Don't Make Truman's Mistake.(US policy towards North Korea)

Japanese intelligence experts who track the whereabouts of "Great Leader" Kim Jong Il say North Korea's shadowy strongman hasn't appeared in public in more than a month. What's he doing? Their best guess is that, like millions of people around the world, he's busy channel- surfing between CNN and the BBC to follow events in Iraq. He has a vested interest, of course. Should the U.S.-led invasion succeed in relatively short order, Kim suspects that Washington's cross hairs will quickly train on him.

Like any hunted man, Kim won't simply wait to be trapped. His regime, which last week declared itself Washington's "next target of attack," is likely to respond preemptively with a little "shock and awe" of its own. His most provocative option: declare North Korea a nuclear power, a move that would both destabilize Northeast Asia and raise the specter of fissile material being trafficked to America's worst enemies. If that happens, the United States "would have only two choices: bomb North Korean nuclear installations... or deal with [the North] as a nuclear-weapons state," argues Larry Niksch, an Asia specialist at the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

History suggests that Washington needs to respond now and to do so by telling Pyongyang exactly what will happen if it begins manufacturing A-bombs. The scariest aspect of today's Korea crisis is that Kim Jong Il--despite his cable-news fixation--may, like many analysts, fail to discern Bush administration policy. "What is the U.S. aim [in North Korea]?" asks Derek Mitchell, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Are we open to a comprehensive agreement or committed to regime change? I don't know."

President Harry Truman suffered from a similar lack of clarity in 1950. Preoccupied with Europe's reconstruction and Chairman Mao's planned campaign to "liberate" Taiwan, he ignored events on the Korean Peninsula. That January his administration put the South outside its declared "defense perimeter" in Asia, a blunder that led Soviet leader Joseph Stalin to give his North Korean protege, Kim Il Sung, the green light to unleash his armies on June 25, 1950. Perhaps the cold war's biggest "what if" is the notion that, had Truman telegraphed his intention to defend South Korea, Stalin might never have approved the attack.

Parallel events are unfolding today. North Korean technicians at a ...