What is it about Oslo? The Norwegian city earned its reputation as the capital of capitulation when it beckoned the Israelis into a parley with the Palestine Liberation Organization. The talks became the catastrophe of the Oslo process. Now news reports — albeit, the sketchiest of dispatches —suggest that something similar is going on in respect of Korea. It, too, holds the potential to devolve into disaster, by legitimizing the communist regime in the north at the expense of the free Korean government in the south.

It’s a mystery to us why this is not getting more coverage. UPI had a squib nine days ago. CNN had a report Monday quoting the North Korea foreign ministry’s bureau chief for North America, Choi Sun Hee. South Korea’s Yonhap news service has had several stories. Ms. Choi spoke to reporters Saturday at the Beijing Capital International Airport. That, CNN noted, was more than a week after President Donald Trump said he would be willing to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “under the right circumstances.”

What could those circumstances be? During the Cold War, and in most of the years following it, such talks would have been unthinkable. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was regarded as having erred when she made an official visit to Pyongyang. Our Cold War strategy was to insist that the North Koreans treat directly with Free Korea’s government. Even when the Armistice Commission meets, the officers sitting on the south side of the table over the Demilitarized Zone technically represent the United Nations.

Somehow this principle seems to have gone by the boards — at least in Oslo. Yonhap quotes Ms. Choi as saying that the talks at Oslo included a group of American experts, among them Suzanne DiMaggio of the American think tank New America, Thomas Pickering, a former American ambassador at the United Nations, and Robert Einhorn, our State Department’s former special adviser for nonproliferation and arms control. These are serious figures, but it is troubling to see them in this role.

Mr. Einhorn was at the State Department under Hillary Clinton and worked on the Iran appeasement. Mr. Pickering has been a big defender of the Iran appeasement and works for one of its beneficiaries, Boeing. We have the creeping feeling that for all Mr. Trump’s criticism of the Iran deal, the talks at Oslo have the potential to put him under the siren spell of appeasement in respect of communist Korea. The unofficial, or quasi official, nature of the parley only amplifies that danger.

Yonhap is quoting a State Department official as cautioning that Washington wouldn’t, in Yonhap’s phrase, attach any special meaning to the “track-two” dialogue in Oslo. Yonhap quoted a State Department aide as saying, “Track-two meetings are routinely held on a variety of topics around the world and occur independent of U.S. government involvement.” Forgive us, but it’s hard to see how there’s anything routine about what is happening at Oslo.

Yonhap itself suggests that “North Korea watchers took note of the timing of the meeting,” saying it may provide the two sides with a chance for a type of “‘exploratory’ talks.” We are, we’d note, not yet a week after an election in South Korea that elevated to the presidency a left-wing human rights lawyer. The hardline former president, Park Guen-hye, sits in a jail cell where she may yet be kept the rest of her life and our own president says he would, were a meeting appropriate, be “honored” to meet with the North Korean tyrant.

It’s not our purpose here to cast aspersions on President Trump. None of his recent predecessors — not Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush, Clinton, Bush, or Obama — made any progress at all in respect of North Korea. It was on George W. Bush’s watch that North Korea actually exploded its first a-bomb. We’d have thought that if Oslo and Iran taught us anything it would be that in the long timeline of Korea’s a-bomb program, diplomacy ought to be a last resort.