KEY POINTS:
The announcement that the six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programme are set to resume could signal the beginning of a rethink in the Bush Administration's counter-proliferation strategy.
Agreement came at a meeting in Beijing of officials from North Korea, China and the United States, and President Bush was quick to praise China for its role in this process.
The Bush Administration and China will begin preparations shortly in Hanoi for the resumption of the six-party talks, which also involve South Korea, Russia and Japan. The talks stopped a year ago after Pyongyang withdrew in protest at US financial sanctions imposed upon it.
Last month North Korea alarmed the world by testing a nuclear weapon, prompting the UN Security Council to respond with financial and arms sanctions.
North Korea's founder, Kim Il Sung, began a nuclear energy programme in the 1960s with help from his backers in the Soviet Union. But it was his son, Kim Jong-il, who accelerated the programme to the point where the Clinton Administration grew concerned.
In 1994 the US struck a deal known as the "agreed framework" under which North Korea agreed to place its nuclear facilities at Yongbyong under a UN-monitored freeze in return for energy assistance and help in building light-water nuclear reactors, which are harder to use for military purposes.
By the late 1990s, the normalisation of US-North Korean relations appeared imminent, with the then Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, visiting Pyongyang in 2000.
All this changed with the election of George W. Bush, who distanced his Government from Clinton's policy of engagement with Kim's regime.
Shortly after declaring the "war on terror" in the wake of 9/11, President Bush identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an "axis of evil" and warned that he would "not wait on events" to prevent these "rogue states" from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States.
In September 2002, Bush's commitment to pre-emption and US global primacy became enshrined in a document called the National Security Strategy of the United States, known as the Bush doctrine.
Iraq was clearly the first test case of the Bush doctrine. Despite the absence of compelling evidence, the Bush Administration consistently asserted there were links between Saddam's secular dictatorship and the fundamentalist al-Qaeda terror network. The Bush team argued it was only a matter of time before Saddam provided al Qaeda with weapons of mass destruction to use against the US.
But if the subsequent US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was meant to demonstrate that the Bush doctrine would effectively curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it largely failed to do so.
With the notable exception of Colonel Gaddafi's Libya, which disavowed the development of weapons of mass destruction after regime change in Baghdad, the real lesson of the Iraq invasion for "rogue states" like North Korea was to heighten the pressure to obtain a strategic capability to deter the prospect of a pre-emptive US intervention.
Conventionally armed states like Iraq could be targets for the application of the Bush doctrine, but the stakes are raised massively for the world's only superpower when a state can show it has a nuclear capability.
In that sense, Kim's nuclear test was a somewhat predictable response from a regime that saw itself as a possible target for US hostility.
Far from curbing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the Bush doctrine has provided a new incentive for "rogue states" to develop these weapons as the ultimate deterrent.
It is surely no coincidence that Kim's bankrupt regime, no doubt encouraged by Iran's defiance and the Iraq quagmire, resorted to missile and nuclear brinkmanship.
As a counter-proliferation strategy, the key weakness of the Bush doctrine is its presumed linkage of "rogue states" and non-state terrorists. But the threat of proliferation can can be distinguished at two levels.
At the state level, a nuclear North Korea can be managed by the international community. Containment and deterrence worked during the Cold War era when the threat of nuclear-armed states was more extensive and global in character.
Besides, the recent support of Russia and China for Security Council Resolution 1718 indicates that a reasonably effective sanctions regime could contain Kim's nuclear ambitions and press Pyongyang towards diplomatic negotiations.
But it is at the level of non-state terrorist groups where the proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction presents the greatest threat to the international community.
Bush is right to warn of this grave threat, but an effective counter-proliferation strategy must seek to prevent, rather than promote, the convergence of "rogue states" like North Korea with fundamentalist non-state terrorist groups.
Such a strategy requires diplomatic engagement between states, even "rogue states". Ironically, the nuclear brinkmanship of Kim's regime may have brought this closer.
The North Korean crisis has bolstered those in the US State Department and elsewhere who have long argued that multilateralism, not unilateralism, is the most effective way of curbing nuclear proliferation in a globalising world.
The resurgence of the Democrats at the recent Congressional mid-term elections and the resignation of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will only increase the pressures in Washington for a reassessment of the Bush Administration's approach.
* Aaron Lim is a graduate of the Master of International Studies (M.IntSt) at the University of Otago; Robert G. Patman is a professor in the department of political studies, University of Otago.
