What do we expect to achieve by talking to North Korea? Do we expect to achieve certain concrete goals that advance our interests? Do these goals include disarming North Korea, or do the talks have a cosmetic purpose? Or have talks themselves become our goal? This week, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao visited Kim Jong Il and secured his promise to send an envoy back to the six-party talks. As is always so with North Korea, there was a catch: the North’s agreement “depend[s] on the outcome of the DPRK-U.S. talks.”

Stated differently, North Korea will demand bilateral concessions as a condition of returning to talks to then demand multilateral concessions, in exchange for some variation on a handful of dry air. This puts us no closer to actual North Korean disarmament than we were in December 2006, when George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice fell for this the last time. We have every reason to expect the same outcome again.

To the eavesdroppers in the Chinese Embassy, the clicking blackberries of State Department employees on Monday night must have sounded like ping pong balls raining on a parking lot. State e-mailed out a mass press release at 7:29 p.m., something bureaucracies only do when they’re panicked or giddy. The text was rushed out, typos included, and in two different fonts. This is the sort of haste that implies irrational exuberance, but as the North Koreans no doubt realize, some of us are easily fooled that way.

It’s odd that China can never do better than this at disarming an economic dependent, but not very: China is to diplomacy what Anna Nicole Smith was to matrimony. China, after all, has helped North Korea acquire and proliferate weapons of mass destruction for years. Despite signing multiple U.N. resolutions prohibiting unaccounted-for aid to North Korea, China continues to provide economic support for North Korea at the same level as last year.

State will probably now send Special Envoy Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang, though it denies having made a firm decision to do so yet. Bosworth will go, and when he does, he can expect to hear North Korea tell him that its return to talks is conditioned on the lifting of sanctions that may be starting to bite:

“The hostile relations between the DPRK and the United States should be converted into peaceful ties through the bilateral talks without fail,” he said, according to the KCNA.

It would be a terrible mistake to agree to this, and the Obama Administration has repeatedly assured us and the South Koreans that it would not repeat this mistake. North Korea, which had only recently declared that it would never return to six-party talks, reversed itself for a reason. Kim Jong Il alone knows what’s coursing through that misshapen, clot-sodden cranium of his, but it’s looking increasingly plausible that sanctions may be forcing him to dip into his cash reserves to keep his elite and his army fed, and to feed his appetite for Italian yachts, expensive booze, and German luxury sedans (meanwhile, the corn crop has failed again and Kim Jong Il refuses to accept American food aid, so the proles can look forward to another year trying to digest those special “miracle foods“).

Recently, while speaking to the North Korean sympathizers at Nodutdol, Kim Jong Il mouthpiece Selig Harrison warned that “the whole future of the six-party talks are up in the air because we’re threatening sanctions.” Kim Jong Il and Mr. Harrison would have us believe that sanctions are anathema to diplomacy. Harrison, as is his tendency, was wrong again. North Korea is now returning to talks in the face of tougher sanctions than the Bush Administration ever imposed. Pressure isn’t a diplomat’s enemy, it is his best friend. It’s just a question of how subtly one should apply it.

But the fact that sanctions have helped our diplomacy doesn’t necessarily mean that diplomacy can disarm North Korea, unless they destabilize the regime enough to alter its fundamental character. To Kim Jong Il, nuclear weapons are a non-negotiable substitute for a degrading conventional military, a source of national pride and legitimacy, and according to reports from inside North Korea, a potential weapon against coup plotters and mutineers. They’re also probably significant to him emotionally, and can you really fault a guy who looks like this for feeling inadequate?

For what little it’s worth, Selig Harrison suggests that President Obama is trying to effect “regime change.” I’d like to believe that Harrison is finally right about something and that the neocon cabal won the 2008 election after all, but he isn’t. President Obama means to pressure Kim Jong Il into negotiating away his nukes, which he won’t, though the North Koreans recently repeated the howler that denuclearization was Kim Il Sung’s ardent desire, a wish outdone only by his devotion to the reprocessing of plutonium during his last years on Earth. I’d be interested in knowing if North Korea’s domestic propaganda system has ever repeated this meme. It would be at great variance with the regime’s domestic boasting of its success at using its nuclear might to extort aid from a hapless President Clinton. It’s also difficult to square with a newly released letter from the North Koreans to the U.N. Security Council:

North Korea said dismantling the regime’s nuclear weapons is “unthinkable even in a dream,” while signaling a readiness to return to disarmament talks with the U.S., China, Russia, South Korea and Japan.

The government in Pyongyang won’t give up its nuclear weapons unless the U.S. completely disarms, according to a statement by the Foreign Ministry sent in a letter to the United Nations Security Council by North Korean Ambassador Sin Son Ho. The statement describes as “unimaginable” any reversal of North Korea’s 2003 withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non- Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

If there is any chance at all for this Administration to achieve meaningful progress through diplomacy, it will have to remain mindful of this: talks are just talks. We’ve had plenty of them with the North Koreans in the last 20 years; meanwhile, the North’s nuclear capabilities have only grown. Kim Jong Il is accomplished at temporarily freezing one program (say, plutonium) in exchange for aid that it uses to advance other programs (say, missiles, uranium, and God-knows-what else). The Administration is on record as saying that disarmament must precede the relaxation of sanctions. That sequencing is essential. Kim Jong Il’s certain rejection of it is proof of his insincerity. If President Obama is prepared to relax sanctions now, having achieved nothing more than a peek at Kim Jong Il’s stumpy, varicose leg, we are lost for sure.

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