Today’s summit at the White House with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak marks a critical moment for our relationship, and a moment for asking difficult questions. Questions like: when has the conventional wisdom been as wrong about anything as it has been about North Korea? Its narrative has long held that, if we can set aside distractions like North Korea’s cheating on past agreements and its atrocities toward its own people, our diplomats can come to an accommodation based on the mutual recognition of peaceful coexistence. The events of this year have destroyed that narrative. No matter how many variations of coexistence we offer North Korea, North Korea will not coexist with us.

To begin to understand how badly our diplomacy has misunderstood North Korea, we should begin by realizing how much there is about North Korea that we cannot comprehend. After all, there is only so much one can learn from journalists describing the same closely guarded circuit of monuments and propaganda warehouses. But in these times, anyone can begin to see what has been hidden for half a century by downloading Google Earth and examining the places few have survived to describe. I would first ask you to give a moment of your attention to the barren hills around Hamhung, North Korea’s second largest city. A few months ago, I noticed a rash of mounds spread across them and soon realized that I was looking at somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 shallow graves. Contemporary accounts confirm that during the Great Famine of the 1990’s — which coincided with North Korea’s big push for The Bomb — some substantial percentage of the city’s population starved to death or died of opportunistic diseases. Although no satellite photograph can establish what killed those who lie within the earth below, I challenge anyone to find another place on this earth with such a concentration of improvised and untended graves.

Across North Korea as a whole, that famine is thought to have killed two and a half million people. Let no one ask when North Korea’s nuclear weapons will commit their first mass destruction.

Earlier this year, Senator Sam Brownback waged a righteous and quixotic effort to block the confirmation of Christopher Hill, the darling of the late conventional wisdom and architect of our effusively generous diplomatic outreach to North Korea during Bush 43’s second term, to become Ambassador to Iraq. In an impassioned floor speech, the senator held up images of a place known as Camp 22. I provided Senator Brownback those particular images because of the ghastly clarity with which they depict this inconvenient contemporary Holocaust. In one remarkable image, what may very well be a new crop prisoners can be seen standing in the courtyard of the camp’s southwestern gate. The fences, the guard posts, the tiger traps, the coal mines were the prisoners work and die, and even ox carts plodding along the roads are all visible.

Camp 22 is just one of North Korea’s five largest concentration camps. Collectively, North Korea’s labor, detention, and concentration camps are thought to hold 200,000 prisoners. No matter how much we may try to separate their relevance from our diplomatic focus, these places have a stubborn relevance. Recently, for example, the American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee were sentenced to spend twelve years in a North Korean labor camp, an experience they could not survive. I tend to doubt that Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee would even see the inside of one of North Korea’s relatively less horrid reeducation camps, however; that would deny Kim Jong Il the option to exchange them for some valuable ransom and let them live to describe what they had seen.

Recent reports that North Korea may soon test yet another nuclear weapon are another example of how North Korea’s pathology intrudes on the work of the diplomats. Few of the reports on North Korea’s nuclear tests bother to mention that the North’s nuclear test site is adjacent to another of North Korea’s worst concentration camps, Camp 16. Here are the only pictures of that camp that have ever been published. Last week, Korean journalist Kang Chol Hwan, himself a survivor of Camp 15, passed along a collection of rumors by former prisoners and guards that prisoners are used as forced laborers to facilitate the nuclear tests, and that none of the prisoners ever leave the test site alive.

Brownback’s point, which was lost in the conventional narrative, was that we ignore any pathology capable of such evils at our own peril. Recently, it has become vogue not to speak of peril to the soul and the values of our nation, except perhaps in defense of Khalid Sheik Mohammad. As Hill put it, “Each country, including our own, needs to improve its human rights record.” In the event this logic has some appeal to you, it should be clear enough that ignoring these atrocities has brought us no closer to realizing our dispassionate security interests, either. Each offer of reasonable compromise we extend, each new North Korean demand to which we accede, seems only to make its regime more cruel and belligerent.

What North Korea is demanding now is to be left alone to make nuclear weapons — from plutonium, and now, from the uranium enrichment program that some scholars invested their credibility in denying to defend the merits of Bill Clinton’s Agreed Framework I, despite North Korea’s material breach. They need not bother any more than the defenders of Bush’s Agreed Framework II, although the steady refutation of the uranium denial school has provided much amusement. North Korea first admitted that it was enriching uranium to American diplomats in 2002, then went back to denying it while our diplomats spent the next seven years trying to coax them into full disclosure. Meanwhile, Libya was caught with casks of North Korean uranium hexafluoride, A.Q. Khan was revealed to have sold North Korea centrifuges, and North Korea tried to prove its innocence by turning over documents and aluminum samples. Both tested positive for highly enriched uranium.

Have we finally come to terms with the pathology of North Korea, or with the implications of that pathology? I tend to doubt it, though we’ve moved modestly in that direction. The U.N.’s newest resolution, Security Council Resolution 1874, is full of loopholes that China will exploit, doesn’t invoke Chapter VII, and doesn’t authorize the use of force against North Korean ships that refuse to stop and be boarded. Still, its financial sanctions provisions and effective codification of John Bolton’s Proliferation Security Initiative greatly improve on those in Security Council Resolution 1718. In Resolution 1874, each nation will find room to do as much as it wants to do, unless the United States lobbies hard for enforcement. It will matter if Britain and Thailand no longer sell North Korea’s slave-mined gold, if Switzerland stops selling them Omega watches, if France stops selling themcognac, and if Germany stops selling them luxury sedans.

It will matter much more if President Obama turns the financial screws on North Korea’s palace economy in a comprehensive and sustained way, and I’m pleased to say that here, he seems ready to refute my prediction that he wouldn’t. His first good decision was to retain Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department’s Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. In 2005, Levey toured European and Asian capitals, persuading bankers and finance ministries to sever their financial relationships with North Korea. Treasury’s earlier sanctions targeted North Korean counterfeiting of U.S. currency, and the U.S. and South Korean governments have begun leaking recent reports confirming that North Korea continues to traffic in “supernotes.” Last week, Levey returned from a visit to South Korea, with the apparent intent of coordinating financial intelligence and sanctions with the government of South Korea. Japan will almost certainly be another eager participant. That coordination will certainly be better now, under President Lee Myung Bak, than it was under Lee’s leftist predecessors who did so much to undermine Security Council Resolution 1718.

But what end will this pressure serve? Arguably, no one has ever tried the kind of structured diplomacy that adds or lifts sanctions as North Korea meets or flunks strict deadlines for disarmament and transparency. That kind of diplomacy would have some chance of success if China doesn’t give Kim Jong Il enough of what he needs to enable him continue to avoid such difficult choices (but it will). Unfortunately, President Obama appears intent on applying only as much pressure as necessary to bring North Korea back to talks that have never yielded any substantial security gains for the United States. In other words, what happens when North Korea shows Obama some leg and promises to return to talks and sign Agreed Framework III?

We’ll be fooled again if we fail to comprehend just how much suffering North Korea is prepared to inflict to possess nuclear weapons, and to whom it is prepared to transfer them. Once when we grasp that coexistence is anathema to North Korea’s cult, we can perceive that negotiated disarmament is futility itself. The objective of this pressure ought to be to diminsh North Korea’s capacity to repress dissent against Kim Jong Il’s misrule, by starving its military and security apparatus of funds, spare parts, patronage gifts, and the means to maintain internal and border controls. We can only effect the disarmament of North Korea by hastening Kim Jong Il’s passage to the ash heap of history.

Joshua Stanton is an attorney in Washington DC and formerly served as U.S. Army Judge Advocate in Korea.