Axis uber Alles? Bush is not dealing adequately with Iran and North Korea.

TO his credit, President Bush is not the type to say raison d'etre out loud, but he nonetheless gave one to his administration in the 2002 State of the Union address. Having summarized the intolerable threats that arise when terrorists, rogue regimes, and weapons of mass destruction intersect, and having christened Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and their like the "Axis of Evil," Bush made a pledge: "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

That resolution--forged in the flames of September 11 and tempered by the realization that there are far deadlier weapons than jetliners--has been the central mission of Bush's presidency. It subsumes even the Iraq War, whose first and best justification was that a regime as dangerous as Saddam Hussein's could not be allowed to exist if it did not verifiably renounce the pursuit of WMD. Bush can fall short on any number of goals and still reckon his presidency a success. But if his nonproliferation efforts fail, so does he, full stop.

Five years on, how goes the fight? North Korea has tested an atomic bomb; Iran is steadily increasing the size of its uranium-enrichment operation; and the "international community," if not quite an assembly of eunuchs, is doing its best to look like one. We should not fall into the distinctly unconservative error of supposing that every problem has a solution. It may be that, in vowing to defang Iran and North Korea, Bush set an unattainable goal. But we are right to ask whether he is doing everything possible to achieve this goal: and the answer to that question must be no.

It is not my answer only, but that of several persons currently or formerly associated with President Bush's national-security team. None wished to speak on the record, and most declined even to be quoted anonymously. But a single theme emerged in these conversations, and it is that President Bush's nonproliferation agenda is in freefall.

To understand why, ask first what Bush's immediate objective with regard to Iran and North Korea should be. The answer, in a word, is pressure. Commentators debate endlessly whether the U.S. should try to change the Iranian and North Korean regimes, or simply their behavior. But these goals are not mutually exclusive. Up to a point, they are even complementary. Both are advanced by the more basic strategy of forcing Iran and North Korea to pay the highest possible price for their misconduct. Such punishment may lead them to conclude that seeking weapons of mass destruction is not in their interest, in which case they will reform themselves. If not, punitive measures will at least weaken their regimes, both of which are already highly unstable.

The deal that the Bush administration negotiated with North Korea--and which the other members of the six-party talks agreed to on February 13--stipulates that Kim Jong Il shut down his nuclear facility and not build new nuclear weapons, in exchange for massive economic aid and the eventual normalization of relations with the U.S. This is the sort of thing that makes hearts skip a beat in international-relations courses, but if the goal was to reduce Kim's threat then the United States should never have set pen to paper.

Prior to the deal, the pressure on Kim was considerable. His regime has escaped financial ruin only through a combination of arms sales, black-market businesses (principally counterfeiting and drug-trafficking), and foreign aid. This last source of income had been significantly choked off as Kim's neighbors suspended aid shipments in response to his provocations. As for the second, the United States had won an important battle in 2005 when it sanctioned the Banco Delta Asia for abetting North Korea's counterfeiting operation. These sanctions deprived North Korea of $25 million in an account with the bank; more important, they effectively shut North Korea out of the international financial system, as banks around the world suddenly refused to have dealings with it. Security Council Resolution 1718 froze additional North Korean assets, further straitening Kim's conditions.

The February 13 deal has entirely dissipated these pressures. Kim's $25 million has been unfrozen and the aid has started flowing again--but, as I write, Kim is more than a week past his deadline for shutting down the nuclear facility at Yongbyon. Probably he intends to close it eventually, since doing so will entitle him to massive energy assistance. China--the North's most important source of material aid and diplomatic cover--has put its credibility on the line, and will presumably exert what leverage it can to make Kim comply. But the nasty truth about the deal is that even full compliance gives the U.S. very little. Kim still owns a nuclear arsenal, since the agreement punts final disposition of that matter to the day when the lion lies down with the lamb. Our only assurance that North Korea will not build more nukes is the word of a liar (recall that Kim promised to give up his nuclear program once before, in 1994). And the deal puts a straitjacket on the United States: We will be reluctant, for example, to interdict a North Korean arms shipment, since Kim might well scuttle the agreement in retaliation. This triumph of diplomacy has only one certain outcome, and that is to make life easier for the Hermit King.

This is not just bad policy; it is bad precedent. It announces to any would-be proliferator that a country possessed of atomic bombs can defy the United States and claim a reward for its defiance. Iran's rulers must have analyzed the deal with particular interest--though they perhaps learned nothing that the U.S. hadn't already demonstrated by abasing itself before the "EU-3" over the past three and a half years.

The logic of tying our Iran policy to that of Britain, France, and Germany has never been obvious. In North Korea's case, multilateralism made sense. North Korea is a weak state surrounded by strong ones, and these neighbors have an interest in keeping its psychoses in check. The six-party talks were an attempt to unite them in a common front against Kim-and, right up until the deal, the plan seemed to be working. Iran, by contrast, is a strong state among weak neighbors. With the possible exception of Israel, they can do little to check its hegemonic impulses. Europe is almost equally useless. France and Germany have strong commercial ties with Iran, and the British people slumber in post-Iraq pacifism. All this has led the EU-3 to greet each new advance in Iran's nuclear program with a collective shrug. By outsourcing his Iran policy to Europe, Bush guaranteed that negotiations would drag on interminably while producing almost no pressure on the Iranian regime. The fruits of his decision have been, first, two toothless Security Council resolutions, and second, complete obscuration of the threat of force.

This is not to say that military strikes are desirable, or that negotiations should not have been attempted. But a clear threat of force--coupled with an expiration date on diplomacy--could have put enormous pressure on the Iranian regime. At a minimum, Bush should have pushed much more forcefully to wrap up dealings in the Security Council by 2004 (two full years after the revelation of Iran's nuclear program). Even if he never intended to order air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities, this would have allowed the U.S. and its allies to focus earlier and more directly on containing the Iranian threat and subverting the Iranian regime. Instead, Bush's tolerance for delay has given the mullahs time to perfect their centrifuge cascades as they run out the clock on his presidency.

Just why Bush has retreated so markedly from the positions he articulated in 2002 is not clear. But if the answer has a name, it is probably Condi. According to one close observer of the administration, Condoleezza Rice "has become the witting captive of the bureaucracy she heads" and takes "the Foreign Service perspective, the State institutional perspective, back to the president." A second observer agrees: "The answer to everything is Condi." She has "complete dominance over the process, greater I would say even than Kissinger during the collapse of the Nixon administration and under Ford." Such dominance would not be possible if the president heard strong alternative views, but the National Security Council-where he normally would hear them-is "completely neutered." According to the first observer, national security adviser Stephen Hadley "is hardwired genetically to seek deals, and has shown absolutely no indication that the substance of the deals matters to him one iota."

In the end, why Bush is making bad decisions is of secondary importance. What matters is that he is-and the Axis of Evil is winning.