The big news from Korea is that the communists are prepared to give up nuclear weapons “if the military threat to the North” were “eliminated and its security guaranteed.” The quotes are from a statement of South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, following meetings between the two sides. The Times calls it the first time North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has been “willing to discuss giving up nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees from the United States.”

Mr. Kim’s father, of course, is another matter. Kim Jong Il, the Dear Leader as he was known, tried this scam with George W. Bush as recently as 2005. His aim was security guarantees and money. We happen to be a great admirer of ’43. His leadership on the North Korean front was not one of his better hours. The North made a fool of him, is the way it could be put, though Mr. Bush has the company of Presidents Clinton and Obama.

Since when, in any event, has it ever been the policy of the United Nations — or of America — to grant security guarantees to the North Korean regime? We mention the United Nations because the Korean war was between the communists and the world body. When the commission meets to manage the armistice that has obtained since the 1950s, the party that sits across the table from the communists is not America but the United Nations.

North Korea has been trying for decades to break out of that construct and go over the head of the Free Korean republic so as to deal directly with America. Now, after two generations of appeasement, the prospect of talks between North Korea and America is suddenly being presented as a tempting opportunity. The North Koreans are reportedly willing to hold a “heartfelt dialogue” aimed at normalization of relations with America.

We, for one, are against it. It is true that in 1974 America recognized the communist regime in East Germany — and even opened an embassy there. Even then, though, it maintained that the free German government in the West was the sole legitimate successor of the pre-Nazi German state and would be the government of any future reunified Germany. That commitment was redeemed in the astounding events that began to unfold at 1989.

Our commitments in respect of Korea go back at least to the 1943 Cairo Conference. That’s where FDR, Churchill, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of Free China declared, among other things, that the “three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.” North Korea, of course, is neither free nor independent and, by dint of its very communism, can never be.

So what would be the logic of America, or the United Nations, issuing security guarantees to the North Korean tyranny? These columns have been warning for a year now of the unraveling that occured with the ouster in December 2016 of Free Korea’s hardline president, Park Geun-hye. What is President Trump thinking? If he does get into talks with the North, he will gain little save for a friendly word from the New York Times, urging him to be ever more forthcoming.

In 2005, when Kim Jong Un’s father tempted President Bush, we urged that “a priority should be placed on preparing a military response” so that action could be initiated the moment the North Koreans were found to be cheating. The North Koreans tested their first A-Bomb the next year, and we did nothing. Now they’ve got an H-Bomb and missiles that might soon be able to deliver it. This is no moment to guarantee North Korea anything but trouble.