Not quite three years ago Robert Gates, then America's defence secretary, warned North Korea that he "was tired of buying the same horse twice". Like some seedy racketeer, the delinquents in Pyongyang had extorted a generous payment in exchange for talks about giving up their pursuit of nuclear weapons. But they had reneged on their promise, procured a bomb and were now expecting yet more rewards for returning to the table.
Over the years an exasperated world has tried inducements, threats and, latterly, "strategic patience"— a form of isolation. All the while the hermit kingdom has stumbled on, stockpiling uranium, and occasionally testing bombs and lobbing missiles into the Pacific Ocean.
Now comes news of a breakthrough. On February 29, North Korea and America announced that the North would suspend its enrichment of uranium at its plant in Yongbyon and impose a moratorium on tests of weapons and long-range missiles. Crucially, the North has agreed that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency will check that enrichment really has stopped.
In return America will ship at least 240,000 tonnes of food aid to feed North Korea's starving people, organise a few cultural exchanges, and work towards six-nation talks about a comprehensive settlement. Despite North Korea's record of caprice and outright deceit, this is a good deal for America. It could even turn out to be a great one.
Times are hard for the Kim dynasty. The famine that struck in the 1990s has never fully gone away. The ruling elite is scandalously indifferent to the suffering of ordinary North Koreans — generations at a time pass through the country's miserable gulags — but it is punctiliously conscious of its own dignity.
The longstanding promise that 2012, centenary of the birth of Kim Il-sung, the Stalinist who set up the North, would be an era of prosperity, dancing and mass celebration is an early test of his grandson, Kim Jong-un. Indeed, after taking power unexpectedly at the end of last year after the death of Kim Jong-il, it is a test that he must be desperate to pass. A few hundred thousand tonnes of extra food would come in handy.
Self-reliance
North Korea craves the American recognition such aid represents. It will have seen how Myanmar, Asia's other pariah, has come in from the cold and is beginning to win the favour of the outside world. Perhaps China has also been applying pressure. It has propped up the Kims, if only to protect the buffer state that separates it from the American troops garrisoned in South Korea.
But it has stressed that the North needs to follow the trail it blazed a little over 30 years ago when it set about reform. For that, the autarky or self-sufficiency enshrined in the North's guiding principle of Juche, or self-reliance, needs to make way for engagement with the outside world. That has meant getting the North out of its epic sulk.
Last week's deal has risks for America. It might yet fall apart, even at this early stage. The North probably has other enrichment plants apart from Yongbyon. It might string the world along, extort as much food and diplomatic capital as it can only to throw out the inspectors and test a bomb. Despite American safeguards, the "nutritional supplements" it has promised might go to the elites and the army or be sold abroad.
Yet America would probably be giving food to North Korea without this deal, as humanitarian relief. And even if the North eventually throws out the inspectors, they will still get their first glimpse of the North Korean programme since 2009. The fact is that North Korea already has a fistful of bombs. It has been pretty much unconstrained since it walked out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2003. If this deal slows the rate at which the North accumulates a nuclear arsenal, then it will have been worth something.
And there is a faint possibility that it will lead to much more than that. Kim Jong-un appears to want stable foreign relations as he consolidates power. But if he really does end up taking a different path from his father, then he will need vast amounts of foreign support. America is right to give him the chance.
The six-party talks on the nuclear programme could yet be the forum in which the outside world invests in North Korean power stations and infrastructure even as the North freezes its weapons programme — or even surrenders it.
Just now that is an enticing, if still distant, prospect for President Barack Obama. Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is to visit Washington this week to assert the need to resort to war to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. America's president will be keen to point out that diplomacy also has its part to play.
