The U.S. visit this week by South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun offers yet another opportunity to bemoan the crisis of confidence in our alliance. Anti-American views, particularly among the young, remain widespread in South Korea. On an official level, there are strains over the role of U.S. troops based in Korea and a stark divergence in approaches toward North Korea.

This portrait of a troubled alliance is often contrasted with a supposed golden age in U.S.-Korean relations during the Cold War. But that view obscures a history of sharp disagreement between the two allies. It is a mythical past that stands in the way of repairing our alliance today. In reality, Korean nationalism and American strategic policy goals have often clashed. Differences over North Korea have arisen repeatedly. And anti-Americanism has been a feature of Korean life for decades.

This was true from the earliest postwar days, in a relationship born out of a fateful and poorly considered decision to divide Korea, after decades of Japanese colonial rule, into American and Soviet zones of occupation. Syngman Rhee, South Korea's first leader, was often at odds with his American backers. Washington feared Rhee would provoke a war with the communist North, even after the end of the Korean War.

Relations with Park Chung Hee, who came to power in a military coup in 1961, were even thornier. Park was a fierce Korean nationalist and, according to a close former aide, uncomfortable with Americans. The two countries collided over North Korea policy, economic goals, human rights and democracy.

In the 1970s, South Koreans developed deep doubts about the durability of the alliance, an uneasiness fed by the Vietnam debacle and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Korea. Park defied U.S. pressure in declaring martial law in 1972, junking the constitution and jailing leading opposition figures. He launched a secret campaign of influence-peddling and bribery of American congressmen to counter U.S. criticism of his policies.

While Park feared abandonment by the United States, North Korea's Kim Il Sung worried that China, after developing ties to Washington, might sell him out. Thus Park, even though he had been the victim of two assassination attempts by North Korea, reached out to Pyongyang. During high-level talks in 1972, there was a remarkable shared belief that the major powers were the obstacle to Korean reunification.

The most alarming sign of an alliance in crisis was Park's dangerous decision to develop nuclear weapons, made in secret in 1971 after Richard Nixon's withdrawal of one of the two American infantry divisions. According to my research, American officials became alarmed over the seriousness of this effort when a young CIA agent provided evidence of a crude design for a nuclear warhead.

In the spring of 1975, my father, the late ambassador Richard Sneider, sent a top-secret cable to Washington calling for an urgent review of the U.S.-South Korean alliance. Korea was "no longer a client state," he wrote, but was "well on its way to middle power status with ambitions for full self-reliance including its own nuclear potential."

Sneider recommended creation of a new partnership, one more akin to our alliances with NATO or Japan. He also pushed for quiet but tough diplomacy to dissuade Park from heading down the nuclear road. That campaign succeeded finally, but not before my father warned Park that the entire security alliance was jeopardized.

Park was assassinated in 1979 by his own intelligence chief, who claimed to have acted at American instigation. The charge was false, but it remains widely believed in Korea. The perilous state of our alliance reached a peak with the Kwangju uprising against military rule the following year, when hundreds of Koreans were killed by troops deployed with the alleged acquiescence of the United States.

Dispelling the myth of the previous golden era in U.S.-Korean relations does not mean that our relations lacked a foundation of shared interest or that the difficulties we face today are not serious. The gap over how to handle the threat from the North is certainly wider and more evident than in the past. And the democratization of South Korea makes our differences visible and harder to manage.

As policymakers from both countries meet this week, they need to take a deep breath and remember that our alliance survived tremendous stresses in the past. The task before us is not to focus on our divergence but to pick up the challenge left unmet 30 years ago -- to define the basis for a long-term relationship that is durable and reciprocal and that finally sheds the shackles of dependency.

Given Tehran's defiant response to the European and American effort to constrain its nuclear program, it is time for bolder diplomacy out of Washington. U.S. President George W. Bush should take a page from the playbook of Ronald Reagan, who negotiated with an evil Soviet regime--competing in the war of ideas, but addressing the enemy's security concerns through arms-control agreements.

Iran's intransigence is both deeply unfortunate and perfectly predictable. It is unfortunate because Tehran's refusal to suspend its uranium-enrichment operations immediately--as demanded in July by the U.N. Security Council in a legally binding resolution--suggests that Iran is moving more quickly than expected toward a nuclear-weapons capability. Tehran has now turned the nuclear crisis into a test of the whole U.N. Security Council system. And Russia and China's current position, threatening to veto any biting sanctions against Iran, suggests that the Security Council may well fail this crucial test.

Tehran's response is predictable, however, because the offer on the table contains both inadequate economic carrots and barely credible threats of sanctions and military force. The carrots appeared impressive at first glance--in return for a suspension of enrichment we reportedly promised to provide light-water nuclear reactors and to help Iran with civil aviation and telecommunications technology. But we did not offer the one incentive that might possibly work, security guarantees that could reduce Iran's desire for nuclear weapons.

This omission is striking. The Iranian government can't talk openly about their security concerns because that would blow their cover story that the nuclear program is only for energy production. And Washington does not want to discuss such worries because it wants to keep open the possibility of removing the regime by force. "Security assurances are not on the table," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice too cleverly argued this spring: "It is a little strange to talk about security guarantees ... I thought the Iranian position was that they weren't developing a nuclear bomb."

This is partly a crisis of our own making, as the Bush administration has practiced the reverse of Teddy Roosevelt's maxim--speaking loudly and carrying a small stick. Think about how Tehran reacted when Bush stated (in his second Inaugural Address), "The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: 'Those who deny freedoms to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it." Or when Bush dramatically told reporters last April that "all options are on the table," in direct response to a question about whether he was considering a nuclear attack against Iran. Such statements only encourage Iran to develop a nuclear deterrent quickly, before the United States can carry out its perceived aggressive intent. Last month, Iran's National Security Council Secretary Ali Larijani pointedly complained about such rhetoric. "How can a side that wants to topple the regime also attempt to negotiate?"

Given the current vulnerability of U.S. forces in Iraq, the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, and the lack of Israeli success against Hizbullah, Iranian officials seem confident that they face no immediate threat of a U.S. military assault. But they are clearly worried that Bush just might attack Iran right before he leaves office in January 2009, or that his successor might do so once U.S. forces withdraw from Iraq.

The best way to prevent a nuclear Iran is for Washington to offer the kind of security assurances that might reduce support in Tehran for building a nuclear arsenal. It will be hard to make such assurances credible, but a public U.S. promise to take forcible regime change off the table, and a U.N. Security Council commitment to protect the "political sovereignty" of Iran could help. Involving the Security Council could also pull China and Russia back into the nonproliferation coalition and enhance the U.N.'s legitimacy.

There is very little time left, which means negotiations should begin despite Iran's unfortunate opening position. Tehran's response reportedly indicated a willingness to negotiate all aspects of its nuclear program, so working out an agreement for Iran to limit itself to low-level uranium enrichment might still be possible. This would work only if Tehran accepts full IAEA inspections and a freeze on future centrifuge construction. Will they? The one thing that might cause Tehran to do so, and that would compensate for any loss of face, would be an assurance that the United States will not launch another preventive war, as it did in Iraq, to remove the Iranian regime. If in turn we get a nuclear-free Iran, that's a good deal for the West as well.

One day perhaps Marina Agaltsova will join the diplomatic corps at a foreign embassy, or help write policy positions for the Russian government. Coit Blacker hopes that the lessons from her Stanford-sponsored distance-learning course will stick.

Agaltsova was among a group of Russian students brought to the provincial city of Yaroslavl in late May for an academic conference that capped this year's five distance-learning courses offered at nine universities across Russia by the Initiative on Distance Learning at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

Through videotaped lectures, web readings and online chat sessions with senior research scholar Kathryn Stoner-Weiss and 14 other Stanford instructors, students in Democracy, Development and Rule of Law explored democratic ideals and practices, studying examples in Latin America, Asia and the former Soviet Union. "The course taught me that there is a black side to the reforms" that followed perestroika in Russia, Agaltsova says. "I learned more about Russian history [in the course] than I had learned in school."

That's the idea, says FSI director Blacker, who wants to re-establish the teaching of critical analysis, lost under decades of Communist rule, in Russian universities. "The social sciences were disemboweled," he says. He wants to develop future generations of diplomats and policy makers whose worldview is shaped "by how they think, not what they're told to think."

This year, to cap off the courses, 40 students came to Yaroslavl to participate in a mock United Nations Security Council session addressing Iran's nuclear program. They traveled from the farthest reaches of the Russian hinterlands, like Amur State University in Blagoveschensk, 4,800 miles from Moscow.

The arms control simulation is a teaching tool developed for the Stanford undergraduate class International Security in a Changing World, taught by Blacker and Scott Sagan, a political science professor and director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation within FSI. Sagan has exported the simulation to several universities in the United States where his former graduate students now teach--UC-Berkeley, Dartmouth, Columbia, Duke--but this was the first one he has conducted overseas.

This year's scenario was the International Atomic Energy Agency's referral of Iran to the U.N. Security Council for failure to fully disclose its nuclear activities. During the simulation, students submitted proposals to their heads of state, played by Blacker, Sagan and Russian faculty members. By the end of the two-day session, delegates had overcome seemingly intractable differences during four intensive sessions led by Stanford third-year law student Matthew Rojansky, acting as U.N. undersecretary-general for legal affairs. The council's resolution gave Iran three months to comply with the IAEA's requests and provided for Iran to obtain nuclear fuel from Russia, with the production and waste disposal to occur on Russian soil under IAEA controls.

After the session closed, students set aside their delegate roles to reflect on what they had learned. Narina Tadevosian, a student from Yakutsk State in far eastern Siberia, said she was surprised at "how strict Russia was" in taking a leading role in the session.

"If only it were so in real life," she added.

BEIJING - A message from President Bush to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il will be delivered Monday in Pyongyang -- via two Chinese officials. Beijing now meets quarterly with Mr. Kim, the most contact the unpredictable North has with any outside party. Whether Vice Foreign Minister Wu Dawei and Vice Premier Hui Liangyu will surprise Kim Jong Il and exert real pressure is unclear.

With an international diplomatic effort under way a week after North Korea tested seven missiles, China has proposed informal six-party talks as a way to move the process along.

That is less than the US hoped for from China. But since China insists that it will veto any UN sanctions against the North, the US will accept such talks, according to envoy Christopher Hill.

All told, Beijing would appear key to shaping how the world deals with the defiant Kim. Yet from the moment Kim launched his missiles, China has denied it has clout; it politely insists that the US has the central role.

Since 2003, China has embarked on a historic effort to prop up and aid North Korea -- a state it had the frostiest relations with for more a decade. Now, $2 billion in aid gives Beijing unprecedented access -- something China is reluctant to squander, to "mix aid and diplomacy," as a Chinese scholar here puts it.

"China's influence on North Korea is more than it is willing to admit, but far less than outsiders tend to believe," says a recent report by the Seoul branch of the International Crisis Group.

To outsiders, it appears that a rising China -- running a lifeline of energy and food to its poor comrade - ought to have clout in Korea, as it holds more carrots and sticks than anyone. It seems axiomatic that Beijing can simply apply ancient Chinese wisdom and modern Chinese might to stop Kim's nuclear ambition. Both states are communist, wear green and red uniforms, fought the US together, and share borders and history. China is the only country with easy access, as well as trade and tourism, to the North.

"China does have leverage, but it is afraid it may overplay its hand," says Joseph Cheng, head of the political science department at City University in Hong Kong.

Since Kim Jong Il's July 4 missile shots, voices from Sandy Berger, President Clinton's security adviser, to John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN, have argued that "China is the key" to dealing with North Korean belligerence. It has become nearly a mantra in Washington. Twelve months ago, it was an article of faith in senior White House circles, misplaced or not, that China would deliver a deal with Kim to dismantle his nuclear program. Yet this did not happen.

Instead, with the US preoccupied in Iraq, China embarked on a quiet policy of self-interest: to strengthen North Korea. That policy helps to maintain the North as a "buffer state" between China and South Korea.

China does not want the North to collapse, and for US troops to fill the vacuum and appear on its northeast border. China has hosted Kim, and moved relations away from a bad patch in the 1990s, during the North's epic famine, when China asked for cash payments for food instead of barter.

In the past two years, Chinese officials have told Kim that he can reform his state along socialist lines just as China did. China has indicated it will help with economic aid, while he retains complete political control. To now castigate Kim could wreck that formula, sources say.

In the larger sense, Kim's launch of missiles, most of which could hit long-time nemesis Japan or US bases in East Asia, puts China in the position of choosing between its North Korean comrade and an evolving consensus in the international community. So far, China has tried to please both sides.

"I'm concerned that China isn't recognizing how serious this issue is," says Zhang Liangui, head of foreign studies at the Central Party School in Beijing, in a rare dissent. "China is taking a rigid position. Yet we have long said that if China wants to be viewed as a responsible superpower, it must not be isolated in the international community."

Adding to Beijing's problems is an unresolved ideological struggle in China -- where "neo-orthodox" hard-liners who maintain contact with North Korea want China to support its revolutionary posture. There is also genuine puzzlement in Beijing over how to deal with Kim, whose founder-father, Kim Il Sung, reputedly warned him many times that China would attempt to take over his regime one day.

"I hear often that China is the key, which involves a set of policy steps Beijing can take that will bring about the outcome the allies want," says Russell Leigh Moses of People's University. "But I have yet to see anyone show how if China does X, Pyongyang will do Y."

The White House seems to have abandoned its 2003 optimism that China will harness Kim. China may agree that a nuclear peninsula and a regime that test-fires rockets is not desirable. But it isn't clear on how to force Kim to open his highly controlled state and allow international inspectors to flood in, witness his system of gulags, and bring in potentially subversive material -- all to dismantle a nuclear program he's cherished for decades. The White House seems to understand this.

Scott Snyder of Stanford University argues the US is using the same strategy that it used with China in closing down Kim's accounts in Macau. China was forced to choose between the international regulatory authority, or North Korean money-laundering behavior.

Sunday, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns argued on FOX News Sunday that "It's time for China to exert its influence that it does have on North Korea." Also on Sunday programs, US and Japanese officials claimed they might have the votes to support a Japan-backed resolution for sanctions against the North.

Japanese politics have long been driven by patronage and pork. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has managed to add personality to the mix. Issues, when they mattered at all, were deeply domestic -- the last election, for example, focused on deregulation of the postal savings system.

So it is a bit of a shock to find Japan embroiled in a political struggle with foreign policy topping the agenda. The contest to succeed Koizumi has become a surrogate battleground for a debate over how to repair Japan's tattered relations with its Asian neighbors, China and South Korea.

Put simply, this war of ideas has two schools -- Conservative Realists and Assertive Nationalists.

The Realists fear that Japan has become dangerously isolated from Asia, its influence waning to the benefit of China. Constant tensions with China and South Korea put Japans economic recovery at risk, they worry. The Realists blame Koizumi for his provocative visits to the Yasukuni shrine to Japan's war dead and worry he tilts too far in his embrace of Bush and his policies in places such as Iraq and Iran.

The Nationalists see China as the principal national security threat to Japan. Their priority is to strengthen the alliance with the U.S., even at the cost of ties to Asia. They believe it is crucial to stand up to what is seen as Chinese bullying, symbolized by Beijing demanding that the Yasukuni visits stop as a price for high-level contacts.

This debate harkens back to the Meiji era and Japan's emergence as a great power. But the tortured history that ensued has left a clear legacy -- both camps accept the U.S. alliance as the foundation of Japanese security. The issue now is one of balance and relative independence in the formation of Japanese policy.

Each camp has a champion in the unofficial campaign for the September vote to replace Koizumi as president of the conservative Liberal Democratic Party -- a post that carries with it the premiership. Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the frontrunner and Koizumi's preferred successor, represents the Nationalists. Yasuo Fukuda, who served as chief cabinet secretary for four years, until 2005, carries the Realist flag into battle.

Abe and Fukuda are cast from almost identical molds. Both are veteran politicians, scions of famous political families, even members of the same faction within the party. Yet they offer remarkably contrasting positions on Japan's diplomatic path in Asia and, less visibly, on how to manage relations with the U.S.

Abe, at age 51, is considered a representative of the younger generation. Like Koizumi, he has personal appeal, at ease on television and able to speak directly and emotively. Abe is the son of a former foreign minister and grandson of former Premier Nobusuke Kishi, a towering figure in post-war conservative politics.

Fukuda, who turns 70 in July, is an old-style Japanese politician, more comfortable working behind closed doors than in front of the TV cameras. "Fukuda is cool, rational, calculating, practical, nonideological and noncommunicative," comments William Breer, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Japan. Fukuda, too, is the son of a major conservative leader, former Premier Takeo Fukuda.

Abe is the front-runner, scoring well in polls and among party members. But Fukuda's star has risen in recent months, tied largely to the rise of tensions with China.

"Fukuda looks more mature, serious and experienced," says Breer. "People want better relations with China, though not at any cost. Fukuda can probably deliver that. Abe may not."

The starkest gap between the two men is over Yasukuni. Fukuda led an effort five years ago to create a secular memorial that would allow a prime minister to honor the war dead while avoiding the issue of the 14 Class A war criminals enshrined at Yasukuni and the unabashed lack of remorse over the war displayed at the shrine's museum.

Fukuda decried the defiant rhetoric in Japan surrounding the shrine, which has become a symbol of defying Chinese pressure. "Discussions in Japan have escalated too far," he said in a speech in late May. "Voices raised here reach China and South Korea, creating a vicious cycle."

Abe, like Koizumi, sees China's interference on Yasukuni as the problem.

"China's diplomacy is high-handed," Abe said recently. "If we permit China to engage in such diplomacy, China will also take a similar attitude on other issues."

But recently Abe pointedly avoided directly answering the question of whether he would continue the shrine visits. That has led some to speculate that Abe may want to find a way out of this cul-de-sac.

The Japanese public, according to recent polls, is evenly divided on the question of whether the next prime minister should visit Yasukuni. They overwhelmingly support the goal of improving relations with Japan's Asian neighbors, but a majority is also sympathetic to Abe's stance against Chinese pressure on Yasukuni.

Beyond Yasukuni, the two men offer contrasting visions of Japan's relationship to Asia and response to growing regional integration.

Fukuda points to the example of the "Fukuda Doctrine," a 1977 initiative by his father that responded to rising anti-Japanese sentiment by declaring that Japan would not become a military power and would try to build relations in the region as an equal partner.

In a series of recent speeches, Fukuda advocated integration of the region through an economic partnership agreement and called on Japan, China, and South Korea to cooperate toward this end. He visited South Korea in March along with former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and met with the South Korean president.

Abe, in contrast, echoes the Bush administration in calling for a strategic dialogue with India, Australia, and other democracies in Asia, as well as the U.S., unifying on the basis of common values -- widely interpreted as a thinly disguised attempt to counter China's rise.

They differ on other issues. Abe is a hardliner on North Korea, while Fukuda has pushed for negotiations. Abe puts revision of Japan'a antiwar constitution at the top of his priority list. Fukuda warns about hasty steps that would alarm Japan's neighbors.

When it comes to managing the U.S. alliance, the choice is subtle. Both have strong ties to the Bush administration. Fukuda played a key role in forging the Japanese rapid response to the September 11 attacks, including the decision to send ships to support the war in Afghanistan. Both supported the dispatch of peacekeeping troops to Iraq.

"Fukuda, however, might be a little more honest in evaluating U.S. foreign policies," suggests Breer. "He might not be as pliable as Koizumi."

Abe remains the favorite to win, particularly among LDP members. But Fukuda's fortunes may have been aided by the emergence of Ichiro Ozawa as leader of the main opposition party. Ozawa, a remarkable political operator and former LDP leader, believes in issue-based politics. He visited China this week and met with Hu Jintao, which suits his clear Realist agenda.

Other events could shape the fight. Koizumi has signaled his desire to visit Yasukuni on August 15, the anniversary of Japan'a surrender. Some analysts suggest that could strengthen Fukuda's appeal. Alternately, the North Korean test missile launches could consolidate Abe's bid for power.

Whatever the outcome, this succession fight will likely mark a turning point for Japan. It could slow -- or perhaps accelerate -- the slippage toward Sino-Japanese tensions. And it will mark the re-emergence of a Japan that looks outward. It is time for the rest of the world to pay attention to Japanese politics.

North Korean technicians are reportedly in the final stages of fueling a long-range ballistic missile that some experts estimate can deliver a deadly payload to the United States. The last time North Korea tested such a missile, in 1998, it sent a shock wave around the world, but especially to the United States and Japan, both of which North Korea regards as archenemies. They recognized immediately that a missile of this type makes no sense as a weapon unless it is intended for delivery of a nuclear warhead.

A year later North Korea agreed to a moratorium on further launches, which it upheld -- until now. But there is a critical difference between now and 1998. Today North Korea openly boasts of its nuclear deterrent, has obtained six to eight bombs' worth of plutonium since 2003 and is plunging ahead to make more in its Yongbyon reactor. The six-party talks aimed at containing North Korea's weapons of mass destruction have collapsed.

Should the United States allow a country openly hostile to it and armed with nuclear weapons to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons to U.S. soil? We believe not. The Bush administration has unwisely ballyhooed the doctrine of "preemption," which all previous presidents have sustained as an option rather than a dogma. It has applied the doctrine to Iraq, where the intelligence pointed to a threat from weapons of mass destruction that was much smaller than the risk North Korea poses. (The actual threat from Saddam Hussein was, we now know, even smaller than believed at the time of the invasion.) But intervening before mortal threats to U.S. security can develop is surely a prudent policy.

Therefore, if North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy the North Korean Taepodong missile before it can be launched. This could be accomplished, for example, by a cruise missile launched from a submarine carrying a high-explosive warhead. The blast would be similar to the one that killed terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. But the effect on the Taepodong would be devastating. The multi-story, thin-skinned missile filled with high-energy fuel is itself explosive -- the U.S. airstrike would puncture the missile and probably cause it to explode. The carefully engineered test bed for North Korea's nascent nuclear missile force would be destroyed, and its attempt to retrogress to Cold War threats thwarted. There would be no damage to North Korea outside the immediate vicinity of the missile gantry.

The U.S. military has announced that it has placed some of the new missile defense interceptors deployed in Alaska and California on alert. In theory, the antiballistic missile system might succeed in smashing into the Taepodong payload as it hurtled through space after the missile booster burned out. But waiting until North Korea's ICBM is launched to interdict it is risky. First, by the time the payload was intercepted, North Korean engineers would already have obtained much of the precious flight test data they are seeking, which they could use to make a whole arsenal of missiles, hiding and protecting them from more U.S. strikes in the maze of tunnels they have dug throughout their mountainous country. Second, the U.S. defensive interceptor could reach the target only if it was flying on a test trajectory that took it into the range of the U.S. defense. Third, the U.S. system is unproven against North Korean missiles and has had an uneven record in its flight tests. A failed attempt at interception could undermine whatever deterrent value our missile defense may have.

We should not conceal our determination to strike the Taepodong if North Korea refuses to drain the fuel out and take it back to the warehouse. When they learn of it, our South Korean allies will surely not support this ultimatum -- indeed they will vigorously oppose it. The United States should accordingly make clear to the North that the South will play no role in the attack, which can be carried out entirely with U.S. forces and without use of South Korean territory. South Korea has worked hard to counter North Korea's 50-year menacing of its own country, through both military defense and negotiations, and the United States has stood with the South throughout. South Koreans should understand that U.S. territory is now also being threatened, and we must respond. Japan is likely to welcome the action but will also not lend open support or assistance. China and Russia will be shocked that North Korea's recklessness and the failure of the six-party talks have brought things to such a pass, but they will not defend North Korea.

In addition to warning our allies and partners of our determination to take out the Taepodong before it can be launched, we should warn the North Koreans. There is nothing they could do with such warning to defend the bulky, vulnerable missile on its launch pad, but they could evacuate personnel who might otherwise be harmed. The United States should emphasize that the strike, if mounted, would not be an attack on the entire country, or even its military, but only on the missile that North Korea pledged not to launch -- one designed to carry nuclear weapons. We should sharply warn North Korea against further escalation.

North Korea could respond to U.S. resolve by taking the drastic step of threatening all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. But it is unlikely to act on that threat. Why attack South Korea, which has been working to improve North-South relations (sometimes at odds with the United States) and which was openly opposing the U.S. action? An invasion of South Korea would bring about the certain end of Kim Jong Il's regime within a few bloody weeks of war, as surely he knows. Though war is unlikely, it would be prudent for the United States to enhance deterrence by introducing U.S. air and naval forces into the region at the same time it made its threat to strike the Taepodong. If North Korea opted for such a suicidal course, these extra forces would make its defeat swifter and less costly in lives -- American, South Korean and North Korean.

This is a hard measure for President Bush to take. It undoubtedly carries risk. But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea's race to threaten this country would be greater. Creative diplomacy might have avoided the need to choose between these two unattractive alternatives. Indeed, in earlier years the two of us were directly involved in negotiations with North Korea, coupled with military planning, to prevent just such an outcome. We believe diplomacy might have precluded the current situation. But diplomacy has failed, and we cannot sit by and let this deadly threat mature. A successful Taepodong launch, unopposed by the United States, its intended victim, would only embolden North Korea even further. The result would be more nuclear warheads atop more and more missiles.

Ashton B. Carter was assistant secretary of defense under President Bill Clinton and William J. Perry was secretary of defense. The writers, who conducted the North Korea policy review while in government, are now professors at Harvard and Stanford, respectively.

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."

Iran has climbed to No. 1 on the Washington crisis hit parade. The question of how to stop Iran's nuclear program has unleashed a torrent of punditry. Advocates of diplomacy and a military strike spar on television and in op-ed pages.

Iran's nuclear ambitions deserve our attention. But even by the most alarmist estimates, Iran is years away from being able to build a nuclear warhead.

Meanwhile, over in Northeast Asia, North Korea now has enough fissile material for five to seven weapons and is quietly churning out enough plutonium to build at least one warhead a year, according to rough intelligence estimates. More ominously, work is moving ahead on a new reactor that could potentially produce enough separated plutonium for up to 10 weapons a year.

Somehow this danger prompts no sense of urgency in Washington. After a promising breakthrough last September, the six-party talks to halt the program have lapsed into a stalemate that is close to total collapse.

The Bush administration seems unconcerned. Diplomacy has ground to a halt. The North Koreans refuse to return to the six-party talks. The White House has barred its chief negotiator from talking directly with them, despite Pyongyang's desire to meet and the urging of our six-party partners.

Administration officials have recently floated a report that they are considering a new initiative to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea. This is a smoke-screen to conceal an empty North Korea policy. According to administration officials, the peace treaty idea has been kicking around for months without going anywhere. South Korean officials tell me that they have been waiting, so far in vain, for any serious detailed discussion of this proposal.

It is the president himself who opposes direct negotiations with Pyongyang, over anything, including a peace treaty. He sees direct talks with North Korea or Iran as an act of weakness. "Somehow,'' he said last month, "the world ends up turning the tables on us.''

In reality, the administration is content to pursue a strategy of going after North Korean counterfeit currency and production of amphetamines and cigarettes, hoping to cut off the flow of funds from these activities. According to administration officials, Under Secretary of State Robert Joseph, the driving force behind this policy, gleefully talks about ``turning out the lights'' in Pyongyang.

Administration officials claim they are drying up slush funds that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il uses to buy the loyalty of his subordinates. Some even suggest this could trigger a coup against Kim, with the Chinese pulling the strings.

But American intelligence experts who monitor North Korea closely see little evidence to support the conclusion that North Korea is being brought to its knees. Even if the measures are drawing blood, it is self-delusional to believe that this will bring down a regime that has already proven it is willing to starve its own population to stay in power.

The administration seems intent as well on pressing China and South Korea to curb their trade and investment with the North. The administration's special envoy on human rights in North Korea, Jay Lefkowitz, seems to spend most of his time attacking the South for setting up an industrial park in Kaesong in the North. He portrays it as exploiting slave labor. The South Koreans defend it as a vehicle to bring capitalism into the communist North.

The Bush administration's combination of attempted coercion and diplomatic freeze has only two visible effects so far.

First, it lends credence to North Korean claims that the United States, contrary to the joint statement issued last September, is still intent on overthrowing their regime.

Second, it undermines gains made by allowing chief envoy Christopher Hill to hold direct talks with his North Korean counterparts. That demonstrated a flexibility and confidence that disarmed critics, particularly in South Korea, and isolated the North. It strengthened coordination with China and South Korea, the two players with the most leverage over the North.

Now officials in both those capitals again question American readiness to seriously negotiate. Beijing and Seoul are even more convinced that pushing market reforms is the only route to bring the North to give up its nuclear option. Next month former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung will revisit his historic summit with the North Korean leader in 2000.

This growing gap with our allies and partners is deadly. Even if we wanted to opt for coercion, the United States can't do so alone. For that reason, it is urgent that the United States regains the diplomatic upper hand.