This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's been years since President Bush put North Korea into his axis of evil.

Where does the North Korea nuclear his axis of evil.

Where does the North Korea nuclear threat stand now?

And what does it mean that South Korea is seeking new lines of communication with the North?

Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, provides his take. North Korea certainly does not appear to be a member of the axis of evil anymore I guess with the nuclear

issue we're down to one member namely Iran with regard to North Korea the

administration has retreated steadily with regard to its policy.

For a time the United States didn't even want to talk to North Korea much less conduct meaningful negotiations.

Pressure from the Allies and China led eventually to U.S. negotiations,

but then the U.S. took a very hard-line position, namely that we wanted a complete,

verifiable, and irreversible end to North Korea's nuclear program. We would accept nothing less than that. And now, after demanding

for months that North Korea come up with a full declaration of all aspects of its nuclear program.

The plutonium processing program that we knew about for many, many years, the nuclear, the uranium enrichment program that we've suspected and have intelligence data on for several years.

And now we're willing to accept what amounts to a secret unverified

partial North Korean declaration about its nuclear program.

Do you have any thoughts on why the US is backed away from its hard line stance?

I suspect the short answer to that is that the Bush administration has a very full foreign policy plate right now.

It has a continuing almost never ending war in Iraq, and it feels that the Iranian nuclear issue is much more urgent,

much more dangerous than the North Korean one and therefore they want any kind of settlement they can get to at least

postpone any showdown on North Korea to the next administration.

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