North Korea, of course, was perhaps the first rogue regime to confront the United States. What follows is a much-abridged version of the study of US diplomacy with North Korea and how we got to where we are.

By the end of the 1960s, it appeared fighting could again erupt on the peninsula. Between 1966 and 1969, there were more than 280 North Korean attacks on Americans or South Koreans around the DMZ.

This brings us to the nuclear program. In 1980, a spy satellite spotted construction of a nuclear reactor at Yongbyon. Four years later, satellites detected craters suggesting North Korea was experimenting with detonators used in nuclear bombs. That North Korea had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1985 should not have assuaged diplomats; the Soviet Union had promised North Korea four nuclear plants should it accept the Non-Proliferation treaty. The next year, satellites detected evidence that North Korea was experimenting with the explosions needed to set off a nuclear warhead.

Between September 2007 and April 2008, the United States negotiated an agreement with North Korea which obligated the regime to disable its plutonium facilities at Yongbyon and provide a “complete and correct” description of its nuclear programs. In exchange, the United States would lift economic sanctions and finalize North Korea’s removal from the terrorism list. In effect, the United States would no longer demand an end to and reversal of North Korea’s illegal actions.

It is easy to play the partisan blame game, but North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and its slow progress on the means to deliver them to U.S. territories like Guam if not to Hawaii, Alaska, and the U.S. West Coast is a testament to decades of diplomatic and strategic failure on the part of almost every U.S. administration, regardless of party. The cost of this failure is grave and growing, and may be counted not only in billions of dollars but also in millions of lives.

Read the source article at aei.org