The North Korean threat is America’s most pressing and potentially deadly dilemma. I have thought for some time that we are drifting toward war, and nothing in Henry Kissinger’s long Washington Post Op-Ed today changes my mind. Kissinger himself quotes with approval former defense Secretary William Perry’s recent warnings that once the spent fuel rods from Yongbyon are reprocessed, war with Korea is next to inevitable. Kissinger’s piece is notable in several ways. First, it stresses (obliquely, of course) the extent to which our interests are now at odds with the South Koreans. North Korea’s nukes add little to the already existing threat to Seoul from conventional artillery. So the South Koreans have no direct stake in preventing a nuclear armed North Korea. Kissinger makes it clear that the coming multilateral negotiations are just as important for forcing South Korea to help us as they are for coercing the North. Kissinger’s envisioned solution is a pure trade of North Korea’s nuclear capacity for security guarantees. Kissinger leaves all questions of aid and/or regime change outside the framework of negotiations. His hope appears to be the creation of sufficient mutual interest in controlling the North among China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea that, over time, and in response to North Korea’s post-negotiation behavior, the coalition could deploy the right combination of carrots and sticks to bring about either regime change or reform. But Kissinger really says nothing of significance about how we can overcome the fundamental obstacles to a negotiated settlement. He does acknowledge the likelihood that the North Koreans will simply use protracted negotiations to complete the reprocessing of the fuel rods. But Kissinger is obviously pessimistic about our ability to enforce a time deadline on the North Koreans. Kissinger talks about containing a nuclear North Korea after failed negotiations with missile defense, but says absolutely nothing about the sale of nuclear material or weapons to terrorists–the real (and unpreventable) danger. And Kissinger says nothing about how verification of an agreement could be achieved. The truth is, Kim Jong Il will never give inspectors what they would need–free run of his vast underground military system. So we still seem to me on a path that is likely to end in either a terrible terrorist attack on the United States, war with North Korea, or both.