Walking down a side street in Shanghai's French Concession, a partially preserved corner of that city's gloried and turbulent past, visitors come upon an ivy-covered house that served as the headquarters for the Shanghai branch of the Communist Party in the 1940s. Here the spartan quarters of Mao's second in command, Zhou Enlai, are carefully preserved, the narrow beds and wooden desks evoking a simpler, revolutionary China.

A short ride away, across the murky waters of the Huangpu River, monuments to the new China are being erected in what was farmland less than two decades ago. The Pudong New Area, with its clusters of highrise office towers and multi-story shopping malls, is emblematic of the rush to wealth and economic power that now drives China.

These were among the images from a visit to China by a delegation of scholars from the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center from April 8-14, 2007. Though time was short, the group managed to visit Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Beijing.

Fulfilling Shorenstein APARC's mission to carry its work "into Asia," the delegation met senior officials from government and business and held wide-ranging exchanges with Chinese scholars and policymakers at leading universities and research institutions. The conversation ranged from China's development strategy to the current state of relations between China and its longtime rival and neighbor, Japan.

The delegation was led by Shorenstein APARC director and professor of sociology Gi-Wook Shin and by professor of political science Jean C. Oi, who has launched the center's new China studies program. The group included Shorenstein distinguished fellow Ambassador Michael H. Armacost, associate director for research Daniel C. Sneider, and senior program and outreach coordinator Neeley Main. In Beijing, Freeman Spogli Institute director Coit Blacker joined the delegation, as did Shorenstein APARC's Scott Rozelle.

The trip started in Shanghai, a dynamic center of finance and industry that has drawn in many Stanford graduates. State-owned enterprises such as Baosteel, one of the world's largest steel producers, are in the midst of becoming players in the global marketplace. From Baosteel's sprawling complex of docks, blast furnaces, and rolling mills along an estuary of the Yangtze River, products are now being dispatched around the world. In a meeting, the leadership of the Baosteel Group expressed an eagerness to tap into the educational and training opportunities offered at Stanford University.

Shanghai is not only the business capital but also a political center, rivaling Beijing. The Shanghai Institute for International Studies is an unofficial foreign relations arm of the Shanghai government. Shanghai Institute scholars are also players in national policy debate on many key issues facing China, such as relations with Taiwan, with Japan, and even with the Korean peninsula.

The scholars presented their views on a wide range of issues, from the preparations for the 17th Congress of the Communist Party this coming fall to emerging structures of regional integration in East Asia. Professor Xu Mingqi, who is also a senior leader of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, explained that China's development strategy is shifting toward a more balanced approach. Whereas local government officials previously were pressed to meet targets for GDP growth, foreign investment, and export volume, now they must also raise employment levels, close the growing income gap, and provide social security.

Hangzhou, considered one of the most beautiful cities in China, is a two-hour drive south of Shanghai. The modern roadway passed a tableau of the suburbanization of this part of China's countryside, with multi-story brick homes mushrooming amidst the fields. The delegation arrived at Zhejiang University, considered among the best of China's provincial higher educational institutions and growing rapidly in size and scope.

The Shorenstein APARC delegation met with faculty members from Zhejiang's social science departments, who briefed the delegation on their research work in areas such as distance education, international relations, Chinese history, even a school of Korean studies. Zhejiang is also the site of a new research institution, the Zhejiang Institute for Innovation (ZII), founded by Stanford engineering graduate Min Zhu, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who is determined to bring the lessons of Stanford and the valley to his home province and his undergraduate alma mater. ZII aims to foster applied research that can tie the university to the vibrant entrepreneurial culture of Zhejiang province. Shorenstein APARC researchers may soon be carrying out fieldwork in this laboratory of change, based at ZII.

Beijing, however, is still the place that matters most in China, not only in the realm of government but also when it comes to academic scholarship. The delegation met with two of Shorenstein APARC's longtime corporate affiliates in China: PetroChina, the state-owned oil and gas giant, and the People's Bank of China. Shorenstein APARC dined with a lively group of Chinese journalists, organized by former Stanford Knight fellow Hu Shuli, the editor of Caijing Magazine, considered China's leading independent business publication.

The substantive task was to forge new ties with key research institutions. The current state of China's development strategy was again on the agenda when the delegation met with senior officials from the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), formerly China's State Planning Commission. Alongside the NDRC, the delegation met as well with the leadership of an offshoot of China's State Council, the China Development Research Foundation, which is doing important work in promoting good governance in areas such as poverty alleviation, nutrition, and budgeting. Those conversations were echoed later in our meetings with scholars from Peking University's School of Government.

Shorenstein APARC's own China program, as Oi explained, is focused on understanding the tensions that arise as China grapples with the consequences of its rapid economic development. Out of the meetings in Beijing, an ongoing dialogue has begun, to be advanced this summer with a visit from a NDRC delegation and in the fall with an international conference at Stanford on China's Growing Pains.

The delegation also engaged in frank and useful exchanges on a variety of international relations issues. We had an extended meeting with scholars and leaders of the China Reform Forum (CRF), a think-tank associated with the Communist Party's Central Party School, the premier institution for training party leaders and officials. The CRF is credited with authoring important concepts such as the foreign policy doctrine of China's "Peaceful Rise." These discussions were followed by a visit and exchange with scholars from Peking University's widely respected School of International Studies.

The scholars shared analysis of the current state of the North Korean nuclear negotiations, as well as evaluating the outcome of Chinese Premier Wen Jibao's visit that week to Japan. Over dinner with CRF Vice Chairman Ding Kuisong, the conversation turned to the American presidential politics and the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.

Professors Blacker, Shin, and Oi also met with senior officials of Peking University, as part of an ongoing dialogue about cooperation between these two premier institutions of higher education.

Little more than a decade ago, Rowen's answer to the question posed by this essay's title was the year 2015. His assessment, published in the Fall 1996 issue of the National Interest, began by observing that all countries (leaving aside states that make nearly all their money from oil exports) which had attained a Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPpc) of at least US$8,000 per year (as measured by the Purchasing-Power Parity or PPP standard for the year 1995) stood no worse than Partly Free in the ratings of political rights and civil liberties published annually by Freedom House (FH).

As China's economy was growing at a rate that promised to carry it to a level near or beyond that GDPpc benchmark by 2015, Rowen reasoned that this, the world's largest country, was a good bet to move into the Partly Free category as well. Since then, China has remained deep in Not Free territory even though its civil-liberties score has improved a bit -- from an absolutely abysmal 7 to a still-sorry 6 on the 7-point FH scale -- while its political-rights score has remained stuck at the worst level. Yet today, surveying matters from a point slightly more than midway between 1996 and 2015, Rowen stands by his main conclusion: China will in the short term continue to warrant a Not Free classification, but by 2015 it should edge into the Partly Free category. Indeed, Rowen goes further and predicts that, should China's economy and the educational attainments of its population continue to grow as they have in recent years, the more than one-sixth of the world's people who live in China will by 2025 be citizens of a country correctly classed as belonging to the Free nations of the earth.

The six-party agreement reached last week in Beijing to cap North Korea's nuclear program was a triumph for diplomacy. But contrary to much of the conventional wisdom in recent days, the fruits of the victory fall mostly to the North Koreans.

In the short term, the deal will halt the country's production of nuclear materials, limiting its ability to expand a nuclear arsenal tested in October. But for this concession, the North Koreans get to keep that arsenal intact, at least for now, and stand to make significant economic and political gains in relations with the United States, China and South Korea.

Some critics say the Beijing agreement is a lesser version of "the Agreed Framework" reached in 1994 by the Clinton administration, later cast aside by President Bush. Former Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Perry, speaking Tuesday at the Asia Society, characterized the new agreement as "thin gruel," while backing it as "a small but a very important step forward."

The ultimate judgment will await the uncertain implementation of numerous crucial, but still vaguely defined, steps down the road. The North Koreans are certain to exploit every ambiguity in the text and to drag out the phase that calls for actual dismantlement of their nuclear program and weapons.

Unfortunately, the process that led to this moment suggests that this will not go well. Contrary to the administration's version of events, Pyongyang was not dragged to this deal by pressure -- not from Washington and not from North Korea's angry patrons in Beijing.

"We don't have the North Koreans on the ropes," a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst who has watched that closeted country for decades said. "We don't have them on the run."

On the contrary, there is ample evidence that this agreement is yet another demonstration of North Korea's uniquely successful brand of negotiation via escalation: a use of brinkmanship and willingness to go up to and over the line that converts weakness into leverage.

Against that approach, the Bush administration's preference for using tools of coercion and threat, even of pre-emptive war, failed. If anything, it brought about the very opposite outcome than the United States envisioned: it encouraged North Korea to move even more rapidly to develop and test a nuclear weapon.

The pattern of brinkmanship was already clear during the Clinton years -- what Korea expert Scott Snyder famously termed "negotiating on the edge." When confronted, Snyder noted, the North Koreans typically responded by accelerating the crisis, unworried by the consequences. The fear of appearing weak has underlined all North Korean behavior.

The Bush administration came into office almost seeking a confrontation, as the president and many of his advisers were convinced the 1994 deal was fatally flawed. Ironically, the North Koreans thought they were on the verge of strategic breakthrough, after a deal to halt missile tests and preparations for President Clinton to visit Pyongyang in the final weeks of his administration. An improved relationship with the United States would balance the power of its Chinese patron, whom North Korea deeply distrusts, and give it legitimacy in an ongoing struggle with South Korea for leadership on the Korean peninsula.

Instead Bush froze the Clinton framework and sought a new, tougher approach. In January 2002, Bush delivered his famous State of the Union depiction of North Korea as a member of the "axis of evil," along with Iran and Iraq. That October, U.S. negotiators confronted Pyongyang with accusations of cheating by pursuing a clandestine uranium-enrichment program.

The 1994 agreement collapsed amid a tit-for-tat series of escalatory moves -- beginning with a U.S. cutoff of heavy fuel oil and leading to North Korea ousting international inspectors, withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and restarting its reactor and recycling facility to produce plutonium. Bush vowed that the United States would not "be blackmailed."

Meanwhile, preparations for war in Iraq were mounting. The Bush administration was convinced the awesome display of U.S. power would successfully intimidate the other two points on the axis of evil, North Korea and Iran.

"We are hopeful," then senior State Department official John Bolton dryly said as the invasion came to a close, "that a number of regimes will draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq -- that the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is not in their interest."

American threat

The North Korean officials drew an entirely different conclusion: they could not afford to seem weak in the face of what they perceived as an American threat to terminate their regime.

"Only tremendous military deterrent force powerful enough to decisively beat back an attack supported by ultra-modern weapons can avert a war and protect the security of the country," said an official statement issued April 6. "This is the lesson drawn from the Iraqi war."

A drawn-out process of negotiations began later that month, beginning with a three-way meeting in China and moving that summer to six-party talks that also included South Korea, Japan and Russia. The U.S. position was to deny Pyongyang what it wanted most -- direct talks with Washington -- and to demand verified dismantlement of its nuclear program, on the model of Libya, before any rewards, economic or political, were provided.

As the war in Iraq wore on, and the threat of military force became less credible, the administration looked for other coercive tools. It forged a multinational agreement to intercept suspicious cargoes and launched a crackdown on illicit North Korea trafficking in drugs and counterfeit currency and goods, which are believed to be the main source of support for the regime's elite.

The North Koreans countered with their own demands, offering a plan to freeze their nuclear program, with compensation, followed by a coordinated series of reciprocal steps leading toward eliminating the program. Their offers were accompanied by statements that they already had the bomb and were prepared to test it.

When the Bush administration started its second term in 2005, it attempted to escalate pressure -- this time with charges that North Korea was exporting nuclear materials to the Middle East and calls for China to put pressure on its difficult clients. Pyongyang moved to unload a second set of spent fuel from its reactor and reprocess it -- American experts believe North Korea created six to eight bombs worth of plutonium after 2002.

Agreement sours

A return to the bargaining table in September 2005 yielded an agreement on the principles that would underlie a denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. But that sign of progress disappeared within hours as both sides sparred over the meaning of a pledge to build nuclear power reactors for North Korea as compensation for it dismantling its nuclear weapons.

The imposition of measures to curb the flow of North Korean "illicit" money through Chinese and other banks added to the acrimony. Administration officials described this as a legal issue driven by Treasury Department efforts to curb counterfeiting. But as Bush admitted recently, it was used as leverage in the nuclear talks.

Throughout the past year, Bush administration officials expressed confidence that these measures were causing serious pain to the North Korean leadership. Some even talked boldly of "turning out the lights" in Pyongyang through such sanctions.

But Pyongyang could read the news from Iraq as well as any American voter. Instead of having its lights turned out, North Koreans put up their own light shows. On July 4, a date chosen with apparent intent, they carried out a test of a battery of ballistic missiles, in defiance of warnings, including one from China. A U.N. resolution condemning the action -- and other steps, including a South Korean suspension of food and fertilizer aid and Chinese attempts to slow trade -- followed.

In October, again in defiance of pressure from all fronts, the North Koreans tested a nuclear device. This prompted another U.N. resolution, backed by China, to impose limited economic sanctions. But although China was clearly angered, there is little evidence it moved to cut off the lifeline of trade, particularly energy supplies.

North Korea's willingness to cross what everyone believed was a "red line" changed the equation permanently. It allowed Pyongyang to return to the six-party talks, stalled for more than a year, but now from a position of strength. At the meeting in December, the North Koreans refused to discuss any other issues unless the U.S. financial sanctions were removed. North Korean officials hinted of preparations for a second test.

The United States blinked, agreeing to hold long-sought direct talks, held in Berlin in mid-January. The talks yielded the outlines of the Beijing deal but also a separate U.S. concession to lift the financial measures within 30 days of signing a broader deal.

The Beijing agreement more closely resembles North Korea's June 2004 freeze proposal than it does the U.S. insistence that dismantling nuclear weapons precede any substantial rewards. Clearly, this is a deal the Bush administration would not have made, says Scott Snyder, "if it were not tied down with so many other problems."

North Korea made its own concessions in the Beijing agreement. But "it doesn't necessarily mean Pyongyang is backing down or preparing to abandon its nuclear weapons," argues Kim Sung Han, a senior analyst at the South Korean Foreign Ministry's research institute.

N. Korea's rewards

Administration officials point out that the initial freeze of North Korea's nuclear program, to be implemented in two months, yields only minor compensation, about 50,000 tons of heavy fuel oil. But that is not what Pyongyang sees as its real reward. The lifting of financial measures will facilitate its rapidly growing trade with China and South Korea. Even more important, the South Korean government has already signaled it will now lift the ban on large-scale fertilizer and food shipments -- which are crucial to North Korea's spring planting.

Less visible, but no less vital, the North Koreans are trying to hold off a conservative comeback to power in the South Korean presidential election in December. A North-South summit meeting may take place, which would be part of an effort by the progressive South Korean government to shore up its support.

Ultimately, the Beijing agreement may yield a trade of nuclear facilities for economic and political relations, leaving the nuclear arsenal capped but still intact. For some U.S. experts, that is sufficient.

"It will limit the size of the nuclear arsenal and the amount of bomb fuel," observes former Los Alamos nuclear laboratory director and Stanford scholar Siegfried Hecker. And that, he says, should make it less likely North Korea would sell its nuclear materials or expertise to Iran.

The bargain made in Beijing flows inexorably from North Korea's skillful playing of the escalation game. But it may be the best outcome possible, given that North Korea has already crossed the nuclear threshold and that the Bush administration has squandered U.S. power in the deserts of Iraq.

Reprinted with permission from the San Jose Mercury News.

To read the seismic signal sent from an abandoned coal mine in the mountains of North Korea's coast, you must first recognize that it represents four major failures, two grave dangers, and one big opportunity.

The apparent explosion of a nuclear device, coming after two decades of trying to stop North Korea from achieving this goal, is a manifest failure of policy on four fronts -- a failure of U.S. nuclear non-proliferation policy, a failure of international diplomacy, a failure of Chinese leadership and a failure of South Korea's strategy of engaging the North.

Having failed so completely, the world now faces two grave dangers. The first is the very real threat of war on the Korean Peninsula, triggered by a series of escalatory actions in the wake of the bomb test. The second is the danger that North Korea will proliferate its nuclear technology, materials or know-how to others -- not the least to another nuclear hopeful, Iran.

But there remains a lone and tenuous opportunity. Having removed all ambiguity about its nuclear ambitions, North Korea may finally have created a common sense of threat that will galvanize the kind of concerted international action that so far has been absent.

THE FOUR FAILURES

Non-proliferation failure

The United States has spent two decades trying to stop North Korea from going nuclear, a turbulent period of crisis and negotiation that even went to the brink of war. At least three administrations confronted this problem and none, certainly not the Bush administration, can escape blame.

North Korea agreed to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985, but it stalled before signing an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1992 to place its nuclear facilities under international safeguards and inspections. During that time the North Koreans reprocessed some spent fuel from their reactor into plutonium - an amount that American intelligence believes was enough for building one or two warheads.

North Korea's resistance to full inspections, while it kept pulling spent fuel rods out of its reactor, provoked a crisis in 1994 and led the Clinton administration to ready military forces to strike the North's nuclear facilities. In a last-minute deal, North Korea froze its reactor and reprocessing facilities, effectively halting plutonium production under IAEA supervision. In exchange, the United States, Japan, South Korea and others agreed to construct two light-water reactors for North Korea and to supply fuel oil until the reactors came online.

The deal was troubled from the start. Neither party was satisfied with the compromise or the way it was to be implemented. By the late 1990s, the North had begun a secret effort to acquire uranium-enrichment technology from Pakistan and, in 1998, tested a long-range ballistic missile. Despite this, the plutonium freeze remained in place. But it did not survive the Bush administration.

The Bush administration came into office challenging the value of the agreement and froze contacts with the North. After receiving intelligence showing moves to build enrichment facilities, it confronted North Korean officials at an acrimonious meeting in Pyongyang in October 2002.

The United States halted fuel shipments a month later, and, in early 2003, the North Koreans expelled IAEA inspectors and withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. They proceeded to reprocess the fuel rods they had stored for a decade, producing enough plutonium, intelligence estimates say, for four to six nuclear warheads. In February 2005, the North Koreans announced they had manufactured nuclear weapons. Last week, they apparently made good on that declaration.

Blame aside, North Korea's emergence as the world's ninth nuclear power may be the most serious failure in non-proliferation history. Unlike India and Pakistan, which remained outside the system of international treaties, North Korea acted in defiance of those controls. Who might be next?

Diplomatic failure

Unlike Iraq, the attempt to stop North Korea's nuclear program has relied on the tools of diplomacy, accompanied by economic incentives and coercive sanctions.

But serious questions have been raised from the start about the sincerity and methods of the diplomatic efforts, particularly on the part of the United States and North Korea. The Bush administration has insisted -- and the president continues to make this argument -- that direct talks with North Korea do not work. Pyongyang has tried to frame everything as an issue with Washington, undermining talks that involved others, including South Korea.

Bush's stance lends credibility to those who charge the administration seeks "regime change," not a compromise that it believes will lend legitimacy to Kim Jong Il. The North Koreans now appear to have used the talks to buy time and build bombs.

Diplomacy has, at American insistence, consisted of six-party talks, held under Chinese auspices and including both Koreas, Japan and Russia. In truth, little real negotiating went on at these gatherings, at least until the last full round of talks in September 2005. In contrast to the thousands of hours of negotiations between Americans and North Koreans that led to the 1994 deal, there have been only tens of hours of actual give and take.

It is intriguing that the September agreement on a statement of principles for denuclearization came only after the State Department's chief negotiator was finally allowed to talk to his North Korean counterpart at length. Even then, their agreement evaporated almost immediately as they dueled publicly over the deal's meaning. American financial sanctions against North Korean currency counterfeiting further clouded the atmosphere, and direct contacts ground to a halt.

China's failure

The North Korean nuclear crisis is also a failure of China's bid for regional, if not global leadership. North Korea is an ally of China, a relationship that goes back more than half a century to the Korean War, when Chinese "volunteers" poured across the border to prevent an American victory. Their relationship has become more difficult since China embarked on market reforms while North Korea clung to its peculiar brand of Stalinism.

China has been torn between its loyalty to Pyongyang, its desire to maintain a stable balance of power in the region and its fear that the North's nuclear ambitions could provoke conflict on its borders. By becoming host for the six-party talks, Beijing stepped into an unusual leadership role.

The Bush administration was eager to move the burden of the North Korean problem onto the Chinese. Some administration hard-liners argued that China had the power to trigger the collapse of Kim Jung Il's regime by cutting off energy and food supplies.

Time and again, Beijing dragged the North Koreans back to the negotiating table, while also pushing Washington to engage Pyongyang in the talks. But Chinese irritation over American inflexibility has now been trumped by North Korea's defiance. Chinese policy-makers now wonder how they can punish the North without creating chaos, or war.

Failure of engagement

The final failure lies on the doorstep of South Korea's 10-year-long policy of engagement. The "sunshine policy" asserted that the North could be induced to give up its nuclear option by opening up the isolated communist state and promoting the forces of Chinese-style reform.

After a historic summit meeting in 2000, South Korean aid and trade, even tourists, flowed into the North. South Koreans lost their fear of a former foe, seeing it more as an impoverished lost brother than a mortal threat. Tensions with their American allies rose because of a gap in the North's perceived threat. The United States wondered why its troops should continue to defend South Korea.

Now South Koreans must confront the possibility that the North may have used engagement only to buy time.

THE TWO DANGERS

Threat of war

With eyes on Iraq and the Middle East, the Korean Peninsula has been far from the center of American attention. American forces based in South Korea and Japan have been dispatched to Iraq.

Yet the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas remains the most militarized frontier on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of well-armed soldiers poised against each other. Clashes along that frontier used to be commonplace and there are signs of a renewal of tensions. The danger of unintended escalation cannot be dismissed.

What might happen if a U.S. naval vessel, moving to inspect a North Korean freighter - as the U.N. resolution may authorize - is fired on or even captured, as the USS Pueblo was in 1968? It is a frightening scenario already worrying some at the Pentagon and the State Department.

Risk of proliferation

More than anything else, American policy-makers fear that North Korea, emboldened by its nuclear success and perhaps desperate for funds amid economic sanctions, might sell its nuclear expertise to Iran and others, including terrorist groups.

For Pyongyang, an alliance with Iran is a logical response to American and global pressure. The North Koreans have sold ballistic missiles to Tehran since the 1980s and rumors of nuclear cooperation persist.

An American effort to interdict the movement of ships and planes to Iran -- with possible U.N. backing - is probable. But the most likely transit is across the long and loosely controlled land border with China. The amount of plutonium needed to make a warhead is the size of a grapefruit and hard to detect - creating yet another nightmare scenario.

THE OPPORTUNITY

In this otherwise bleak landscape, there is an opportunity. For the first time, there is a chance of a consensus among the key players -- China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the United States. The passage of a U.N. resolution is a small step in that direction. But the real test will come next, as the nations must cooperate to put pressure on North Korea, while coolly navigating the perils of war and making sure to leave open a diplomatic exit.

There is a slim chance of such concerted action, and a limited window for achieving it. Not everyone sees the dangers the same way. Signs of rethinking errors of the past are no more evident in Beijing and Seoul than they are in Washington or Tokyo. Ultimately, however, if they are to seize this moment of opportunity, all parties must face up to the fact that the policies of the past have failed.

Pre-emption used to be the watchword of Bush foreign policy. The world's sole superpower would not hesitate to wield force against an imminent threat to its security. The old doctrines of the Cold War era -- of containment and deterrence of a potential enemy -- were disdained as weakness.

Now, facing the most serious national security challenge since the end of the Cold War -- the nuclear weapons programs of Iran and North Korea -- the administration is reaching back to those oldies but goodies.

The determination of Iran and North Korea to develop nuclear weapons has so far been largely unchecked by this administration. The North Koreans, since breaking out of the freeze agreed to during the Clinton administration, have been steadily producing plutonium, and presumably warheads. The Iranians, after the election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, reversed their deal to suspend uranium-enrichment activities, the crucial step toward nuclear weapons.

Diplomatic negotiations in both cases have produced little movement. But a military strike on their nuclear facilities is almost inconceivable. The danger of potentially horrendous retaliation and the sapping of American will and resources in Iraq have almost killed that option.

"As shaky as a policy of containment is, it is certainly preferable to confrontation, 'rollback,' or 'regime change' through military force,'' wrote conservative national security expert Thomas Donnelly in a recent analysis. "Containment is, in fact, regime change by tolerable means, and the solution to the problems of Iran and North Korea lie in an indirect approach.''

While we try to contain a nuclear Iran and North Korea, suggested Donnelly, we should surround Iran with movements for democratic change in Iraq and Afghanistan. North Korea, he believes, will be changed through Chinese influence.

Donnelly cautions that there may be circumstances when containment proves even more risky than intervention -- say if Iran tries to slip nuclear materials to Islamist terrorists. Iran is less stable than the Soviet Union, though it is worth remembering that the first 15 years of the Cold War brought us to the brink of nuclear war once and close to it several times.

For the administration, this is a stealth policy shift. That is no surprise. It flows directly from the mess in Iraq, a mistake the administration can never really acknowledge.

For those who once touted American global domination, it is still hard to face the reality that containment is impossible without allies and partners. By ourselves, we cannot press those regimes by cutting off their access to investment and advanced technology.

The administration is rightly moving to take Iran to the United Nations Security Council to seek a mandate to enforce the demands of the International Atomic Energy Agency. North Korea is undoubtedly watching this carefully.

China and Russia, who have veto power in the Security Council, are reluctantly going along. But they still resist any move to impose economic sanctions against Iran. Nor are the Europeans, Japanese and others who depend on oil and gas from Iran eager to halt their investment and trade.

Similarly in the case of North Korea, the Chinese and South Koreans are not prepared to cut the flow of economic aid and investment into the otherwise isolated North Korean state. This is less a case of economic interests than a fear that sanctions will escalate to greater confrontation, even war.

"The strategic challenge the Bush administration faced was to convince the rest of the world that Iran is more dangerous than the United States,'' says nuclear proliferation expert George Perkovich. "They finally did it -- and it took Ahmadinejad to do it,'' referring to the inflammatory rhetoric, including threats to "wipe Israel off the map,'' issued by the Iranian leader.

The administration made some headway down the same path with North Korea by engaging in direct talks with that regime this past fall, dispelling the image that the United States was unwilling to negotiate. But that progress has been undermined recently because hard-liners inside the Bush administration pulled the plug on such talks.

Managing an effective containment partnership will be a huge challenge. And there is still tremendous resistance inside the administration to engaging and negotiating -- and compromising -- with the enemy. But that was always a part of making containment succeed, even at the height of the Cold War.

Containment is no silver bullet. It is merely, as Donnelly puts it, "the least bad alternative, but not by a lot, and not under all circumstances.'' And right now, it is the only game in town.