The North Koreans have reached out to one of President Clinton’s U.N. ambassadors, Governor Richardson of New Mexico, in an apparent effort to delay or defuse the crisis building over Pyongyang’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. That’s illuminating: Given a choice, the axis of evil would rather deal with the Clinton team than with President Bush’s. Mr. Bush’s Washington has been at some pains lately to explain the differences between the situations in North Korea and Iraq, and to phrase both situations in terms of disarmament rather than revolution. That distinction must be lost on those who have languished in the dungeons of either country and on those who have starved while the tyrants in both countries built monuments to themselves. To our mind, the problems at Baghdad and Pyongyang are of a piece: North Korea’s communism and Iraq’s Baathism are both ideologies whose time has past. They are at odds with the fundamental human thirst for freedom. America doesn’t need immediately to invade every country that is still unfree. But by funding and supplying democratic oppositions and by spreading the message of freedom abroad through broadcasting, we can help defeat the tyrants. What the Kim Jong-Il’s of the world are doing by invoking the Richardsons of the world is playing for time, hoping to delay their moment of defeat by freedom’s march. But America has its own time horizon. If the tyrants insist on becoming, as they are, powerful enough to threaten us as well as their own people, pretty soon they are going to be reckoning with Rumsfeld instead of Richardson.