Kim Il Sang.

THE "sincere condolences" that President Clinton expressed on Kim Il Sung's death were only the latest grotesquerie that his Administration's policy has led us into. Kim Il Sung, you will remember, was a totalitarian aggressor responsible for the deaths of 54,000 American servicemen and the torture and brainwashing of American POWs; his regime developed state terrorism into a creative art form, murdering half the South Korean cabinet with a bomb in Rangoon and planting other bombs on South Korean airliners. He was hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles to deliver them. In return for deceptive concessions, he was about to be rewarded with a triumphal summit with the democratic South Korean president and new high-level talks with the U.S., signifying the international acceptance he had long sought. A merciful God spared us this final embarrassment.

The Administration's nervousness comes from the unpredictability of a successor regime after almost fifty years of one-man rule, especially when the successor-son and heir Kim Jong Il--has the reputation of being flaky as well as murderous. Indeed, many believe it was he, not the old man, who thought up those terrorist incidents. We've gone from Stalin to Cahgula, anxious U.S. officials told Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post.

How did the Administration get into this position? Essentially, it abdicated control over events several weeks ago, when instead of driving hard to impose tough UN sanctions and bring the issue to a head, it opted instead for weak and incremental sanctions, the quest for which left it vulnerable to renewed diplomatic offensives by Pyongyang. Jimmy Carter was the perfect instrument for Kim, transmitting to the outside world a deceptive proposal to "freeze" the North Korean nuclear-weapons program in exchange for high-level talks and the dropping of sanctions. The proposal is deceptive because North Korea, having flouted the Non-proliferation Treaty by removing fuel rods (from which rods weapons-grade plutonium can be obtained) from a nuclear reactor, now needs to wait a few months for the rods to cool before extracting any of the fuel. We paid handsomely for a pause that we were going to get for free--without the slightest assurance that North Korea would not, after two months, proceed on its original bomb-making schedule.

When Stalin (the real one) died in March 1953, after 25 years of rule, his people too wept in the streets out of fear of the unknown. More important for our current purposes is that his successors were equally fearful; they bought a breathing space at home by making a number of concessions abroad--ending the Korean War, pushing a compromise in Indochina, agreeing to vacate Austria. In barely two years, however, they had regained their self-confidence and consolidated their power in order to torment the world for another three and a half decades.

The lesson of history is that this may be a moment not to mourn the dead monster but to seize the strategic opportunity--to increase the pressure on an undoubtedly vulnerable regime that has far more reason to fear the future than we do. This is the moment to raise the stakes--to insist that North Korea will be strangled by sanctions unless and until it surrenders its nuclear capability.

There is speculation that the regime may crumble of its own accord. Perhaps it will. But it is equally possible that the military and Party and secret police will rally behind the dynastic successor, having seen in the East German case how limited were the career prospects of their counterparts under unification. A weak Western policy, which sells our reassurances for too low a price, will only give them time to consolidate their power and resume the policy of maneuver and deception that their departed Great Leader had raised to such a high art.