Kristof?

When he’s not buying Thai prostitutes, Nick Kristof occasionally gets one right.

But if the Bush administration had just adopted the policies that Colin Powell initially pushed for – and that Mr. Bush largely came to accept several years later – then this mess could probably have been averted.

You don’t have to take it from me. Charles Pritchard, the ambassador and special envoy who was the point man for North Korea in the first Bush administration, says of this administration’s decision-makers: “They blew it.” Another expert still involved in North Korea policy puts it this way: “Their A.B.C. approach – ‘Anything but Clinton’ – led to these problems.”

A bit of background: North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons around 1989, during the first Bush administration, but froze its plutonium program under the 1994 “Agreed Framework” with the Clinton administration. North Korea adhered to the freeze on plutonium production, but about 1999, it secretly started on a second nuclear route involving uranium.

That was much less worrisome than the plutonium program (it still seems to be years from producing a single uranium weapon), and it probably could have been resolved through negotiation, as past crises had been.

Instead, Mr. Bush refused to negotiate bilaterally, so now we have the worst of both worlds: that uranium program is still in place, and the plutonium program is churning out weapons material as well.

I’m uncertain of some of Kristof’s data. In particular, there’s not a ton of really good evidence regarding how many nukes North Korea has, and while Kristof probably knows more people that I do, he doesn’t really provide a basis for his assertions. On the whole, however, he’s right on target. The “anything but Clinton” policy pursued by the Bush administration in 2001 and 2002 has led to a situation in which there are no good options other than the Clinton policy, on worse terms than we could have achieved three years ago.

Unsurprisingly, John Bolton is right in the middle of the whole mess. Indeed, he has pursued, rhetorically at least, a hard line against North Korea even after the rest of the administration gave it up.