A friend writes:

In the 1994 North Korea crisis, Clinton established that the U.S. will not use force to prevent the nuclear breakout of a rogue state (which nobody knew before then). That dealt a potentially mortal blow to the nonproliferation regime, because it removed the only obvious deterrent to piddly countries flouting it left and right. And it left us with a huge immediate problem, because it gave Iran the green light to launch into a nuclear program at top speed.
Now the U.S. has defaulted to a policy of seeking to convince everyone that a rogue state will not be able to gain strategic advantage from a nuclear weapon, and that its security will be endangered not enhanced. And here is where I have to disagree somewhat with your column. I believe this is a policy of more than talk, and I believe there is some promise to it. For all Amb. John Bolton’s criticism of the Six Party Talks, it is important to note that North Korea got much less economic benefit out of them then they did out of the Clinton-era Agreed Framework. For all their bluster earlier this year, they’re acting a lot more like beggars than blackmailers now. So in other words they were able to get less benefit out of actual nuclear weapons than they were able to get out of potential nuclear weapons. That is an important piece of information.
On Iran, take a step back and think about how far we’ve come since even 2003 when our prestige was at an all-time high. The EU3 weren’t even on the same page with us that there was a problem in Iran’s enrichment activity, ipso facto, whether covert or not — their only gripe back then was that Iran had kept the Natanz facility secret. Now we have managed over many years to build an international united front on the basis of a series of propositions that are quite novel and which it was by no means obvious we would be able to get international consensus on. The key of those propositions is that a nuclear program which has no convincing economic rationale must be presumed to be a “diversion for weapons use” under the NPT. That’s not stated in any resolution of course, but it’ the implication of the now-accepted procedure of how great powers respond diplomatically to a challenge against the NPT. Even the dreaded El Baradei has refused to certify Iran in compliance with its non-diversion obligations.
The Obama administration has reached the conclusion that they will not be the first to commit an act of war. Force is almost certainly off the table, except in retaliation for a first Iranian use of force. I know a lot of the people in senior positions of the administration — they’re scared of using force and they’re not afraid to show it. That is bad, because it takes a lot of immediate risks out of Iran’s calculation, and makes us appear weak. But the Obama administration has also reached a consensus to ratchet up the sanctions pressure and diplomatic isolation to unbearable levels — think South Africa in the last years of apartheid — in the hopes that this regime will squeezed to death between its popular opposition at home and the enmity of the international community abroad. The calculation is that Iran’s regime cannot long survive what has happened to North Korea — and that very point has actually been made by leading mullahs in print. The Obama strategy is not just talk. It has some chance of working. And more to the point, it must work, because now, given Obama’s allergy for preemptive force, it is the only realistic scenario for favorable resolution of the crisis.