Did Kim come clean?

For a man whose approval rating rests at a chilly 23%, whose second term can be charitably called a mess, and who may go down in history as having breathed new life into moribund big governmentism at the price of wrecking his own party, President Bush looked awfully satisfied today. He does have a couple of reasons to: Two of the Supreme Court justices he appointed protected our 2nd amendment rights today, and the president announced a landmark nuclear deal with North Korea.

The deal has North Korea renouncing its nuclear weapons program and, among other things, is removed from the US terrorism watch list. As with any deal involving a charter member of the "axis of evil," the devil in this deal is very much in the details and in Pyongyang's actual, verifiable compliance.

Liberals will probably ignore this deal (if they don't attempt to claim some absurd credit for it) and conservatives will be mostly skeptical of it. I expect former UN ambassador John Bolton to hit the air shortly and call it a sell-out, and I'm not here to say whether he's right or wrong on that. The deal could go down as either a major blunder or a major victory: It will be one or the other but it's too soon to tell which it will be. Kim Jong-Il has his father's tendency to welch on deals and cheat at the first possible moment. North Korea cheated on the 1994 Agreed Framework deal that Jimmy Carter negotiated on behalf of the Clinton administration before the ink was even dry on Kim Il-Sung's signature. The Bush administration should not trust North Korea, and should continually verify that it is living up to its end of the bargain.

While Mr. Bolton's skepticism (once he actually voices it) is warranted, there area few major differences between this deal and the 1994 deal. This deal is born of an entirely different context than that earlier, and failed, deal. The Bush administration first pursued the problem of weapons proliferation in Iraq by ousting Saddam Hussein in 2003; the Clinton administration had taken no similar action and thus posed less of a credible threat to the bellicose Kim regime. For the past several years, the Bush administration has pursued enforcing anti-proliferation alongside allies like Japan, Russia and most of Europe via the Proliferation Security Initiative, and by doggedly sticking to the Six-Party Talks in the face of calls from the left to go unilateral in one-on-one talks with North Korea. Those talks put pressure on North Korea from its old allies in Russia and China, not to mention its mortal enemy (and staunch US ally) Japan. As South Korea softened against North Korea, Japan's position hardened, and China and Russia shifted to less friendly stances toward their troublesome allies in Pyongyang. Face-to-face talks would have taken the regional powers out of the picture, allowing Kim to focus exclusively on pressuring the US. The Bush administration also worked with banks around the world to crack down on North Korean currency counterfeiting. And the Bush administration probably greenlit the Israeli raid on a suspected North Korean nuclear facility in the Syrian desert in 2007, signaling that even in the face of a difficult war in Iraq, military action was never off the table. Taken together, these steps put Kim in a cage and kept him there as much as it's possible to do so, while also alienating him from his allies in Moscow and Beijing. And last but not least, the deal wasn't negotiated by the tyrant-loving worst ex-president in American history, Jimmy Carter, on behalf of a credulous Clinton administration. That alone means this deal stands a much greater chance of holding up.

I think this deal probably stands a 50-50 chance of succeeding, but if it does, it will have made the world safer. It's now up to Kim to decide how ronery he'll be.

AS IF ON CUE: Matthew Yglesias manages to denounce Bush while praising the deal that Bush fostered over the course of several years and against criticism mostly from the left, focusing credit on Assistant Secy of State Christopher Hill. Who works for Bush and was acting in concert with Bush's policies, of course. Left unsaid is what this "better deal" Yglesias claims the administration could have had years ago was, and why he (Bush or Ygelsias, take your pick) would have trusted the North Koreans to stick to it.