Last week, as I related how the North Koreans had compared Secretary of State Clinton to an elderly pensioner on a shopping trip, I had no idea that Mrs. Clinton’s husband was packing his bags for a visit to Pyongyang, but the North Koreans did know. Consider that as you read the breathless predictions that Mr. Clinton’s surprise visit to Pyongyang this week could be our next great diplomatic breakthrough. It won’t be. Instead, it represents a setback for the consistency of U.S. policy toward the North, regardless of whether the former president can bring the two imprisoned journalists home.

We still know little about the circumstances of how Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee came into North Korean captivity four months ago, and we know almost nothing with any degree of certainty. Most of the recent hints and concessions from the State Department, however, suggest that Ling and Lee crossed the border on their own. If that’s true, it would have been breathtakingly bad judgment by these two young women, and an object lesson in the fact that many journalists continue to write and publish reports about a state whose totalitarian pathology they fundamentally fail to understand. The North Koreans have even claimed that they confiscated video that Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee took. If that is true, Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee may well have jeopardized the lives of refugees, people smugglers, missionaries, or underground railroad workers depicted in that video.

For purposes of U.S. policy toward North Korea, none of this matters much anymore. Either way, Laura Ling and Euna Lee are still U.S. citizens. Either way, a detention of this length is unjustified and clearly aimed at gaining some ransom, whether monetary of diplomatic. As such, our government should treat it as false imprisonment and therefore, terrorism. Either way, no ransom should be discussed, offered, or paid. And either way, the North Koreans should understand that some particularly painful sanction will be applied with increasing force until Ling and Lee are freed. Predictably, however, things have taken a different turn.

Clearly, there was a price for Mr. Clinton’s admission. We learn today that the terms of the visit were negotiated with the North Koreans for months, meaning that North Korea didn’t let Clinton in without at least the prospect of a payoff. The converse must also be true:

“The question is going to be how could he go to Pyongyang without some assurance that they would be released,” Snyder said. “For someone at his level to go without a prior assurance of some kind would be to risk a huge loss of face.”

Despite the Administration’s efforts to keep this issue separate from the nuclear diplomacy, the subject will almost certainly come up and probably already has.

In fact, the North Koreans have already achieved a form of ransom through Senator John Kerry, who has emerged as Kim Jong Il’s most prominent defender in the U.S. Congress. Kerry, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has repeatedly blocked bills designed to impose severe sanctions and re-add North Korea to the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The last time he did so, in late July, Kerry drew an explicit connection between the terror-sponsor listing and talks to free Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee, saying:

Right now, the Secretary of State is meeting at ASEAN. Right now, the various countries involved in this delicate process are working to determine how to proceed forward with respect to getting back to talks and defusing these tensions. For the Senate just to pop on an amendment like this at this moment in time not only sends a signal that complicates that process, but I think it also, frankly, will make it more difficult to secure the return of two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

To cover himself, Kerry later substituted a watered-down bill that asked the Administration to “consider” re-listing North Korea as a terror sponsor, but which imposed no new sanctions of any consequence. So let’s unpack that: North Korea falsely imprisons two U.S. journalists, and Kerry rewards the North Koreans for that by blocking efforts to call North Korea a state that sponsors terrorism (which it is, of course).

Why Bill Clinton? Both he and the North Koreans are involved in their own intrigues against President Obama. A man of lower stature and higher integrity would have been far more suitable, which suggests that the North Koreans have already won round one of these negotiations. Indeed, the very fact of negotiating for the freedom of these women means that.

In all likelihood, this story will end the way talks with North Korea always do — with North Korea being rewarded its evil acts, and as no less of a threat to us than when the story began. And because North Korea has learned to profit from ransom, there will be more hostages taken as a result.

Joshua Stanton is an attorney in Washington, D.C.