One of the biggest questions humankind needs to ask itself when looking at someone like Adolf Hitler is: “How the heck was this allowed to happen?” It’s complicated, but according to The National WWII Museum, Hitler first rose through the ranks of Germany’s Nazi party, then was made chancellor in 1933. By that time, War History Online says that there had already been seven serious assassination attempts made on his life. They started way back in 1921, when an unidentified gunman opened fire during one of his speeches. The same thing happened twice in 1923, and he was shot at again — on four separate occasions — in 1932.

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There was one attempt in 1930 that took some serious pre-planning, and it involved poisoning. Hitler and his cronies were known to regularly eat at Berlin’s Hotel Kaiserhof, and after one meal, literally everyone got sick. It’s not clear what happened, and no one was ever arrested in connection with the mass poisoning, but it’s thought the vegetarian Hitler escaped serious illness because of his dietary preferences.

For the rest of his reign, he employed food tasters … although “employed” isn’t quite right. Margot Woelk was one of 15 girls drafted into civilian service then put to work taste-testing the Fuhrer’s food … just in case someone tried to poison him again. She was the only one to survive: The others were killed by the Soviets (via CBS News).

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The West does not have a strategy of regime change in Russia. However, if its overall efforts prove successful and Ukraine can end the conflict on its own terms, Putin’s regime could fall. A failed war, combined with economic deprivation and loss of prestige, makes regime collapse a possible outcome. While it is hard to see how Putin departs, it is also hard to see how his regime survives such a situation. But although the West has a post-victory strategy for Ukraine, namely a framework for reconstruction and a path toward EU and NATO membership, it lacks a vision for Russia in the aftermath of a Ukrainian victory.

This issue brief assesses the potential for the war to prompt a transition of power in Russia, as well as the possible ramifications of this. It concludes, contrary to much of the prevailing view, that if Putin leaves power, it will likely be due to a reaction against the war and Putin’s hardline approach. The potential for Ukrainian military success to cause regime instability in Moscow has generated understandable nervousness among many Western governments about what could follow Putin. In fact, there is a growing assumption that what follows his reign could very well be worse. Such a pessimistic outlook might seem sober—but, as this issue brief argues, it could very well be wrong. This is because regime supporters and war hawks will, most likely, vigorously seek to keep Putin in power, prop up the regime, and stay the course. Thus, for a transition to occur there will need to be a strong demand for change. This will likely be driven by two interlocking factors: the Putin regime’s loss of legitimacy (with the public, the security services, elites, and the state) and the existence of a clear alternative to Russia’s current path. Ukraine and the West have created the conditions for the first, Putin’s loss of legitimacy. However, the West has not yet offered an alternative vision for Russia’s post-Putin future.

There is a clear and more rational path for Moscow: end the war, reconcile with the West, and reverse Russia’s economic, diplomatic, and cultural isolation. However, while Russia can end the war on its own, reconciling with the West and reversing Russia’s isolation is ultimately up to the West. Thus, as this issue brief argues, building momentum for change inside Russia also requires signaling from the West that it is both open to future reengagement with a post-Putin Russia and that it believes such an alternative future is possible.

U.S. and European leaders could make clear to Russia—both the public and especially elites—that the West ultimately sees Russia as part of Europe. There is therefore a path out of Russia’s isolation after Putin departs. Europe could pledge to “welcome back” a post-Putin Russia that ends the war, respects its neighbors, releases dissidents, restores political freedoms, and seeks to positively reengage with the West. The goal would be to make it known that an alternative European future is possible for Russia should Russians seek it.

Whether this is possible or likely is a separate discussion. The West’s objective in offering a positive vision for Russia’s future is to put additional pressure on the regime by undermining the Kremlin narrative that the two are inevitable adversaries and by creating clear incentives for Russia to pursue a different course. This does not mean adopting a policy of “regime change,” something the West has rightly disavowed and has no means to implement in practice. Instead, it simply means leveraging the power the West does possess: its appeal. People, especially Europeans, want to be part of it; countries want to join it. There is no clearer example of this than Ukraine, where the government’s 2013 rejection of a closer relationship with the European Union spurred the Maidan Revolution.

Calling on Western leaders to talk about reintegrating Russia into Europe may seem utterly tone-deaf. Missiles continue to descend on Ukrainian cities, targeting playgrounds, pedestrian bridges, and civilian infrastructure. In the wake of Russia’s initial missile barrage on civilian infrastructure, Former Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb assessed that “Russia is in the process of isolating itself from Europe for decades. . . . It did not have to be this way, but Putin decided otherwise.” The war in Ukraine has unleashed immense and justifiable anger not just toward the Kremlin but also toward the Russian public, with some prominent voices arguing that Russians are complicit through their support for Putin. There has been no mass protest or robust anti-war movement. Instead, the voices of dissent and criticism come from the far right, pushing Putin to increase the brutality. Because of this assumption that Russians are complicit, it is not surprising that when three civil society groups in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the Ukrainian government criticized the Nobel Committee.

However, as much as righteous indignation toward Russia—and therefore the Russian public—is understandable and warranted, applying collective guilt is ultimately a self-defeating strategy. Doing so will likely strengthen Putin and Russian hardliners inside the country who claim that the West is nurturing hatred toward the entire Russian nation. If there is no way back for Russians, no alternative to isolation, why not just persist with a hardline anti-Western path? Moreover, since Russia is not going to be occupied by a conquering power, the reality is that there will be no accountability or justice for war crimes or reparations unless Russia itself is a willing participant.

Thus far, the West has not provided any clear incentive for the Russian people or elite to mobilize against the regime. Currently, the message the West is sending is that Russia will be treated like Germany was after World War I and will face crushing reparations. Such calls may be morally and legally justified, but they also bolster Putin by demobilizing those with anti-regime sentiment. The Russian public or members of the elite are unlikely to mobilize against the regime if it means inheriting continued economic ruin (never-ending sanctions plus reparations), continued diplomatic isolation, and (potentially) more territorial concessions. Instead, Russians are more likely to act if there is a clearly better path available and if they have confidence there will be clear benefits for Russia should they succeed. Moreover, knowing that the regime, not the West, is preventing a better future can lead to growing frustration, which in time can grow and boil over.

The West shifting its rhetorical approach toward Russia and offering a positive vision for a post-Putin future might have little to no impact. However, it could add an additional source of pressure on an increasingly brittle regime and potentially open the door to rebuilding relations. Such a shift has little cost but significant potential upside.

This issue brief first assesses the stability of the Putin regime, analyzing its strengths and weaknesses. It then sketches out potential trajectories of how Putin might depart. Finally, it outlines possible Western policy options.

Black South Africans resisted apartheid from the very beginning. In the early 1950s, the African National Congress, or ANC, launched a Defiance Campaign. The purpose of this campaign was for Black South Africans to break apartheid laws by entering white areas, using white facilities and refusing to carry “passes”—domestic passports the government used to restrict the movements of Black South Africans in their own country. In response, the government banned the ANC in 1960, and arrested the prominent ANC activist Nelson Mandela in August 1962.

The banning of the ANC and the incarceration of its leaders forced many ANC members into exile. But it did not stop resistance within South Africa, says Wessel Visser , a history lecturer at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

“What many dissidents started to do inside the country was to form a kind of an alternative…resistance movement called the United Democratic Front,” he says. The UDF, formed in 1983, “was a [collaboration] of church leaders and political leaders who were not banned at that stage, community leaders, trade unionists, etc.,” he says.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Reverend Allan Boesak, two of the UDF’s main leaders, “started to organize marches to parliament, in Cape Town, in Pretoria, Johannesburg—crowds of 50 to 80,000 people, so there was definitely a groundswell of resistance against apartheid,” he says. And around the world, this activism drew attention.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s Opposition to Sanctions Are Overruled

Mohamed Tennari, a medical doctor, was visiting an electronics repair shop in the northwestern Syrian village of Sarmin to have a broken internet router fixed. The store was owned by family friend Waref Taleb. Tennari left the router with Taleb and returned the following day to collect it. Taleb did not charge him for the fix. These were the last exchanges the two Syrian friends would ever have.

The next time Tennari saw Taleb was on March 16, 2015, a month or two later, following a chlorine chemical attack in Sarmin. This time, though, Taleb was on an operation table in the emergency room of the Sarmin field hospital.

Tennari rushed into the emergency room to see Taleb, who was coughing, choking, foaming at the mouth, and barely clinging to life. That night, a helicopter had dropped a barrel bomb containing chlorine that exploded on Taleb’s home.

“We couldn’t help him because he inhaled a lot of chlorine,” Tennari, 36, recalled, who has been working as a doctor in Syria since 2007.

OPINION: We must not let chemical weapons to become the ‘norm’

Taleb’s family scrambled into their basement to hide. The noxious gas seeped into the ventilation ducts of their house and killed Taleb and his entire family – his mother, wife, Ala’a Alajati, and their three children Aisha, three, Sarah, two, and Muhammad, one.

“They all died. It was so bad that we couldn’t save them,” he added. “[Taleb] was my friend and it was so sad.”

Tennari suspected it was the Syrian regime that dropped the toxic gas cannister. He estimated that he and his staff treated about 120 patients who had been exposed to chlorine that night. The Taleb family, however, were the only casualties.

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“They were in the basement and the chemical material was going down. People must go high. Because they were in the basement they really got a lot of this material, the chemical material.”

Tennari described Taleb as a family man.

“He was friendly, quiet, [a] good person,” he said. “He had a nice family. He loved his family.”

On the anniversary of Taleb’s death two years later, that night of chaos and terror still gives the Syrian doctor chills. “Helicopters were in the sky at all times and we hear sound at all times and we didn’t know what second they would attack the hospital,” Tennari said in between heavy sighs.

“We didn’t know what to do. Patients were in chairs, on the ground, on the floor- everywhere. We didn’t have enough time to stay with one patient. I was going from one patient to another patient every minute. It was so noisy.”

This is a fleeting, but not uncommon snapshot of the destructive role chlorine attacks have played – and the fear the chemical has sown – in the country’s civil war, which enters its seventh year this week.

It is definitely very scary ifyou are a physician in a small hospital with dozens or hundreds of patients that are suffocating and you don’t know what to do. The main reason chlorine was used in Syria was to cause panic and to force people to flee. by Zaher Sahloul, a former president of Syrian American Medical Society

Chemical weapons have been a recurring footnote in the bloody narrative of Syria’s civil war, which has robbed hundreds of thousands of lives, and displaced roughly 11 million more. But amid this troubling saga of chemical weapons use in Syria, it has been sarin nerve gas, and to a lesser extent mustard gas, that have punctuated this ongoing storyline.

Following the 1,300 tonnes of sarin nerve gas and its precursors being removed from Syria, chemical attacks persist there nearly four years later, but most notably in the form of chlorine, which has emerged as the most heavily used chemical weapon in the war.

“We saw chlorine appearing as a weapon in Syria for the first time in 2014,” said Ole Solvang, the deputy director of the emergencies division at Human Rights Watch.

“The challenge is there are so many horrific things going on in Syria, that this one issue tends to perhaps be overshadowed sometimes by other attacks that are going on.”

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In February, Human Rights Watch and Solvang authored a report documenting at least eight instances of chlorine use by the Syrian regime in the battle for Aleppo between Nov. 17 and Dec. 13, 2016. The human rights watchdog verified the attacks through video footage analysis, phone, and in-person interviews, as well as by social media.

The report indicated that the chlorine attacks killed at least nine people, including four children, and injured around 200 people. The attacks, according to the report, constituted war crimes.

“This is, of course, horrific because it is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention that Syria is a part of,” Solvang explained. “It’s horrific for the victims, but also because it really undermines one of the strongest bans on any weapon in international humanitarian law and what we’re really concerned about is that the government’s continued use of chemical attacks will undermine this ban and lower the threshold for other countries to also use it [chlorine].”

INTERACTIVE: Syria’s Civil War Map

The Chemical Weapons Convention, which came into effect in 1997, is the first international treaty to prohibit the use, development, production, stockpiling and transport of chemical weapons. It is enforced by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, an independent and international treaty-based organisation.

Following the sarin gas attack in Ghouta in August 2013 that killed more than 1,000 people – more than 400 of them children – according a United Nations Security Council report, Syria joined the convention as part of an international agreement – and to subdue the Obama administration’s threats of military action. It was the 190th country to sign on.

So to what role has chlorine played in Syria’s complex and long civil war? And what has been the human toll?

Human Rights Watch have documented 24 chlorine attacks in Syria since 2014, of which 32 people were killed and hundreds were injured. However, Solvang acknowledged that this is likely a grave underestimate.

“It’s a terrifying weapon to most people,” Solvang said.

Chlorine is a choking agent. Its greenish-yellow clouds of gas cause shortness of breath, wheezing, respiratory failure, irritation in the eyes, vomiting, and sometimes death.

Chlorine’s effects are also largely psychological: the chemical triggers fear, shock, and panic in a way that other conventional weapons don’t. In the case of Aleppo, Solvang suspects the regime strategically used chlorine to force a mass exodus of the city.

“Places that were relatively safe suddenly were not safe any more when chlorine started being used,” Solvang said. “When people were trying to hide and shelter from explosive weapons, regular rockets and bombs – they would go into a basement because that’s the safest place to be. Chlorine is heavier than air so it sinks into those basements, so those basements can become death traps.”

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Solvang’s statement, echoed the way in which the Taleb family died in Sarmin: overexposure to chlorine gas after mistaking their cellar as a safe haven.

“It is definitely very scary if you are a physician in a small hospital with dozens or hundreds of patients that are suffocating and you don’t know what to do with all of that,” said Zaher Sahloul, a former president of Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), who is originally from Homs, but who now practices in Chicago.

SAMS has also closely monitored chlorine attacks in Syria. The medical organisation has documented 109 chlorine attacks since the civil war began in 2011.

“The main reason chlorine was used in Syria was to cause panic and to force people to flee. And that’s what it really did in most of the instances,” Sahloul added.

Sahloul, a pulmonary specialist, attended medical school with President Bashar al-Assad between 1982 and 1988 at Damascus University. He knew Assad personally.

“[Assad] was collegial, humble and talkative,” Sahloul recalled of his former classmate turned president, who he now accuses of war crimes.

“No one expected him to oversee the destruction of his country, target hospitals and doctors and use extreme brutality against civilians including torture, siege, collective punishment, and chemical weapons.”

Chlorine was first used as a weapon by the Germans on French, British, and Canadian troops in World War I on the battlefield in Ypres. A decade later, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the first constructive international laws banning the use of chemical weapons, was introduced.

But despite its deadly effects, chlorine isn’t classified in the same league as sarin or mustard gas. It exists in somewhat of a grey zone under today’s international laws and is only regarded as a chemical weapon when it’s used maliciously. Chlorine’s complicated status on the spectrum of chemical weapons raises tough questions about the definitions of chemical warfare.

For instance, why are some lethal chemicals internationally prohibited, while others aren’t?

“The difference between chlorine and sarin is [that] chlorine is readily available,” Sahloul explained. “Chlorine is used for many other beneficial ways, to clean water and so forth, in many industries but that’s why the Syrian regime has been using it because it’s easily done and weaponised easily.”

Tens of millions of tonnes of chlorine are produced around the world each year. It’s used to disinfect water supplies, in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals, antiseptics, and drugs, in textile industries, the bleaching of paper, in the separation of metals such as gold, nickel, and copper from their ores, as well as such household chemicals like adhesives.

Its widespread industrial use makes controlling and regulating its use as a weapon all the more problematic, which has allowed its use to persist in Syria’s civil war.

“Chlorine is used on a daily basis in all countries. It can be easily produced, in all of our countries, [regardless] of the development of the country, the materials are available,” said Ahmet Uzumcu, director general of the Netherlands-based Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international organisation that verifies the destruction of existing global stockpiles of chemical weapons.

“It creates panic, of course, and terror especially among civilians [but] the difficulty to eradicate it – it’s not declarable – so we cannot ask state parties to declare the chlorine stocks,” added Uzumcu. “I believe that it is very difficult to contain it.”

The OPCW, which led a fact-finding mission in 2014 to investigate chlorine attacks in Syria, were unable to confirm to Al Jazeera the exact numbers of confirmed attacks, but a press release on the missions stated there was “compelling” evidence that chlorine was used “systematically and repeatedly”.

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Kelsey Davenport, the director nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, a non-profit organisation that promotes public understanding of arms control policies in Washington, DC, also echoed Sahloul and Uzumcu’s assertions on the problematic nature of containing chlorine as a chemical weapon.

“Chlorine is particularly a problem because it has so many uses for industrial purposes that don’t have anything to do with weaponisation,” she said.

“It can be very easy for organisations to get their hands on chlorine and the necessary ingredients to create chlorine gas, using sort of other mechanisms or justifications for industrial purposes. That makes it much more difficult to control and much more difficult to prevent groups from using,” Davenport added.

The precarious situation on the ground makes is even more difficult, if not impossible for governments and NGOs, to verify each attack, and who exactly is on the delivering end: the regime, rebel forces, or ISIL.

Last August, the UN-led a joint investigation in Syria to pinpoint who is responsible for the flurry of reported chlorine attacks. The UN examined nine cases of alleged chemical weapons attacks. They found what they described as “sufficient evidence” of three instances of chemical weapons attacks between 2014 and 2015. Two of these were chlorine gas attacks on civilians by the Syrian air force. Another was a sulphur mustard gas attack by the Islamic State.

“It’s hard – it’s impossible to use the word ‘verifiable’,” said Paul Walker, a chemical weapons expert and Director of Green Cross International’s Environmental Security and Sustainability programme.

Walker attributed the contrasting numbers of chlorine attacks recorded by NGOs, media, and governmental bodies like the UN to the dangerous conditions on the ground in Syria.

“By looking at newspaper reports, you know there’s an average alleged attack with chlorine probably every month and probably for the last several years,” he said. “A ballpark figure is a dozen [chlorine attacks] a year. And I think that’s a gross underestimate because it’s very difficult to verify these attacks when you can’t get to the site in a reasonable amount of time, you can’t gather forensics, [and] you can’t necessarily interview victims.”

In response to the UN joint investigation, the United States imposed sanctions on 18 Syrian military officials in January, according to a Treasury Department statement.

And just last month, the US, France, and Britain drafted a UN Security Council resolution that would have imposed further sanctions on Syrian military officials over the alleged use of chlorine. However, Russia and China vetoed it.

Prior to the veto, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2209 on March 6, 2015, condemning the use of chlorine attacks in the civil war, threatening to take Chapter VII action – which could include sanctions and ultimately military force – if the attacks continue. But that was two years ago; the attacks have persisted, UN sanctions have fallen flat, and the international community hasn’t been able to effectively halt Assad‘s regime or the rebels’ use of chlorine.

With the emergence of the US President Donald Trump‘s administration, which seems open to allowing Russia, Syria’s ally, operate more freely in the country, Assad’s regime appears more insulated than ever. Military escalation against Assad, or the possibility his regime will be charged with war crimes in an international criminal court, at least in the near future, seems unlikely.

“The people and physicians, especially in Syria gave up on this issue,” said Sahloul, the Chicago-based SAMS doctor, who has testified on chlorine attacks before the UN Security Council and the US House Foreign Relations Committee.

Sahloul is frustrated by the international community’s perceived indifference – and its inability – to solve the chlorine problem, and he, too, is sceptical anything will be accomplished in the near future to hold Assad’s regime accountable.

“There was a lot of effort that at one point to document all of these issues,” he added. “There were testimonies in the [UN] Security Council, there were resolutions, there were attributions, and then investigation teams, and then nothing happened. I think at this point, people gave up on Syria and talking about these issues.”

Instead, Sahloul, appealed directly to Assad, his former classmate, to end the brutality of chlorine chemical attacks once and for all.

“I want him [Assad] to see the faces of the children who woke up choking in the middle of the night,” he said, in reference to the chlorine attack that killed the Taleb family in Sarmin.

“I want him to imagine the panic in the faces of Taleb family in Sarmin [hiding] in a basement, when they were overwhelmed with the smell of bleach, and when their children – Aisha, Sarah, and Muhammad – started to suffocate; how they rushed to the field hospital and how they all ended up dead.”

For other Syrians, like Tennari, the Syrian doctor in Sarmin, who have seen the gruesomeness of a chlorine attack first hand, justice is already too late. Tennari still agonises over the loss of his friend Taleb, and his family, who were all killed by the toxic substance two years ago.

“I’m praying to not be in this situation again: to see a friend choking in front of me and I couldn’t do anything,” said Tennari, who said he’ll continuing practising in Syria as long as the civil war continues.

“I’m so sorry that we couldn’t help [the Taleb family],” Tennari said. “I feel bad all the time when I remember that we couldn’t help them and they died. I feel weak because of that. I wish that nobody would be in my situation and see what I see. It’s horrific. I wish this war will finish one day.”

Dorian Geiger is a Canadian journalist and an award-winning filmmaker based in Doha, Qatar and Queens, New York. He’s a social video producer and a freelance features writer at Al Jazeera English. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram.

The actor James Woods tweeted a 1994 clip of President Bill Clinton announcing a deal with North Korea, suggesting the current standoff was the fault of the former president. If you never do another thing this week, just listen to this liar, please. #NorthKorea #BillClinton #NuclearWinter https://t.co/FnaTFtZoEx — James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 9, 2017 There’s plenty of bipartisan blame to go around, however. Here’s a quick summary of what happened. (Note: Glenn Kessler covered the collapse of the Clinton deal and subsequent efforts to negotiate a nuclear deal with Pyongyang as The Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent from 2002-2011.)

The Facts

Clinton’s deal was called the Agreed Framework. In contrast to the detailed and lengthy agreement negotiated in 2015 under President Barack Obama intended to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Agreed Framework, struck in 1994, was only a few pages long.

Essentially, an international consortium planned to replace the North’s plutonium reactor with two light-water reactors; in the meantime, the United States would supply the North with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil every year to make up for the theoretical loss of the reactor while the new ones were built.

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North Korea’s program was clearly created to churn out nuclear weapons; the reactor at Yongbyon was not connected to the power grid and appeared only designed to produce plutonium, a key ingredient for nuclear weapons. The theory of the deal was that, with the plant shuttered and the plutonium under the close watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), North Korea would not be able to produce a bomb. There were also vague references in the text to improving relations and commerce.

The deal was hugely controversial in Congress. Just as with Obama’s Iran negotiations, Clinton structured the agreement so that it was not considered a treaty that would have required ratification by the Senate. As with Iran, there was also an international component, with South Korea, Japan and a European agency joining with the United States to create an organization to implement the accord.

As Iowa State University professor Young Whan Kihl noted in an article exploring the political ramifications:

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Since the “Agreed Framework” took the form of a presidential “executive agreement,” rather than a formal treaty (such as SALT I & II), the U.S. Senate did not need to give “advise and consent” under the U.S. Constitution. However, the terms of the agreement are controversial and subject to scrutiny by the Republican-dominant U.S. Congress that began a series of congressional hearings in mid-January 1995. Some congressmen and senators demanded that the “agreed framework” be treated as a formal treaty; this move was resisted by the Clinton Administration but, because of the budgetary and appropriation clauses of the agreement, the U.S. Congress was inevitably drawn into the process of implementation and verification of the agreement.

So how did North Korea get its hands on the nuclear material? George W. Bush became president in 2001 and was highly skeptical of Clinton’s deal with North Korea. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was even slapped down when he suggested the administration would follow the path set by the Clinton administration. The new administration terminated missile talks with Pyongyang and spent months trying to develop its own policy.

Then intelligence agencies determined that North Korea was cheating on the agreement by trying to develop nuclear material through another method — highly enriched uranium. The Bush administration sent an envoy who confronted North Korea — and the regime was said to have belligerently confirmed it in 2002, just as the Bush administration was mostly focused on the pending invasion of Iraq.

In response, the Bush administration terminated the supply of fuel oil that was essential to the agreement — and then North Korea quickly kicked out the U.N. inspectors, restarted the nuclear plant and began developing its nuclear weapons, using the material in radioactive fuel rods that previously had been under the close watch of the IAEA. Japan and South Korea, the key partners in the accord, were not happy with the decision to terminate the Agreed Framework, but there was little they could do about it.

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Within two years, U.S. intelligence analysts concluded North Korea was using the plutonium to create nuclear weapons.

After North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in 2006, the Bush administration tried desperately to negotiate a new accord with Pyongyang, including offering significant new concessions, but those efforts ultimately failed. Bush, to the anger of conservatives and the government of Japan, even removed North Korea from the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism — only to see the hard work turn to dust. The nuclear genie by then was out of the bottle, and North Korea had little incentive to give up its stash of plutonium, no matter what the United States and its negotiating allies offered.

(Toward the end of the negotiations, the Bush administration learned that North Korea had helped Syria build a nuclear facility, which was destroyed by Israeli warplanes. Bush kept negotiating, even though North Korea in theory had crossed a “red line” set by Bush in 2003 that it could not transfer nuclear technology to other parties.)

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The issue was considered such a loser that the Obama administration barely bothered to restart disarmament talks, adopting a stance dubbed “strategic patience.” (One official privately said the Obama team was stunned at the concessions offered by Bush when they reviewed the diplomatic history after taking office.) During that eight-year period of fitful talks, North Korea improved its mastery of nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment, and also its missile technology.

Questions have since been raised about whether the Bush administration misinterpreted North Korea’s supposed confirmation — and doubts also emerged about the quality of U.S. intelligence that inspired the confrontation. But Bush’s later efforts to negotiate a new accord were hampered by fresh evidence that North Korea actually did have an undisclosed uranium-enrichment program.

Interestingly, former Clinton administration officials have said they knew North Korea was cheating on the uranium enrichment front dating back to 1998 and planned to use that intelligence as leverage to keep the Agreed Framework in place and the plutonium under lock and key. Other Clinton administration officials will also concede that they never thought they would have to build the light-water reactors because they assumed, wrongly, that the regime would collapse before the reactors would be built.

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But in the end, the regime has survived. Much like the Iranian accord negotiated by Obama, the North Korea deal had little bipartisan support and was rejected by the incoming president as a bad deal. But, as Bush quickly learned, terminating one deal is much easier than renegotiating a better one.

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