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North Korea is showing signs of wanting to get back to talks. But without any changes to its behaviour, it might be better to focus on the next generation.

The well-choreographed pas de deux of South Korean and North Korean nuclear negotiators in Bali, and the visit of North Korea’s Senior Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan to New York, appear to have rekindled hopes for dialogue with North Korea and a resumption of Six-Party Talks. Pardon my scepticism, though, but haven’t we seen this movie before?     

Looking over the record of the past two decades, it’s fair to ask what we’d talk about now that we haven’t talked about before. Three successive administrations have posed essentially the same simple binary choice to Pyongyang:  butter or...