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.

The Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center is happy to announce that Daniel Sneider has accepted the position of associate director for research. For the past year (2005-06), he has been a Pantech Fellow at the Center and involved in many Center projects and events.

Sneider has had a long career as a foreign correspondent and worked most recently as the foreign affairs columnist of the San Jose Mercury News. His column on foreign affairs, looking at international issues and national security from a West Coast perspective, is syndicated nationally on the Knight Ridder Tribune wire service, reaching about 400 newspapers in North America. He previously served as national/foreign editor of the San Jose Mercury News.

From 1990-94, Sneider was the Moscow bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, covering the end of Soviet Communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From 1985-90, he was Tokyo correspondent for the Monitor, covering Japan and Korea. He has worked in India covering South and Southeast Asia, covered the United Nations, and extensively covered defense and national security affairs.

Sneider's responsibilities as associate director for research will fall into two main categories: research management and program development. He will work closely with the Center's director and faculty to design and manage research projects. With the Center director, he will represent the Center in its interactions within the Freeman Spogli Institute and the University, and will serve as a liaison with specialists from the fields of academia, policy, and business. Sneider will also oversee the publication of Center research findings. He will also provide substantive support for the varied lecture and seminar series the Center hosts each year.

"He joins us at a critical time," says Center director, Gi-Wook Shin, "and I have no doubt that his contribution will give a tremendous boost to our research projects, particularly those that are policy-oriented."

Sneider will also be conducting his own research, which includes finishing his book on Cold War diplomatic history of the United States' alliances with Japan and Korea, and continue to write commentary on current policy issues in the Asia-Pacific region and on U.S. foreign policy.

Sneider will start in this position on July 1, after he has completed his Pantech Fellowship responsibilities.

The nuclear regime in place since the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) took effect in 1970 is broken and needs to be fixed, the world's highest-ranking nuclear official told a half-full Memorial Auditorium in a wide-ranging lecture about the future of nuclear energy and weapons yesterday afternoon.

"We have a dysfunctional system -- system that cannot endure," said Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "We're reaching the fork in the road. Events in the last few years have made it clear that we need to change course."

The big news from ElBaradei's speech was his support for American entreaties to Iran. But the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize recipient also commented on North Korea, India, Pakistan, Iraq, terrorism, disarmament and the future of nuclear energy.

He said there are probably eight current nuclear states, excluding North Korea. He worried aloud that countries which can currently produce nuclear energy peacefully are only six months away from developing nuclear weapons for military purposes.

"Acquiring the technology to enrich uranium or reprocess uranium basically is the key to develop nuclear weapons as we have seen in Asia and Iran," he said. "They are virtually weapons states because in six months time if they decide for security reasons to develop their own weapon, they are there."

Iraq

While not a household name, ElBaradei was a prominent figure in the news as the lead weapons inspector in Iraq during the run-up to the 2003 American invasion. He said at the time that he could not find evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but he would not conclude that there were no weapons in the country or that Saddam Hussein did not have a program.

ElBaradei asked for more time to complete inspections, but the Bush administration declined his request and decided to invade. The U.S. never found the nuclear and biological material that some had promised existed.

"Luckily...well I'm not sure luckily...we were proven right that there was no nuclear or any weapon of mass destruction in Iraq," he said. "But I hope that all of us have learned from the Iraq experience that we cannot just jump the gun. You have to be absolutely sure of the facts."

India

ElBaradei surprised observers when he supported the U.S. agreement with India earlier this year, which allowed the country to continue developing nuclear weapons and energy. He said the agreement with India did not endorse its proliferation activities but was indicative of the kind of outside-the-box thinking the international community needs when considering the spread of nuclear weapons and material.

"The end result is India coming closer and working with the rest of the world," he said. "It is not a perfect agreement, but it has a lot of advantages. From the safety, security and nonproliferation perspective, I see that agreement as a win-win situation."

Pakistan

Pakistan developed nuclear weapons as a response to India. Some have criticized Pakistan for its poor stewardship and control of the bomb, pointing out that weapons were almost fired during a skirmish over the disputed Kashmir region.

AQ Kahn, a senior nuclear scientist who helped Pakistan join the exclusive nuclear club, was caught selling compact discs and other information about bombs to several other countries.

"How much damage was done in the process we don't know," ElBaradei said.

The release of this nuclear material demonstrates the need for a "more robust verification system," he said, adding that Pakistan has come closer to the international community in recent years.

North Korea

Kim Jong Il expelled all IAEA inspectors in Dec. 2002, withdrew from the NPT in Jan. 2003 and announced in February 2005 that his military had a nuclear deterrent.

"North Korea is still a major problem," ElBaradei said. "We don't talk about it enough, but North Korea is declaring right now that they have a nuclear weapon. And the longer that they continue to be in that status, the more it is accepted in the collective conscious. This would be terrible because it will have a lot of negative ramifications in South Korea and Japan."

ElBaradei said ongoing negotiations are an important development but more needs to be done.

"What we see with the current six-party talks should have taken place years ago," he said.

Nuclear Proliferation

ElBaradei stressed that he understands the value of nuclear power, which produces much of the developed world's energy. Reducing its use would create more dependence on greenhouse gas-creating fossil fuels, he said.

"We need to use nuclear energy responsibly to maximize benefit and minimize risk," he said.

He said his "number one nightmare scenario" is a terrorist group acquiring nuclear technology since terrorists are not deterred by the possibility of reprisal.

In the post-Cold War world, ElBaradei said he could see no justification for the U.S. and Russia to maintain their nuclear arsenals on ready alert to fire with thirty minutes notice. He called on America to lead by example and continue to disarm its nuclear stockpile.

"Rather than pass judgment, I'd definitely like to say the U.S. should do more in leading by example in terms of nuclear disarmament," he said.

In September 2005, ElBaradei was reappointed to a third term as director general of IAEA. The United States had considered holding up his nomination but dropped its objections under pressure from European allies, who admire the former law professor from New York University.

Diplomat to the Core

The Egyptian native's sometimes broken English was interspersed with self-corrections and careful legalese nuance. ElBaradei answered questions posed by Political Science Prof. Scott Sagan, the director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

When Sagan made bold pronouncements about different country's nuclear activities, including the United States' "colossal failure" when North Korea violated the NPT, ElBaradei seemed careful not to point fingers, play the blame game or make enemies. Nonetheless, for a senior United Nations official, his speech was notably blunt.

"There's no international public servant whose integrity and work I admire more than yours," Sagan told ElBaradei.

Accompanied by his wife, ElBaradei spent the day at the University visiting with faculty and students. He spoke at a lunch sponsored by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and traveled to Sagan's home for a dinner with invited guests. He left the area at 8:30 p.m.

Does the conflict in Iraq amount to a civil war? In many ways, the public debate over this question is largely political. Calling Iraq a "civil war" implies yet another failure for the Bush administration and adds force to the question of whether U.S. troops still have a constructive role to play.

Politics aside, however, the definition of civil war is not arbitrary. For some -- and perhaps especially Americans -- the term brings to mind all-out historical conflicts along the lines of the U.S. or Spanish civil wars. According to this notion, there will not be civil war in Iraq until we see mass mobilization of sectarian communities behind more or less conventional armies.

But a more standard definition is common today:

1) Civil war refers to a violent conflict between organized groups within a country that are fighting over control of the government, one side's separatist goals, or some divisive government policy.

By this measure, the war in Iraq has been a civil war not simply since the escalation of internecine killings following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, but at least since the United States handed over formal control to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.

Here's why: Although the insurgents target the U.S. military, they are also fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to believe that if the United States were suddenly to withdraw its forces, they would not continue their battle to control or shape the government.

Political scientists who study civil war have proposed various refinements to this rough definition to deal with borderline cases. One issue concerns how much killing has to occur -- and at what rate.

2) For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.

Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).

The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.

This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.

And there's another twist to the terminology:

3) If the conflict in Iraq becomes purely a matter of violence between Sunni and Shiite communities driven by revenge and hatred rather than by political goals, many political scientists would say that it is something other than civil war.

Almost no one, for example, calls the Hindu-Muslim violence in India a civil war.

A civil war has to involve attempts to grab power at the center of government or in a given region, or to use violence to change some major government policy.

In Iraq's case, however, the vacuum of power at the center means that communal violence will inevitably be tied to struggles for political power and control.

A final complication concerns the nature of international involvement. Some argue, for example, that the war in Bosnia should be seen as an interstate war rather than a civil war, since the Bosnian Serb forces were armed and directed largely by Belgrade. Post-Mobutu violence in Congo is often termed a civil war, even though fighters have been closely tied to armies from neighboring states.

4) A conflict may be both a civil and an interstate war at the same time.

The Vietnam War, for instance, clearly comprised both a civil war in the South and an interstate war involving the North, the South and the United States.

Iraq may be moving in this direction. The United States and Britain are already openly involved, and such neighboring countries as Iran and Syria are more covertly involved. Not that it matters to the people dying there, but the next debate here may turn on whether what is already a civil war in Iraq should be viewed as an interstate war as well.

A recent report from Duke University that critiques the supposed gap between the number of American science and engineering (S&E) graduates and those of merging economies -- especially China's -- has led to false reassurance that the U.S. lead in science and technology is not under threat from China. It would be a grave mistake to drop our concerns about China's competitive challenge.

First, the Duke report simply claimed that China's true number of science and engineering bachelor degrees was 351,000, rather than the widely reported 600,000. Coupling this with an upward adjustment for American graduates still left China producing 214,000 more such degrees than the United States.

Moreover, undergraduates are only part of the concern. China's production of those with doctorates has increased rapidly. By 2003, China's homegrown science and engineering doctorates numbered almost half of the U.S. total.

Chinese were also earning large numbers of doctorates abroad. In 2001, the number of Chinese S&E doctorates earned in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States equaled 72 percent of the total of S&E doctorates earned by American citizens and permanent residents.

Since 1975, China has increased its global share of S&E doctorates from zero (courtesy of the Cultural Revolution) to 11 percent, not counting doctorates earned overseas. During the same three decades, the U.S. global share has fallen from half to roughly 22 percent.

More worrisome than the aggregate numbers is American universities' reliance on foreigners who earn doctorates. In engineering, foreigners account for over half of America's doctorates, and in computer science just under half.

If foreign-born holders of doctorates continued to stay in the United States, we wouldn't have to worry. Unfortunately, there are many signs that it is becoming much harder to retain them.

One need only look at the flow from Taiwan, one of the former main sources of American S&E doctoral degrees, to see what could happen. Up until 1994, Taiwanese earned more science and engineering doctorates in the United States than members of any other foreign nationality. By 2000, their numbers had plummeted because economic and educational opportunities at home were more appealing.

The Taiwanese didn't just stop coming to America. They also began to leave. As Taiwan's tech sector boomed in the 1990s, huge numbers of Taiwanese technologists (estimates range as high as 100,000) left America for home and took their technical skills with them.

Our two current biggest foreign sources of technologists, China and India, appear to be following Taiwan's path. China has begun to lure back large numbers of technologists. China's central and local governments offer free office space and other benefits to attract technologists home. These inducements are working. A 2005 survey of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professionals Association's members showed that the vast majority regard China as the most likely future work destination, and they rated Shanghai higher than even Silicon Valley on career potential. India's recruitment efforts have also started to bear fruit.

The challenge is not simply keeping up the numbers of technologists in America. China by many measures has improved its technological capabilities. On the Georgia Institute of Technology's Index of Technological Capability, China has more than doubled its index score over the past decade. China now ranks fourth behind the United States, Japan and Germany.

This rapid ascent is not surprising given China's increasing investments. China's research and development spending as a percentage of gross domestic product has tripled to 1.3 percent in the last decade, even while its GDP has ballooned. Few emerging economies spend even 1 percent of their GDP on research.

U.S. patents invented in China are also on the rise. Information-technology patents from corporations' Chinese technologists have risen from 134 in 1997-2001 to 482 during 2002-04. As a first step to meet this challenge, we should increase federal spending on basic and exploratory research. Our R&D spending has been flat at 2.6 percent of GDP for four decades, but the share of federal spending has declined from two-thirds to one-quarter.

Given that corporations now de-emphasize basic scientific research, the federal government should further support the basic research that could maintain our lead at the cutting edge of technology.

Increased federal funding would also address the issue of the falling share of investment in certain disciplines. With spending flat, the rising share commanded by biomedicine has meant a falling share spent on engineering and physics.

Federal support may also play a direct role in increasing interest in pursuing a science education. Since the 1950s, the number of undergraduate S&E majors in America has risen and fallen in line with federal research funding, as Professor Henry Rowen of Stanford University has pointed out.

Before meeting China's challenge, we first must recognize it. Complacency in reaction to "good'' news that China is producing fewer S&E graduates than commonly thought is not the answer.

Analysis of the Indian-U.S. nuclear agreement, as well as substituting natural gas for coal in fueling the Chinese electricity sector, reveals that side agreements between developed and developing countries could result in massive greenhouse gas emission reductions.