At the Wall Street Journal, Aaron David Miller, who during the 1990s was one of Bill Clinton’s top negotiators for the “Middle East peace process,” offers an important warning about the tendency of negotiators to fall in love with their work. He warns that negotiators—whether himself back in the 1990s or the team currently dealing with the Iranians—are prone to be over-optimistic for three reasons.

1. “Negotiators are charged with getting stuff done, not telling their bosses why something won’t happen. Not surprisingly, negotiators are reluctant to admit when their single tool won’t work. They strive to preserve the process at all costs.”
2. Being involved in the negotiations can breed “a feeling of superiority that can be intoxicating,” because by definition you know more than outsiders do.
3. “The hundreds of hours that U.S. negotiators spend creating psychological and emotional connections [with the other side] can skew judgment and perspective.”

As if to illustrate the dangers that Miller warns about, two of the Clinton administration’s leading North Korea negotiators, Robert Gallucci and Joel Wit, have penned a piece in Foreign Affairs claiming that “The 1994 agreement was a success.” What agreement are they referring to? Why the Agreed Framework under which the U.S. pledged to provide North Korea with all sorts of aid, including building nuclear reactors for electric power, in return for an end to its nuclear program.

Earlier, former CIA expert Sue Mi Terry and I wrote a piece warning that the Agreed Framework was an ominous precedent for Iran negotiations today because there is every indication to believe that Iran, like North Korea, is intent on acquiring the benefits of having sanctions lifted without actually ending its nuclear work. In responding to our article, Galluci and Wit don’t deny that North Korea broke out of the Agreed Framework. They estimate that “ North Korea could have anywhere from 20–100 nuclear weapons by 2020, with a stockpile of 50 bombs the most likely outcome.”

So how can they possibly assert that the 1994 Agreed Framework was a success when it manifestly has not stopped North Korea from being a full-fledged nuclear weapons state? Their tortuous logic goes like this: “The consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community in the early 1990s was that Pyongyang’s nuclear program was so advanced that it could produce 30 Nagasaki-size nuclear weapons a year by the end of the decade. The 1994 U.S.-Agreed Framework stopped that drive and… more than 20 years later [the predicted expansion] still hasn’t happened. ”

That’s quite a leap of logic.

The most plausible explanation for why North Korea hasn’t built as many nuclear weapons as the US intelligence community predicted more than twenty years ago is that the US intelligence community doesn’t fully understand how the North Korean regime works. Intelligence analysts probably didn’t make sufficient allowance for the inherent inefficiencies of the world’s last remaining Stalinist regime. (In a similar vein, CIA analysts during the Cold War years routinely overestimated Soviet economic production.)

And even if the Agreed Framework did somewhat slow down the North Korean program—so what? The standard ought to be whether such negotiations stop a rogue state like North Korea or Iran from becoming nuclear at all. It’s scant comfort to know that North Korea will soon be in possession of dozens rather than hundreds of atomic bombs. Even one A-bomb in the hands of a regime like Kim Jong-un’s or Ayatollah Khamenei is one too many.

The larger problem that the Galluci-Wit article illustrates is, as Aaron Miller warns, the tendency of negotiators to make endless excuses for their handiwork. If Galluci and Wit are claiming that the 1994 Agreed Framework was a success even today, imagine how ardently the Obama administration will deny any evidence that the Iran nuclear accord isn’t a huge success too. Much of Obama’s argument today depends on the ability of “snap back” sanctions—but it’s a psychological impossibility for an administration that negotiated such an accord to admit that it made a mistake.