In the case of North Korea, the Clinton administrations policy, while not perfect, was a success. And most experts have forgotten at least the ones I argue with that it wasnt just diplomats engaged in a prolonged negotiation that led to the framework. It was the result of the administration using all the tools at its disposal: working closely with allies, constantly nudging China to support our efforts, the threat of extensive international sanctions, beginning a slow process of ramping up military deployments on the peninsula to prepare for war, serious negotiations with the North, and even preparing for a surgical strike on North Koreas main nuclear facility with cruise missiles if Pyongyang seemed ready to start reprocessing plutonium.
As for the Agreed Framework itself, the arrangement worked while it lasted.
Because of the 1994 agreement, the United States was able to head off the dangerous future foretold in its intelligence estimates. As my colleagues in the U.S. government and I worked to implement the arrangement, it gradually became clear that the North Koreans not only shuttered their operating reactor and allowed Americans to safely and securely store their spent plutonium, but also did nothing to maintain facilities under construction. The North Koreans may have thought maintaining these installations was unnecessary since they would eventually have to be dismantled under the terms of the agreement. But whatever the reason, these buildings became useless piles of junk and were abandoned. When the Agreed Framework collapsed in 2002 before it was fully implemented, Pyongyang only had enough material to eventually build less than a handful of bombs, a far cry from what we had expected without an agreement. That sounds like a success to me. And its large reactor, probably intended to produce power for civilian purposes but could have also produced plutonium for nuclear weapons, was expected to have been completed by the late 1990s. Instead, it became a pile of unsalvageable junk.
Critics who point out that the Agreed Framework failed to stop North Koreas nuclear program since Pyongyang was secretly working to produce weapons-grade uranium in violation of the agreement are right on the facts but wrong on the conclusion. Yes, North Koreans started a small-scale effort to explore uranium enrichment in the 1990s; by late in that decade they had even acquired a handful of centrifuges from Pakistan to produce enriched uranium. But why would they gut an advanced plutonium production program poised to produce large numbers of nuclear weapons to press ahead with a nascent uranium enrichment program that was nowhere near producing fissile material? That would be absurd. Indeed, private experts believe that the North only recently began producing weapons-grade uranium, over a decade since the framework collapsed. Imagine where we would be today if the Agreed Framework had never existed.
