At a joint press appearance with South Korean President Lee Yong-Ho earlier today, President Barack Obama used what the New York Times called a "stern tone" with North Korea. Obama's main objective is to bring an end to the Sisyphean quality of the negotiations.

"The thing I want to emphasise is that President Lee and I both agree we want to break the pattern that existed in the past, in which North Korea behaves in a provocative fashion, and then is willing to return to talk ... and then that leads to seeking further concessions."

What's the best way to do this? Apparently, by answering the DPRK's demands and provocations by providing these concessions before the DPRK agrees to return to the Six Party talks. Earlier this month, the DPRK laid out its conditions for talks. “If the U.S. is not ready to have a face-to-face meeting, we will go our own way,” the state Korean Central News Agency said, quoting a spokesman for the foreign ministry. “It’s time for the U.S. to make a determination.”

So yesterday Obama announced that he will be sending Ambassador Stephen Bosworth for direct, face-to-face meetings with Kim Jong Il's regime, something the North Koreans have been seeking for years as a boost to the legitimacy of their criminal regime. And, standing next to Obama, President Lee promised the North Koreans a "grand bargain" of incentives for good behavior.

All of this after repeated provocations by North Korea and a persistent intransigence on multilateral talks. When North Korea tested a Taepodong 2 missile on April 4, Obama promised consequences: "With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations." UN Ambassador Susan Rice warned that the US would "send a strong message to North Korea that it can't act with impunity." After a nuclear test in late May, Obama said the US would "work with our friends and our allies to stand up to this behavior." In a letter to the UN on October 1, the DPRK said that abandoning its nuclear program was "unthinkable even in a dream" and test-fired short range missiles several days later.

And yet after all of this, President Obama holds a press conference in which he offers concessions and says "we want to break the pattern that existed in the past, in which North Korea behaves in a provocative fashion, and then is willing to return to talk ... and then that leads to seeking further concessions."

Is it any wonder they don't take our threats seriously?

This analysis, from former Bush administration Asia hand Michael Green, caught my eye as I re-read a recent New York Times article on North Korea and the formerly detained journalists.

Mr. Green said the North was unlikely to release the women without getting something in return. Although North Korea does not expect the Obama administration to abandon its effort to impose sanctions on the North for its recent nuclear test, he said, it is likely to want a “high-profile visit” by an administration official to demonstrate that “it’s possible to return to business as usual.”

A former president is even better. Business as usual, indeed.

North Korea has responded to the nonbinding (i.e. virtually meaningless) UN Resolution Presidential Statement issued yesterday that condemns its April 5 missile launch, calling the statement "brigandish" and threatening to continue its nuclear program.

And, in what the Obama administration will surely regard as the most alarming part of the statement, North Korea has threatened to "never participate" again in six-party nuclear talks.

Over/under on how long it will take for the White House to offer some kind of concession to bring Kim Jong Il back to the negotiating table?

I say three days.

Update: A smart reader points out that this post "mistakenly referred to a UN resolution yesterday when it was really a Presidential Statement."

State Department lawyers don't even consider all UNSC resolutions legally binding, only those under Chapter VII [...]

This is a hugely important point, over which Rice is making a fool of herself, arguing on Saturday that even a Presidential Statement is legally binding.

Did Christopher Hill, Barack Obama's nominee to serve as Ambassador to Iraq, lie under oath during his confirmation hearing on Wednesday? One exchange he had with Senator Roger Wicker, a Republican from Mississippi, deserves considerable scrutiny.

Wicker read Hill a passage from the piece I wrote about Hill for this week's TWS. That article focused on two incidents in which Hill disregarded George W. Bush's policy of refusing to conduct bilateral negotiations with North Korea.

Wicker first read this paragraph: "Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had given Hill permission to meet face-to-face with the North Koreans but only on the condition that diplomats from China were also in the room. Although the Chinese participated in the early moments of the discussions, they soon left. Hill did not leave with them."

And then he read this passage, a direct quote from Meltdown, an exhaustively reported book on the North Korean nuclear crisis written by CNN reporter Mike Chinoy. "Although Rice remained supportive of reviving the diplomatic process, Hill had held the bilateral discussion with North Korean negotiator Kim Gye Gwan in defiance of her instructions."

Hill's response is incredible -- literally:

Well, thank you. Thank you very much.

Actually, what this was was the start of the -- this was in the summer of 2005, and this was an effort to get the six-party process going because the North Koreans had boycotted. And so what Secretary Rice agreed to do was to have bilateral -- a bilateral meeting with the understanding that the North Koreans would then announce at the end of the bilateral meeting their participation in the six-party process. But she wanted the Chinese to be there.

So which is it? Did Rice agree to "a bilateral meeting" with the North Koreans or did she want the Chinese to be there? They are mutually exclusive. Did Rice tell Hill he could simply disregard Bush administration policy? Unlikely. Chinoy, who interviewed Hill for his book and offers a sympathetic account of Hill's diplomatic work, explains it this way on page 239 of his book. "The North Koreans made clear that, while they were open to returning to the talks, they wanted a bilateral meeting with Hill before making any announcement. Hill's problem was that Rice and other senior officials, while willing to sanction a meeting, insisted that it be trilateral, with China participating as well." [Emphasis added]

They "insisted" that China participate as well. If that's right -- and it's consistent with my reporting, administration policy and at least part of Hill's answer -- then Rice did not "agreed to a bilateral meeting" with North Korea in the summer of 2005.

Hill continued his response to Wicker at the hearing:

The Chinese came, but the North Koreans were not willing to carry on the meeting with the Chinese. So I was there in the meeting room. The North Koreans were arriving, and the Chinese were disappearing. So the question I had -- and Secretary Rice was in the air in between Anchorage, where she had a refueling stop, and coming into Beijing. So the audible I had to call at that point was, do I continue the meeting or do I walk out?

That is, do I adhere to the stated policy of the president or do I freelance? Hill decided to freelance. And, as Chinoy points out, he did not have to call an audible at all. "He could have called Rice on her plane to ask for guidance. Instead, displaying the willingness to take risks and to stretch -- if not ignore -- his instructions that would characterize his modus operandi in the coming months, Hill decided to go ahead on his own and present her with a fait accompli."

More Hill, from the hearing:

Secretary Rice arrived that night in Beijing, and in the morning -- and I remember this very clearly -- she was quite angry, but quite angry with the Chinese for not having remained through the process. And she expressed that directly to the Chinese foreign minister in a meeting that I attended -- that is, the next morning. So that was the incident with respect to the meeting with the North Koreans.

This presents a question. If Secretary Rice had "agreed" to "have a bilateral meeting" with the North Koreans, as Hill testified under oath, why would she have been "quite angry" that the Chinese did not attend the meeting? On its face, Hill's testimony makes no sense.

Wicker concluded by asking HIll whether he and Rice had a confrontation about the "audible" Hill called. "Never," Hill responded.

If Hill "remembers this quite clearly," he seemed to remember it a different way shortly after the incident took place. Again to Chinoy:

When Rice arrived in Beijing later that night, Hill went to her hotel suite. "The bad news," he told her, "is that the Chinese didn't show up. But the good news is that the North Koreans announced they would come back to the talks." Rice was not amused, although Hill felt that, since getting the talks under way again was one of her goals, her anger would pass.

There are two possibilities: HIll told the truth in his testimony and Chinoy's account is wrong. Or Hill lied under oath.

If I had to bet, I'd bet on the latter. Why? Chinoy quotes Hill directly from his conversation with Rice and goes on to describe how Hill "felt" about their confrontation -- two facts that strongly suggest Hill was Chinoy's source.

And on pp. 368-369, Chinoy lists the people he interviewed for his book. Rice is not among them.

Hill's rogue diplomacy was not a one-time thing. He did the same thing in the fall of 2006. Three weeks after President Bush declared at a press conference that the U.S. would not meet bilaterally with the North Koreans, Hill sat down with Kim Gye Gwan, his North Korean counterpart.

In doing so, Hill overruled the president to engage a rogue state, included on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terror. And he did so, we now know, at a time when North Korea was proliferating nuclear technology to Syria, another state sponsor of terror, in a facility that was financed, at least in part, by Iran, another state sponsor of terror.

And for this he is rewarded with the country's most important diplomatic post?

It seems clear that Hill twice disregarded presidential policy and ignored instructions that expressly forbade him from a bilateral meeting with North Korea.

Did he lie about it, too?

File this in the ever-growing "it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-serious" that characterizes the Bush administration's second-term foreign policy. After North Korea publicly promised earlier this week to restore its nuclear facilities "to their original state," senior US negotiator Chris Hill characterized the move as North Korea striking a "very tough negotiating position." The Agence France Presse headline notes: "US bewildered, disappointed over North Korean nuclear defiance."

How is it that anyone could possible find themselves "bewildered" by North Korean nuclear defiance? And yet that is where Condoleezza Rice and the White House find themselves these days. "The North Korean actions are very disappointing and run counter to the expectations of the members of the six party talks and the international community," said a White House spokesman earlier this week.

If the North Korean actions "run counter to the expectations" of the Bush administration and others facilitating the appeasement, they were utterly predictable to anyone who has read the newspaper regularly for the past decade.

Here's a three-sentence summary of just the past two years: In October 2006, North Korea tested a nuclear weapon and earned the condemnation of the world and stern warnings from the Bush administration. Then, last spring, after promising better behavior, North Korea was caught proliferating nuclear technology to Syria, the world's second-leading state sponsor of terror, and the Bush administration, after keeping this information secret for months in order to protect its diplomatic efforts with Kim Jong Il, once again thundered warnings against further nuclear development and proliferation. Then, in a triumph of the diplomacy of dreams, the Bush administration proposed even more concessions -- offering to lift key economic sanctions on North Korea and remove the rogue regime from the list of state sponsors of terror.

And now, to the surprise of few outside the State Department, North Korea has refused to honor its obligations under the six-party talks and seems as determined as ever to continue its nuclear program.

So how long until the State Department offers new concessions?

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said today that North Korea would be taken off of the U.S. list of state sponsors of terror and will no longer be sanctioned under the Trading with Enemies Act. And what does North Korea have to do to get these long-sought rewards? Basically, do what it had promised to do months ago -- provide an exhaustive declaration of its nuclear activities. The new concessions follow the disclosure last fall of intelligence demonstrating that North Korea was helping Syria with its nuclear program.

The lesson: Break promises and proliferate and the State Department will reward you.

If John McCain is looking for places to break with the Bush administration, its Clinton-lite approach to North Korea would be a good place to start.