Rupert Cornwell: This weird little dude has caught the US on the hop

Day by day the North Korean crisis deepens, and day by day the language coming out of Washington grows more absurd. Kim Jong II may rule over certainly the most reclusive and arguably the most miserable country on earth. But the man whom a CNN host sneeringly dismissed yesterday as "a weird looking little dude" has tied the world's mightiest country in knots as it tries to explain why it is gearing up for war on Iraq while soft-pedalling a far more serious state of affairs in Asia.

North Korea may seem as remote as the other side of the moon, and about as inviting. But what happens there matters to everyone. Pyongyang is already the world's biggest weapons proliferator. If it officially goes nuclear, Tokyo might feel obliged to follow suit, raising the old Asian demon of Japanese militarism. The outcome could be a regional arms race involving China and, perhaps, Taiwan. And what price a superpower's credibility if it lets off the hook a founder member of the "axis of evil"?

Small wonder that President Bush, who likes his logic simple and soundbite-sized, has uttered scarcely a word on the crisis. His spokesmen, meanwhile, advance ever less credible justifications for the utterly different approaches to Saddam Hussein and the man in Pyongyang with those round glasses, the shock of hair and that funky combat dress that the TV people find so amusing.

North Korea, we are told, is not a direct threat to the US. But there is no conceivable way Iraq can threaten the US directly; and for Baghdad to make chemical, biological or nuclear weapons available to terrorists would guarantee immediate destruction in return. Pyongyang, by contrast, has missiles that can hit Japan and is developing ones that will be able to reach Alaska. If it does not yet have the nuclear warheads to fit upon them, it almost certainly will – in months, not years.

But, we are assured, the North has not defied the international community like Iraq, it has not been in serial breach of UN resolutions for a decade. This however overlooks the previous showdown with the North in 1994, over Pyongyang's plutonium-technology nuclear-weapons programme. Moreover, for at least three years North Korea has been violating the deal that ended that crisis, with its parallel and secret effort to build weapons using enriched uranium.

But one thing even the deftest White House aides cannot explain. Why is Washington on the brink of attacking a country where UN inspectors are roaming unimpeded (and as far as one can gather have found nothing incriminating) while it plays down the threat from a country that has not one but two nuclear programmes, and has kicked out every inspector in sight?

There remain only the consoling words of Colin Powell and his "Crisis, what crisis?" routine last weekend. North Korea, he now suggests (upping fuzzy CIA speculation into hard fact) already has a couple of nuclear weapons. So if it gets a few more, what's the big deal? In short, this is not a crisis. The truth, however, is surely the reverse. Iraq is a crisis today only because the US has made it so. Pyongyang's capabilities and avowed ambitions, on the other hand, mean it is a menace to its region and beyond, on a scale not remotely matched by Iraq.

Only the super-hawks (admittedly a vocal species in Washington) are hanging tough. According to them, the real mistake Bush made was to dither on Iraq. Had the US moved earlier and unilaterally to topple Saddam, the "weird little dude" would have got the message and agreed to get rid of his weapons. But after warning that the US was perfectly capable of fighting two regional wars at once, even Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon has fallen silent.

The truth is that North Korea is a crisis the Bush crowd have brought upon themselves. This administration inherited a tantalising possibility when it came to office in January 2001. Three months earlier, a senior North Korean envoy was admitted to the Oval Office to invite the then President, Bill Clinton, to pay a visit, hinting that great things might happen. But the White House could not be sure what Kim had in mind, and nothing happened.

Then came Bush, whose foreign policy consisted mainly of undoing the policies of those Clintonite softies. The stick rather than the carrot was deemed appropriate for the North, even though this has deeply upset Washington's South Korean allies, committed to a "sunshine policy" of opening up to the North that one day might lead to reunification; 11 September, understandably, hardened attitudes. Rogue states became legitimate targets in the war on terror.

But the "weird little dude" has used Mr Bush's fixation with Iraq to call his bluff. Washington is left with three bad options. It can act militarily against the North, a step successive administrations have concluded would detonate a second Korean war. Or it can watch the North become a nuclear power, with all the dangers for the region and the world outlined above. Or it can negotiate – which America says is out of the question until Pyongyang agrees to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

But sooner or later there will be talks; indeed General Powell's formulations of "tailored containment" and "bold dialogue" confirm as much. In the meantime, his boss has learnt that cheap words can have expensive consequences.