January 1 was the date, under an agreement negotiated last February, by which North Korea was supposed to come clean about its nuclear-weapons program. But the deadline came and went without a response — until January 5, when Pyongyang declared that “as far as the nuclear declaration on which wrong opinion is being built up by some quarters is concerned, [North Korea] has done what it should do.” In others, North Korea was insisting that it already done what it had not done.

After an initial and exceptionally tepid reaction from the State Department calling the broken promise “unfortunate,” the U.S. is now ratcheting down the pressure. “They’re engaging the international media, in their own way,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack. “It is an important point that in none of this have any of the parties been backing away at all from their commitment to the process.”

Christopher Hill, the U.S. envoy to the six-party talks, and now traveling in the region, has chimed in, explaining that “the problem is the [North] is not often automatically inclined to transparency and so it’s a little difficult for them.”

Connecting the Dots has three questions:

Why is the United States offering excuses for North Korean behavior?

What lesson is Iran, another aspiring nuclear power, likely to draw from this episode?

What is the right word for characterizing American behavior?