Tehran Has Studied Pyongyang's Playbook Well

Weekly Standard

. . . "Iran has already learned a number of damaging lessons from North Korea. First, cheating on nuclear deals is permitted. North Korea cheated twice, and we kept coming back for more. President Bill Clinton announced the 1994 Agreed Framework as a deal that would “freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program,” but Pyongyang violated the agreement when it started a covert uranium enrichment program. Washington tried another nuclear deal with the Kim regime, negotiating the 2005 Joint Statement, but the Kim regime built a nuclear reactor in Syria during the negotiations. The reactor was eventually destroyed by Israel in 2007. Normally that would have ended negotiations, proving that North Korea was not a serious interlocutor. Instead, the Kim regime was rewarded for its nuclear proliferation when the Bush administration removed North Korea from the state sponsors of terrorism list in 2008." . . .

Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, was the nonproliferation adviser to the U.S. delegation to the 2005 rounds of the Six-Party Talks and spent more than 17 years in the U.S. government.