked the North Koreans--who cheat and blackmail as a way of life--into thinking that the assurances of nonaggression they got from Clinton were dead. "Our problem with the Clinton framework was that it froze rather than disbanded North Korea's nuclear capacity," the senior official said. "That left the North with the ability to threaten to restart the program, to blackmail. And we have seen that the North Koreans do this time and again. We're not going to go down that road again. But if it would forswear its nuclear program altogether, we would be in a completely different place with North Korea. There is no division in the administration on this; it was approved policy last spring."

While the administration is willing to use some carrots in the long term, "right now we cannot give in to blackmail," said the official. Thus the administration's short-term strategy is all sticks. Threaten North Korea with sanctions and press our allies to threaten it as well. These threats are important and worth wielding. In fact, we unwisely took the possibility of a limited military strike on North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor off the table. But let's face it, we have precious few threats that are credible. We cannot go to war against North Korea, because South Korea would be devastated in the process. (This reality, not Iraq, our military "weakness" or the North's crude nukes, is the real deterrent.) We cannot even press the regime hard because South Korea does not want to deal any time soon with the costs of a North Korean collapse. "We're constrained because South Korea has a very different attitude toward unification than West Germany did," said the official. And if we pursued a coercive policy, South Korea could very easily and quietly undermine it.

China, which has the greatest leverage over the North (providing the most aid to it), has so far been unwilling to do much. Beijing worries about a nuclear North but it worries more about a war or an implosion in Korea. A Chinese analyst told me that "China is much less worried about this crisis than the U.S. Indeed, Beijing's big worry is that the U.S. will overreact and intervene." If our hope is that China will solve this problem for us, we will be disappointed.

So far the Bush administration is being admirably multilateral in this crisis. It is trying to impress upon China, Japan, South Korea and Russia that a nuclear North Korea would not be in their interest. This is an intelligent approach and is the only long-term strategy that will work. In the even longer run, the North Korean regime cannot last. But for now we have to ensure that while alive, it does not cause a strategic meltdown in Asia.

The only short-term solution is to start talking to North Korea about the benefits of de-escalating and starting a new relationship. We want this regime to do something--or rather to stop doing something. Pressure might work, so might incentives. We have no option but to try both.

Besides, the administration is already giving North Korea the assurances it has been seeking. The White House now says twice daily that it has "no hostile intentions towards North Korea." This, after all, is what the North is seeking--a declaration of nonaggression. Why not write it down and get something in return? Sure, it will look as if the administration is rewarding the North for its bad behavior. But that's where diplomacy comes in. Perhaps we can call them sweet peas instead of carrots.