North Korea is continuing preparations to launch a long-range Taepodong-2 missile within days to weeks — a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered, “We have made it very clear that the North Koreans pursue this pathway at a cost and with consequences to the six-party talks, which we would like to see revived.” Sure, just look how much those talks have accomplished.

The State Department needs to come to grips with a frustrating reality. Talks with the Kim regime have occurred as a parallel spectacle to, not a conditional aspect of, North Korea’s weapons programs. State might just as well have spent decades engaging Pyongang on Prokofiev’s technique of chromatic displacement or on the future of arena football for all the good that talking has done.

For years, onlookers have suggested that North Korea uses empty bluster as a negotiating technique. As we see from the current status of things, the onlookers were wrong. North Korea uses empty negotiation as a legitimizing technique while it builds the weapons to back up its bluster. If, in the process, Pyongyang can stumble upon a Jimmy Carter to cough up some light water reactors, all the better. With President Obama’s penchant for diplomacy well established, and on the heels of his ode to persistence, we now confront dangerous evidence of the U.S.’s most persistent diplomatic failure.

In defense of persistence, and as a means of delaying disappointment, Obama likes to refer to the U.S. as an ocean liner. It’s not a speedboat, he suggests. Changes in direction will be slow, incremental affairs. That’s great rhetoric, but we are no longer in the land of metaphor. The American vessels Obama now finds himself stuck with are warships; two of them, equipped with anti-missile technology are heading toward the coast of Japan. Let’s hope their mere presence can accomplish what decades of engagement failed to achieve. That is: something.

UPDATE: Smart power to the rescue. “The United States has no plans to shoot down the North Korean rocket, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Jill Dougherty, but will raise the issue with the U.N. Security Council if Pyongyang carries out a launch.” By extinguishing the mere threat of action Hillary has given North Korea the full American go-ahead. We’re just spectators now.