Evil, Yes. Genius, No

To

hear tell, the man at the center of the unfolding North Korean nuclear crisis, Pyongyang's "Dear Leader" Kim Jong Il, is a ruthless mastermind. Earlier this month, another American newsweekly put him on the cover under the label "Dr. Evil." The message: he may look bizarre, but Kim Jong Il is deadly formidable.

This is not just one magazine's judgment. China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan calls Kim "quick-witted." Outgoing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his 2000 summit with Kim Jong Il, praises him as a "man of insight." And the Dear Leader impressed former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as "very decisive and practical and serious."

With his widely reported virtuoso skills on the Internet and his supposedly intimate knowledge of everything from South Korean politics to French wine, Kim Jong Il sounds like a brilliant villain straight out of a James Bond flick—and a nightmare opponent for the U.S. and its allies. There's just one thing wrong with all this buzz about Kim Jong Il's devilish cunning: it's belied by elementary and obvious fact. These days, he's merely using the playbook of his father, Kim Il Sung, from the previous nuclear confrontation in the early 1990s—and so far, he's proving to be barely a chip off that old block.

As a decision maker, the Dear Leader's record is, quite literally, disastrous. At home he is the architect of a catastrophic famine that has killed hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of his subjects since 1995. On the international chessboard, Kim's performance has been scarcely more awe inspiring. Indeed, in the current nuclear drama, many of Pyongyang's moves are careless or clueless miscalculations.

Today's diplomatic impasse began with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly's visit to Pyongyang in October, when he confronted his hosts with evidence of a secret North Korean program for producing weapons-grade uranium. That meeting hardly proceeded according to North Korea's plan. North Korean Foreign Ministry officials were reportedly left all but speechless, having cheerfully assumed that Kelly was coming to town with an offer of renewed aid. Reports further suggest that Pyongyang had even readied the U.S.S. Pueblo, the spy ship North Korea captured in 1968, for return to Washington as a gesture of thanks.

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North Korean officials finally got back to Kelly after an all-night session with the Dear Leader. Kelly was then reportedly told that Pyongyang did indeed have a covert uranium-enrichment program and "had more powerful things as well." For good measure, North Korea said its 1994 Agreed Framework with Washington was "nullified." This defiant tirade may have been emotionally satisfying for an enraged and embarrassed dictator. But as a diplomatic gambit it was rank buffoonery. By admitting its own nuclear cheating, North Korea inadvertently spared America the trouble of proving the subterfuge.

What's more, North Korea's designated messenger for the announcement of its nuclear violation was Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, the very official who clinched the 1994 agreement. With this clumsy stroke, Pyong-yang undercut the credibility of its entire negotiating team. Now, even if Washington wants to get a deal, there is no one on the other side they can trust.

Ever since the Kelly fiasco, the North Korean regime has been trying to scramble out of the hole the Dear Leader dug for it. North Korea's nuclear crisis-management team has reverted almost robotically to the playbook that Kim Jong ll's father developed in the 1993-1994 nuclear confrontation: the pullout from the Nuclear Non-Prolifer-ation Treaty, the "sea of fire" threats, the demand for "nonaggression" assurances and the attempted end run around Washington's North Korea policy via a prominent former American official. We've seen this all before, folks.

But Kim Il Sung—North Korea's "eternal president," according to its constitution—has been dead for eight and a half years: he's no longer so good at thinking on his feet. Kim Jong Il, for his part, is alive and well but prone to egregious lapses of judgment, especially in a crunch. That is what makes the present crisis so very scary: not the high caliber of America's adversary, but precisely the opposite.