Beijing has ruled out using the considerable leverage it has in food and fuel to pressure Pyongyang to end its nuclear threat. North Korea has announced it is taking steps to reprocess spent fuel. Other accounts report that U.S. intelligence fears Pyongyang is on the verge of testing a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration’s policy for dealing with Pyongyang has taken a hit and the international community is no closer to finding a way to deal with Kim Jong Il.

Jasper Becker’s new book, “Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea” Oxford University Press, 328 pages, $27), offers no new policy prescriptions, but his account of Pyongyang’s terrorism, gulag, nuclear program, and famine is a strong criticism of the failure of old ones. Mr. Becker, a reporter, is also the author of “The Chinese,” a personally observed account of a people among whom he has lived for more than a decade, and “Hungry Ghosts,” a history of the famine caused by Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

Neither type of book is possible for North Korea – yet. There is too little access and too little solid information. Instead, in “Rogue Regime” Mr. Becker synthesizes history, accounts from defectors, and reporting from China’s border region, where many North Koreans seek refuge, as well as a couple of trips inside North Korea. The result is an indictment of the Kim dynasty and a critique of the policies followed by the United States, South Korea, China, and international agencies.

South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung’s Sunshine Policy, writes Mr. Becker, “required a willing suspension of disbelief.” China collaborated with Pyongyang in returning refugees to North Korea, where they face imprisonment, torture, and death. The United Nation’s World Food Program did not face up to the magnitude of the disaster, it relied on the North Korean military and other state mechanisms of food distribution, and failed to demand the ability to verify that aid went to the right places.

As for the United States, the Agreed Framework, Mr. Becker believes, “did avert war, however it did not save lives,” and he speculates that external aid propped up Mr. Kim while allowing his murderous regime to continue.

Mr. Becker’s honesty about the paucity of hard information also compels him to concede that Pyongyang is a regime “uniquely impervious to both sticks and carrots.” Nevertheless, he argues, dealing with North Korea as an economic or proliferation problem has led to a fundamentally misguided approach to the regime as a strictly geo-strategic issue. He sets out to change the issue to a moral one that demands action from the international community.

Mr. Becker lays 7 million dead at the feet of Mr. Kim and his father Kim Il Sung – from war, famine, and political repression. He is disgusted with the pronouncements of “a succession of statesmen – Jiang Zemin, Vladimir Putin, Kim Dae Jung, Sweden’s Goran Petersen, Madeleine Albright – [who] have returned home to tell us how rational, well informed, witty, charming, and deeply popular Kim Jong Il is.” By contrast, he is completely comfortable with President Bush’s passionate, undiplomatic assessments of Mr. Kim as “the only honest and truthful one.”

The evidence gathered by Mr. Becker is more than enough to make that case. Unfortunately, his book is badly organized and often repetitive, which hampers its effectiveness. In the chapter “The UN and Genocide,” the case that Mr. Kim is responsible for genocide, which has a precise definition, is implied rather than made. The Kims themselves are barely present in this chapter, though other details of their responsibility for famine and their failure to alleviate it appear elsewhere.

Similarly, the title of the chapter “Kim Jong Il the Reformer” is a sardonic but too subtle slap at U.S. officials and academic experts who shaped the broader American view in the 1990s that Mr. Kim was engaged in an internal battle with hard-liners over incremental openings toward the West and a capitalist system. Mr. Becker clearly disdains this point of view, and provides much evidence to the contrary.

These may seem like small complaints, but they are symptoms of a larger problem. Mr. Becker’s chapters often overlap thematically and chronologically, making for a sometimes unsatisfying and confusing read. So do a number of small errors (the names of the former Swedish leader and the U.S. ambassador to Seoul are misspelled) and editorial lapses that leave the reader paging backward for the original reference to a person or event.

At the outset, Becker demurs to offer specific policy advice, choosing instead to emphasize the depravity of the regime and the failures of democratic governments and China to respond. In doing so, Mr. Becker has struck a blow at the conventional wisdom about North Korea that has guided the United States for too long – that it is possible or advisable to deal with North Korea without making an end to the Kim dynasty the priority. That is a policy prescription of its own.

Ms. Bork is deputy director of the Project for the New American Century.