The Bush administration’s much-vaunted deal with North Korea seems to be collapsing faster than you can say “Condoleezza Rice.” According to this report, Pyongyang has lost interest in being taken off the list of terror-sponsoring states. This had been one of the big concessions that the U.S. was going to give in return for the dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program. Now this:

“We neither wish nor expect to be delisted as a ‘state sponsor of terrorism,” the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA, quoted a ministry spokesman as saying. “We can go our own way.”

Oh, and that nuclear reactor at Yongbyon that North Korea ceremoniously began destroying this summer, in a move heralded by the administration?

The North Korean Foreign Ministry also confirmed what the United States and South Korea have said already: it has begun to reassemble a nuclear complex that can produce weapons-grade plutonium.

It’s a shame that the “deal” with North Korea is unraveling–but hardly unexpected. The only surprise is that the administration was so willing to abandon its first-term principles in order to pursue an accord that was widely seen as doomed. Presumably this will free up Secretary Rice’s time for another quixotic undertaking–trying to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, more than sixty years in the making, by the end of this year.