KEY POINTS:
The tentative deal on North Korea's nuclear weapons programme is worse than the deal that the Bush Administration wrecked in 2005, and considerably worse than the one the Clinton Administration made in 1994, but did not abide by.
Last week's deal lets North Korea keep whatever nuclear weapons it has already built, plus whatever others it can build with fissile material it has already produced. But it's probably the best deal left.
The pattern of bargaining by nuclear blackmail that is now so closely identified with Kim Jong-il's regime began in 1993 when the regime of his father, Kim Il-sung, refused to let the International Atomic Energy Authority inspect its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.
Instead, he said, Pyongyang would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and reprocess 8000 spent fuel rods to extract plutonium for nuclear weapons.
By June 1994, the Clinton Administration was seriously discussing air strikes against Yongbyon, but former president Jimmy Carter sensed that this was a bargaining ploy by a regime that was in desperate economic trouble. Carter went to Pyongyang and substituted bribery for threats. Within days, North Korea agreed to remain under NPT safeguards, admit inspectors, and stop processing plutonium.
In return, under the "Agreed Framework", the United States, South Korea, and Japan promised to supply Pyongyang with two pressurised-water reactors - whose spent fuel would not yield fissile material - after which North Korea would shut its plutonium-producing reactor.
They would also provide North Korea with 500,000 tonnes of fuel oil a year free, and facilitate the shipment of a large volume of food aid.
Pyongyang obeyed this agreement for eight years, although it soon discovered a loophole: the deal did not explicitly ban North Korea from pursuing nuclear weapons by the alternative means of mining uranium ore and enriching it.
Although the free oil arrived each year, enabling the North Korean economy to stagger on, the US failed to build the pressurised-water reactors. In 2001, President Bush denounced Kim Jong-il as a monstrous tyrant (perfectly true), and formally abandoned the pressurised-water reactor deal.
Shortly afterwards he ended the free-oil shipments and a year later, after 9/11, declared the North Korean regime a member of the "axis of evil" that the US would dismantle.
Pyongyang panicked, and in 2002 Kim Jong-il did exactly what his father had done in 1993 - openly acknowledged its secret uranium enrichment programme. In 2003 he withdrew from the non-proliferation treaty and began reprocessing the spent fuel rods.
The so-called "six-party talks", including North Korea, the US, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, finally got under way in August 2003.
Everybody else involved was well aware that any agreement would have to resemble the 1994 deal, but the Bush Administration resisted.
Eventually, an agreement was reached along predictable lines. In September 2005, North Korea agreed to rejoin the NPT, end its efforts to produce nuclear weapons, and re-admit inspectors.
The other parties agreed to resume oil shipments and to build the pressurised-water reactors.
And the US promised not to attack North Korea or try to overthrow its regime.
Then, unexpectedly, the US Treasury Department imposed financial sanctions on North Korea on the unproved grounds that Pyongyang was counterfeiting US dollars.
It is still not clear whether this was a deliberate spoiling move by hard-liners or just poor policy co-ordination, but the deal fell apart. A year later North Korea tested its first nuclear weapon.
Now, inevitably, there is a new deal along much the same lines: North Korea shuts down the Yongbyon reactor and gets a million tonnes of fuel in return. But now it has at least a couple of nuclear weapons and it looks like it gets to keep them.
