“We used to call that, and still do, ‘appeasement,’” General McInerney said.

“I didn't say anything about appeasement,” Mathews replied.

“I know, and you won't say anything about it,” McInerney said. “One's got to be very careful in taking the diplomatic route. Look, I commend Bob [Gallucci] for the work the Clinton administration tried in ‘94. But let's not live on the good ship Lollipop and think that we're going to be able to do this again once they have shown that they are not going to negotiate [in good faith]. They cheated us.”

“What they have shown is if they can get away with cheating, they'll cheat,” Mathews said. “Our job is to be smarter than that. Their having cheated gives us an opportunity to give them a tougher deal.”

“This is precisely the discussion that needs to take place,” David Kay said as the session ended. “And it is very clear why the president of the United States has to be present at the discussion. Otherwise we have an absolute stalemate. We don't win on a stalemate in this case. And so you've got to decide what risk you're willing to run now to avoid a greater risk later on. And only the president can make that decision.”

* * *

During the next few weeks I had conversations with all the members of the Principals Committee. What had they taken away from the war game? Despite the disputatiousness of the proceedings, was there any consensus about the lessons that could be drawn from the exercise?

There was. The first lesson was no surprise: This is not a situation that is going to get better with time. “Anyone who walks through the North Korea crisis comes through absolutely convinced that it is only going to get worse,” David Kay told me. He came away from the exercise convinced of the situation's urgency—and convinced that the United States has wasted several years, effectively doing nothing while it hoped the regime would collapse. Kay believes that the administration's reluctance to engage the matter diplomatically is dangerous. And that was the second lesson at least three of the principals agreed on: We need—soon—to make a serious attempt at negotiating. “The Bush administration believes that the North Koreans cannot be relied upon to abide by international agreements,” Kay said. “They also believe there are groups so bad that you harm yourself by talking to them. North Korea is a horrible regime—in human-rights terms, one of the worst on earth. But talking to them in no way compromises our moral beliefs.” We need to take another crack at direct negotiation before we go the military route, he said.

For Jessica Mathews, this second lesson was the most important. She felt that the administration was hurting itself by insisting on participating only in multilateral talks, as opposed to direct negotiations with North Korea. “There's nothing in our national-security interest that is better served by multilateral versus bilateral talks. That's a shape-of-the-table issue. If we wanted to say, ‘Okay, they want to have bilateral talks? Fine. We'll have a bilateral subcommittee within the six-party talks’—how long would that take to figure out? Half an hour.” She added, “It's kind of odd that this administration, of all administrations, wants to outsource this policy issue to the Chinese.”