One of the lessons of the North Korean nuclear deal is that America is far the poorer for the fact that Ambassador John Bolton is no longer in the administration. The White House, as Toby Harden of the Daily Telegraph wrote it up, was hailing the pact as the “important first step toward the denuclearization of North Korea,” while Mr. Bolton was denouncing it as making America look “very weak.” He pointed out, Mr. Harden reported, that it contradicted “fundamental premises” of President Bush’s policies and set a “bad precedent for Iran” and other would-be proliferators. As Mr. Bolton characterized it, according to Mr. Harden, the message was that “if you hold out long enough and wear down the State Department negotiators, eventually you get rewarded, in this case with massive shipments of heavy fuel oil for doing only partially what needs to be done — the complete dismantling of their nuclear program.”

Another telling reaction to the North Korean nuclear deal came from one of Japan’s big papers, the Yomiuri Shimbun. The second paragraph of the dispatch from their Beijing reporter said, “The document does not mention other important issues, such as the country’s nuclear test in October, and Pyongyang’s nuclear development using highly enriched uranium. With these issues left untouched, the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons will remain even if the items stipulated in the joint document are implemented.” It’s a sad situation when the Japanese are taking a more realistic position in respect of Kim Jong Il and his uranium and plutonium stocks than the White House.

President Bush was careful to describe the deal reached Monday as “an initial step toward abandoning all of those programs and facilities under international supervision.” But if one examines the arrangement, there is no reason to think the North Koreans will not exploit the rest of this process to continue its uranium enrichment and deny its neighbors and America the necessary access and monitoring to make sure the gulag state is not cheating. The pattern of the long North Korean crisis teaches that this last matter is not an academic one. The North Koreans, at the least, violated the spirit of the 1994 joint framework accord signed by the Clinton administration and brokered by President Carter. In 2002, Pyongyang admitted to making plutonium at Yongbyon. This agreement merely commits Kim Jong Il and his communist camarilla to stopping that.

The agreement fails to even mention that Pyongyang tested a nuclear weapon in October. It may be true that the Security Council passed a unanimous and largely meaningless denunciation of the test. But it now turns out that this kind of brinksmanship is rewarded with a deal that shelves many of the important concerns in Pyongyang ‘s program for later, while committing up front the food and fuel Kim needs to prop up his rickety torture regime. Perhaps it is for this reason that Mr. Bolton, who recently left his post at Turtle Bay, was so quick to denounce the deal. We can only imagine that Robert Joseph, who has also just retired from his State Department post overseeing nonproliferation and international law, felt the same way. These days Mr. Bush probably doesn’t want to hear from the likes of Messrs. Bolton or Joseph. But they are the ones who hold the key to his legacy in Northeast Asia.