NORTH KOREA: In North Korea, a dictator remains, pushing through policies at a terrible cost to his own people, writes Jasper Becker, in Beijing.
The deal that president Clinton and former president Carter made with North Korea in 1994 has finally unravelled. The situation is as it began, except that in the last eight years, over two million North Koreans have starved to death and Pyongyang is closer to acquiring a nuclear arsenal - that is, if it does not already have one.
All this comes as no surprise. The poorer and more desperate North Korea became after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc, the more important became its weapons sales and especially its nuclear programme.
North Korea is no Iraq. For a country bereft of oil or indeed of any tradable resources, its only assets have been the threat its weapons pose to its enemies, and the inducements that military technology transfers could offer its rapidly dwindling number of friends.
Once North Korea abandoned International Energy Agency inspections and severed ties with its director, Dr Hans Blix, the US became so alarmed it began planning a strike to prevent Pyongyang from producing plutonium from its Yongbyon plant.
This led the North Koreans to warn that they were ready to turn Seoul into "a sea of fire".
In came former president Carter who resolved the crisis by visiting the "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung in his lair and hatching a deal.
The US, Japan and South Korea would build North Korea a bigger and better nuclear plant, and provide fuel oil until it was up and running, if North Korea would agree to inspections and the suspension of its nuclear programme.
A year later North Korea suddenly admitted it was starving, setting in motion a major emergency food programme.
It was clear that what Pyongyang really wanted was the US and its other enemies, South Korea and Japan, to subsidise it with food, fuel and other necessities.
This is still its main objective and Pyongyang believes the chief obstacle to this is the refusal by the US to give it diplomatic recognition and guarantee the state's continued existence.
Despite frequent claims that the North had run a successful economy until the Soviet collapse, the truth is that it has always been a mendicant state reliant entirely on subsidies from either the Soviets or the Chinese.
Its poverty is not just due to the absurd ultra-Stalinist economic policies of its father-and-son leaders but also to the devotion of enormous resources to the military. The North Korean military has accumulated enough weaponry to prepare an invasion against a foe twice its size. It has honeycombed the country with caves and tunnels to resist US aerial attacks.
If North Korea had been ruled by someone saner than either Kim Il Sung or his son, Kim Jong Il, the last eight years would have been used to introduce economic reforms like China's.
Instead, Kim Jong Il has done little other than squander money on his vanity projects like equipping the economy with such projects as an ostrich farm and several casinos, not to mention schemes like building a long-range rocket. Even if he lacked the means to reform the economy, Kim had a golden opportunity to use South Korean talent, thanks to the unexpected election of Kim Dae Jung to the South Korean presidency.
He bent over backwards to reassure the North of his good intentions and encouraged the South's business elite to propose all kinds of investments.
And in the last days of the Clinton presidency, Washington did everything possible to reach a settlement with the North and open diplomatic ties.
Yet the "sunshine policy" was no more able to persuade Kim Jong Il to act in his own interests than pressure from either China or Washington.
One can only conclude that Mr Carter's 1994 accord was a terrible mistake.
The international community should have removed the Kim family from power and changed the regime, preferably by unifying the two Koreas. The then South Korean president, Kim Young Sam, firmly believed that after the Great Leader's death, shortly after Carter's visit, the North would collapse.
There were constant - although unsubstantiated - reports of uprisings, troop rebellions and at least one attempted coup. Many refugees interviewed in China said they expected and had been preparing for a US-led invasion, that Kim Jong Il was deeply unpopular and would not last long.
Instead, the US military feared that with so many American troops on the front line, it was too dangerous to corner the North Koreans into starting an all-out suicidal war.
The US resident commander, Gen Gary Luck, warned of 52,000 US casualties and a further 490,000 Korean casualties if war broke out. Many in South Korea agreed with him that the risk was too great. When the international aid to the North finally arrived in sufficient quantity to make a difference, it was too late to save millions of lives.
So the North Korean regime has been allowed to continue but at a terrible cost to its own people.