The latest U.S. intelligence on Syria’s attempt to build a plutonium nuclear reactor with North Korea’s help and under the nose of the International Atomic Energy Agency shows that the Syrian threat is strategic.

Intelligence officials recently briefed American policy makers on Capitol Hill of Syria’s complicity in developing a hostile nuclear program in tandem with the North Koreans. This should have made it clear that regime change and democracy development is more important than ever in order to deter adversaries of global security.

The Syrian regime, long complicit in a variety of acts supporting terror in Iraq and the region has gone too far with the latest discovery of its effort to build a nuclear weapon with the North Koreans.

Diplomatic threats and entreaties liked by America, the European Union, and various Arab allies have done little to deter a Syrian regime that has long been set on a policy track hostile to Western security interests. The intelligence presentation shown to American officials included a ready nuclear reactor built on the banks of the Euphrates river deep in the Syrian Desert.

Syria’s nuclear program has been in the works since the late 1990s. Most damning of all the pictures shown was of the head of the Syrian nuclear commission with the North Korean manager of the Yongbyon nuclear facility. The U.S. intelligence brief made clear that the relationship between Syria and North Korea was deep and resilient.

North Korean nuclear organization officials made a number of covert trips to Syria in 2007, and the Syrian government took the utmost pains to keep this activity hidden from the eyes of the world. The brief was explicit: Syria’s nuclear efforts and the pattern of cooperation with the North Korean nuclear developers were not indicative of “peaceful intentions.”

Two dictatorships have formed a symbiotic relationship across the vast distances of the globe. Pragmatic outreach to the hermetic regimes in Damascus and Pyongyong has paid little to no dividends.

Moreover the Syrian regime under the rule of Bashar al-Assad has cemented its role as an engine for instability, chaos, and terrorism in the Middle East. The core interests of America and democracy in Iraq and the wider region are threatened by the Assad regime’s shrewd strategies that have drawn it closer to Iranian hegemonic aims while separately accommodating Sunni extremist groups tied to Al Qaeda.

Syria’s role in terrorism faded to the backdrop of public consciousness following the Israeli strike against the nuclear reactor on September 6, 2007. But Mr. Assad’s regime was not content in facilitating the deaths of American servicemen and women. Instead, their vision of nuclear weapons showed the immediacy of its threat.

Those who have argued that Syrian acquiescence could be given the right “bargains” must now answer how Syria’s development of a covert nuclear program built by the North Koreans figures into such logic. Simply put, the Syrian regime remains implacable and dedicated to rejecting a peaceful world order.

A serious U.S. demarche on this issue is long overdue. While Iran is increasingly confronted in the public arena for its machinations in Iraq, Mr. Assad and company have been granted a free pass.

The Syrians are following a very familiar playbook once charted by Saddam Hussein. As uncovered regime documents have come to demonstrate, Hussein fashioned a complex foreign policy, which relied on terror and the threat of terror as the principle tools of statecraft. Calls for dialogue based on common interests with the West were merely an exercise in denial and deception.

Today’s case in Syria is no different. The Syrian threat is a perfect storm of the worst amalgamation of terror threats imaginable.

We and a slew of Arab states have tried bargaining and cajoling to no avail. A renewed policy imperative is needed; one which recognizes that the freedom agenda and American security in the region cannot be ignored.

Mr. Ghadry is president of Syria’s Reform Party.