A few weeks back, Senator Clinton and Senator McCain got in a tussle over the Clinton administration’s 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea. Sen. Clinton said the Framework was a policy success and a lesson for how to deal with Pyongyang. McCain called it a “failure” and something we shouldn’t repeat. Back in 1994, he forcefully argued against the deal with the “crumbling regime” because it was all carrots and no sticks. He also noted: “We will reach a moment when it is apparent to all” that the Framework was a failure. “That will be when North Korea begins reprocessing the fuel now in cooling ponds into weapons-grade plutonium.”

All this brings me to this piece, “In ’97, U.S. Panel Predicted a North Korea Collapse in 5 Years,” in today’s New York Times. The Times reports:

A team of government and outside experts convened by the Central Intelligence Agency concluded in 1997 that North Korea’s economy was deteriorating so rapidly that the government of Kim Jong-il was likely to collapse within five years, according to declassified documents made public on Thursday.

The panel described the isolated and impoverished country as being on the brink of economic ruin and said that “political implosion stemming from irreversible economic degradation seems the most plausible endgame for North Korea.” The majority among the group argued that the North’s government “cannot remain viable for the long term” and could fall within five years….

“Conventional wisdom was completely wrong,” said Ambassador Wendy Sherman, who during the late 1990s was the Clinton administration’s coordinator for North Korea policy. “People constantly underestimated the staying power of the North Korean regime.”

The belief that the North Korean economy was collapsing helped shaped White House thinking in 1994 when it promised to deliver light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea by 2003 in exchange for Pyongyang’s halting its covert nuclear weapons program. Senior Clinton administration officials said privately at the time that they did not expect Mr. Kim’s government to be in power by the time the United States had to make good on its pledge….

So did all those carrots – from the U.S. and Pyongyang’s neighbors over the years – sustain a regime that was on the verge of collapse? Did all those carrots give Pyongyang the time it needed to advance its missile and nuclear programs? On thing is for sure: The Clinton-McCain North Korea debate hasn’t ended.