LONDON – Endless confrontation can be endlessly counterproductive. There is no conclusive evidence that isolating or cornering a state succeeds in moderating its behaviour. Engagement is the only way, short of war, to produce results that move nations out of their entrenched positions.

This may seem to many of my readers a controversial statement. Of course it is. But it is my political credo. And the best example I can give to sustain it is coming to the boil right now- on the Korean peninsula. On June 12th South Korea’s ex-political prisoner and human rights activist and now democratically elected president, Kim Dae Jung, will meet his opposite number Kim Jong Il, president of North Korea, who inherited his position from his notorious father Kim Il Sung, the communist warlord who initiated the Korean War 50 years ago. For this much of the credit must go to President Bill Clinton.

There have been any number of reasons why over the last six years America could have decided to get tough with a country that gave many indications that it had serious ambitions not just to build a nuclear bomb but to develop a long distance missile to deliver it. Even today North Korea is the arch-demon for those who advocate the necessity of building an anti-missile shield to “protect” the U.S. from nuclear attack from a “rogue” country.

Yet, contrary to many of its basic instincts, the Clinton Administration has used the soft glove rather than the mailed fist. Indeed, North Korea is now the main recipient of U.S. aid in Asia. The U.S. supplies free much of the country’s fuel oil needs and a good part of its food requirements. At the same time South Korea and Japan are building it free of charge a state-of-the-art light-water nuclear reactor capable of supplying most of North Korea’s electricity needs for years to come.

In retrospect it seems amazing that debate in Washington six years ago was almost dominated by those discussing the best way of bombing North Korea. U.S. intelligence had discovered that North Korea was about to remove spent nuclear rods in a cooling pond to recover plutonium, sufficient to make four or six nuclear bombs to add to its supposed (but never proved) stockpile of two or three. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and former CIA chief, Robert Gates went loudly public with calls for battle. The saving grace was that they ended up shooting themselves in each other’s feet. Gates and Scowcroft argued that the U.S. should immediately bomb the North Korean reprocessing plant before the cooling rods could be transferred to it. This, they said, would minimise the risk of radioactive fallout.

Kissinger advocated immediate tough sanctions and unspecified “military action”. But his timetable miraculously allowed time- a short three months while the rods cooled- for both a conference of the nuclear-haves and for sanctions to work. Military action should occur, he said, only if North Korea refueled its reactor or started to reprocess its plutonium from the cooling rods.

However, this seemed to ignore Scowcroft’s and Gates’ point about the dangers of an aerial bombardment on reprocessing facilities. Nor did any of them appear to worry that North Korea might use the two or three nuclear bombs they said the country already had to repulse an American attack.

In fact the three of them talked themselves into the ground and made it easier for president Jimmy Carter to journey to Pyongyang on a peace mission and pave the way for a deal for Kim Il Sung to accept a nuclear freeze. In return the U.S. would be committed to working with South Korea and Japan to build two conventional power-producing nuclear reactors.

In the intervening six years there have been all manner of ups and down in the U.S.-North Korean relationship. Congress nearly sabotaged the agreement by reneging on White House commitments to begin liberalizing its trade and investment and ending sanctions. In 1998, when North Korea test fired a long range rocket over Japan, it seemed that Pyongyang was determined to play out its role as the world’s number one agent provocateur. Later in 1998 U.S. intelligence spotted a massive hole being dug suitable to explode in secret triggers for a nuclear weapon. In the end, for a payment, the U.S. was allowed to inspect the hole and found that a hole was all it was.

Not without a great deal of political contortion, the U.S. over the years has managed in the end to convince Pyongyang of its good faith. North Korea, for its part, has reciprocated by drawing in its horns, albeit often at the last moment. Most important it has honoured the freeze.

Meanwhile, Kim Dae Jung in the South has pursued his so-called “sunshine policy” with the North. Despite immense opposition from the old guard, he has succeeded in sustaining it to where the temperature of the Cold War between North and South has begun to rise to the point where the waters are unfrozen enough for this summit to take place.

Everyone knows holding the summit raises the stakes. There can be no going back. But can the North and the South agree on which way forward is? Also, how much further is the U.S. prepared to go? Having made so much progress in dampening the North’s nuclear ambitions, is it prepared to throw this softly softly course to the wind, move into a tougher, more antagonistic, stance, build its anti-missile shield and, in the process, undermine the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and alienate both Russia and China, perhaps triggering a new round of the nuclear arms race between the big powers?

The North Korean peace is one of Mr Clinton’s three great positive foreign policy achievements. (The others are his North American Free Trade Area and his recent victory to persuade Congress to give China permanent most-favoured-nation trading status.) If only he had applied the same determination to engagement in disarmament with Russia, detente with Iraq and Iran and support of the United Nations. Perhaps the problem is that Mr Clinton has not digested quite just how much progress his policy of the carrot more than the stick has made in North Korea. Maybe the summit will provide a measure of his achievement and, although too late to have any influence on his presidency, do something to make sure his successor doesn’t imitate so many of his mistakes.