If indeed North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon, and the evidence weighs heavily at this late hour (CNN has said that senior US officials are all but certain it has happened) towards this being so, make no mistake, no matter what you hear from the talking heads in the next few days, this is a massive, unmitigated Bush Administration foreign policy failure. I'll have more thoughts on this later, but basically, our unwillingness to engage the North Koreans bilaterally in the face of all regional powers wishing us to engage them, including China, Russia, South Korea and Japan, has made Northeast Asia more unstable and dangerous. For more on why North East Asia is a more dangerous and unstable place see my primer on North Korea. Will there be sanctions on North Korea now? I personally doubt it. Why? Why would the Chinese want to destabilize such a nation along its border? What will Japan do as well?

Nota bene: Billmon has this one right:

No doubt Tony Snow will step out tomorrow to tell us it's really not such a big deal -- the North Koreans and Kim Jong-il being ever so much nicer and more rational than those genocidal Iranians and their power-crazed dictator, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

North Korea would not have gone nuclear had the Bush Administration not arrogantly brushed aside the previous agreement with North Korea and embraced a hardline against them upon assuming office in 2001. All of this was preventable. Since 2001 They have done nothing but ignore the North Koreans, ignored their nuclear program and ignored our interests in the region. That's all that needs to be said about this event. It could have been prevented and was not.