There is no indication of a similar change of heart in North Korea, where there are indications that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has drawn a very different lesson from the Iraq war. Having seen how the leader of Iraq was transformed into a prisoner, North Korea appears to have concluded that the best protection against a US intervention is a nuclear arsenal, the bigger the better.
Instead of renouncing its nuclear program, North Korea has in the past year advertised its supposed advances in making nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has turned particularly to China -- as well as to Russia, South Korea and Japan -- to try to advance diplomacy, but has in effect found itself with little leverage.
Threatening military force is not an option. War on the heavily armed Korean Peninsula would be a calamity. No Asian ally is prepared to back a policy of confrontation. With most of the US Army preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, the US simply lacks the military muscle to marshal a credible threat.
In talks, North Korea has proved to be frustrating and possibly untrustworthy. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has oscillated between a hard-line policy of waiting for North Korea's collapse and trying to engage the North in bargaining.
If there is hope of replicating the Libyan reversal it may be in Iran.
First, Iran has not yet developed nuclear weapons. So it would be giving up a prospective, and not actual, ability. Second, a diplomatic process is already under way.
Gary Samore, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and a former proliferation expert on the National Security Council under former US President Bill Clinton, notes that Iran has responded to diplomatic pressure -- from Europe and the US -- and temporarily suspended its previously clandestine efforts to enrich uranium at its Natanz site.
What is needed now is a permanent solution, one in which Iran will permanently forgo efforts to produce nuclear weapons materials by enriching uranium or producing plutonium.
European nations have offered Iran access to fuel supplies for a peaceful nuclear program if it gives up its ambitions to develop nuclear weapons.
Whether the US would be party to such a deal and whether Iran would embrace it, Samore notes, are unclear.
"In the case of North Korea the Libya model is unrealistic," he said in a telephone interview. "It is not plausible that the North Korean regime, given their perception of the world, will give up their missiles and chemical, biological and nuclear programs in exchange for better relations. They view them as essential for their survivability. The best you can do is to achieve limits."
If there is a chance to repeat the Libyan experience, he notes, "the test will come in Iran."
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