Mick Hartley

Can Mr. Clinton broker a durable agreement with North Korea where others have failed? That’s highly improbable for many reasons. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il is reportedly suffering from numerous life-threatening ailments, including kidney failure and pancreatic cancer. It’s impossible to know for sure, but he has probably ceded powers to hardline generals to obtain the support of the military for succession to one of his sons, the 26-year-old Kim Jong Un. The Chinese have recently stepped up trade to North Korea to help tide the regime over during a particularly difficult period, thereby giving it the means to ride out the U.N. Security Council’s slap-on-the-wrist sanctions.

Now is not the time to throw Kim a lifeline. Another former president, Jimmy Carter, did just that when he made his own surprise visit to Pyongyang in June 1994. On that visit, Mr. Carter developed the outline of the Agreed Framework, which contemplated supplying light-water nuclear reactors to Kim in return for a freeze of his nuclear program and its eventual dismantlement.

Mr. Clinton, against the advice of then South Korean President Kim Young-sam, accepted that arrangement, which not only provided material assistance to Pyongyang but also signified American acceptance of the regime immediately after the death of founder Kim Il Sung. Messrs. Carter and Clinton effectively squandered North Korea’s most vulnerable moment since the Korean War.

Thanks in part to failed diplomacy in the Clinton and Bush administrations, there is almost no room left for the U.S. to make additional concessions to North Korea over its nuclear program. Last year Pyongyang broke off the so-called six-party denuclearization talks, which began in 2003 after the North admitted violating the Agreed Framework. Pyongyang refused to verify its promises to dismantle its nuclear facilities and give up its small arsenal of atomic weapons. Kim, like his father Kim Il Sung, has broken every promise he’s ever made with respect to the nuclear program.

And now there may be one more reason for the regime to continue its alarming conduct. If Mr. Clinton is conducting any nuclear discussions he would be rewarding Pyongyang for jailing the two reporters and making them bargaining chips.

This matters because Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were not Pyongyang’s only hostages. In March, North Korea detained Yu Song-jin, a South Korean manager working in the Kaesong industrial zone, for criticizing Kim’s paradise. Last week, a North Korean patrol boat seized a South Korean fishing vessel that accidentally strayed into the North’s waters, and Pyongyang is now keeping the four-member crew for no good reason. North Korea may be holding 100 or more Japanese abductees and at least 1,000 South Koreans, some of them prisoners from the Korean War and others kidnapped since then. More broadly, Kim uses all his 23 million people as hostages.

Now two American journalists will come home safely. Good. But let’s hope the U.S. didn’t secure their release at the cost of further negotiations that will only give Kim more time to perfect his nuclear arsenal and develop his ballistic missiles.