Mick Hartley

According to the WSJ, the Obama administration secretly agreed to talks with North Korea in an attempt to end the Korean War, dropping a long-standing condition that Pyongyang first take steps to curtail its nuclear arsenal. This was just prior to the latest North Korean nuclear test:

Instead the U.S. called for North Korea’s atomic-weapons program to be simply part of the talks. Pyongyang declined the counter-proposal, according to U.S. officials familiar with the events. Its nuclear test on Jan. 6 ended the diplomatic gambit. 

Claudia Rosett:

If only President Obama were as tough on America's enemies as he's been on his own domestic rivals. Recall his statement, during the 2008 presidential campaign, on how to deal with Republicans: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." Unfortunately, no such creed seems to apply in Obama's dealings with North Korea (or, for that matter, with Iran, or Russia, or Cuba…). Instead, while Pyongyang prepares a nuclear test, Obama brings neither a gun nor a knife to the showdown. Rather, in apparent hope of yet another "historic" bargain to cap the rotten nuclear deal with Iran and the feckless embrace of Cuba's Castro regime, he extends his hand to Pyongyang….

In other words, while North Korea was readying its fourth nuclear test, the Obama administration was quietly offering concessions to North Korea's tyrant Kim Jong Un. Make no mistake, for America to talk with North Korea at all is, in itself, a concession — dignifying the world's most horrific rogue regime, while setting the stage for yet another round of North Korean cheating and nuclear extortion. For the American superpower, erstwhile leader of the Free World, to furtively offer sweeteners — and this one was a whopper — in hope of opening official talks with Kim is even worse. Concessions that the State Department may regard as carrots are viewed by North Korea as capitulation.

Nor would a formal peace deal with Pyongyang's Kim regime be likely to bring anything resembling peace, any more than the series of nuclear deals since 1994, under Presidents Clinton and Bush, brought the much-promised and never-delivered North Korean "denuclearization." To this day, almost 63 years after the armistice that has left North and South Korea facing off across the Demilitarized Zone, North Korea's idea of an acceptable end to the Korean War is not some happy coexistence, or climbdown from Pyongyang's totalitarian Kim dynasty, but the reunification of the Korean peninsula — under the rule of Pyongyang.

It's unclear whether this latest hand-extending by Obama was a desperate gesture meant to stop — or at least delay — North Korea's then-imminent nuclear test, or simply another step in the Obama administration's long slog of capitulations and concessions dressed up as "engagement" with assorted hostile powers. Either way, it's bad news, and obviously it did not succeed in stopping North Korea's Jan. 6 nuclear test, or the Feb. 7 test-launch of a long-range missile — the latest step in North Korea's program to build nuclear-tipped missiles that could target the United States.

More from Joshua Stanton.