The recent "food for freeze" agreement between the United States and North Korea has been described accurately by the State Department as reflecting "important, if limited, progress" and inaccurately by the media as constituting a "breakthrough" in the seemingly endless march toward Korean Peninsula denuclearization.
The good news is that the agreement makes a future breakthrough once again possible, after more than three years of stalemate, which began when the Six-Party Talks broke down, during the Bush administration, in the fall of 2008.
The bad news is that we are not any closer today to actual denuclearization than we were three years ago and have a long uphill slog ahead of us, something that the Obama administration readily admits.