WASHINGTON -- In June 1994, as the United States and North Korea stepped back from the brink of war over the North's nuclear weapons program, a moderate consensus in the U.S, South Korean, Japanese and Chinese governments applauded the Agreed Framework for averting a crisis through dialogue and negotiation.

Today, as hawks in the Bush administration resist any dialogue with Pyongyang over new revelations about another secret drive for these weapons, another so-called moderate consensus reminiscent of 1994 has emerged calling for continued dialogue and engagement as the best option. Unfortunately, engagement worked in 1994, but it is both ineffective and infeasible today. Indeed, the true "moderate" position if the North does not come clean on its uranium-enrichment activities is not engagement or a pre-emptive attack, but isolation.

The logic of engagement in 1994 re-played today is mistaken on three counts. First, it assumes that the U.S. can simply start over with North Korea and wind back the engagement clock, implicitly accepting that this instance of North Korean misbehavior is no different from others. On the contrary, Pyongyang's uranium-enrichment activities have meaning far beyond a violation of a standing U.S.-North Korea bilateral arrangement.