One of the reasons why the North Korean regime has been able to resist the international community for so long is that the significant powers in the region have worked at cross purposes, with China and South Korea on one side and Japan and the United States on the other. China saw in the North Korean nuclear capability a possible balance to Japan’s rise. South Korea, similarly, worries more about Japan than it does about a possible nuclear threat from the North. Despite the South’s long-term alliance with the US, Seoul and Washington have had noteworthy differences in their approach to the North Korean problem.

Japan and the US, the two powers that feel most threatened by North Korea’s nuclear weapons, face major problems. Japan, the former colonial power in the region, is severely inhibited by that history. Japan is essential to any deal, but Japanese leaders have had to tread cautiously to avoid charges of a return to Japanese imperialistic policies in the region.

Washington’s capacity to act, of course, has been limited by the Iraq war, but that is only part of the story. American decision-makers have swung between threatening a military strike — it came close to deciding to attack in 1994 — and seeking to get other powers such as China to coax the North Koreans to the negotiating table.

What this agreement shows is the sea change that resulted from the North Korean nuclear test last year. It forced the major powers to find at least some common ground in handling North Korea. For both China and South Korea, though a covert, latent North Korean nuclear capability might be a useful counter to Japan, an openly nuclear North Korea posed a problem because it threatened to propel Japan towards militarising its own nuclear programme, something that neither Beijing nor Seoul wanted. So both have pushed hard for the deal, especially China.

The US has also compromised: it has conducted secret negotiations with North Korean officials prior to this deal, and has agreed to conduct direct negotiations with Pyongyang and normalise relations, something that the North Korean leadership had long demanded.

The question now is whether this new consensus will last. The current agreement is only a stop-gap measure: it only requires the North to freeze the programme. The real movement towards de-nuclearising North Korea will take place only during the second phase, where negotiations should be expected to be much tougher. At that stage North Korea will have to negotiate an agreement to give up not just its future nuclear weapons potential, but also any weapons or material it may already have produced.

Maintaining this consensus among the major powers is going to be difficult, especially since North Korea can be expected to exploit every ounce of difference between the powers it is negotiating with. But that is not the only obstacle. There are already objections from hard-line voices in Washington such as the former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, who has called on President George W. Bush to reject the deal with North Korea.

A more fundamental problem is whether any deal can satisfy the North Koreans sufficiently so that they would willingly give up their nuclear weapons. US actions can go some way in assuaging Pyongyang’s sense of insecurity, but China, Pyongyang’s closest ally, too has an incentive to act. If North Korea drags its feet on de-nuclearisation, it could potentially push Japan over the nuclear edge, a possibility that Beijing should not take lightly.

Nevertheless, great powers do not always act in their own best interest. China had a hand in both the North Korean and the Pakistani nuclear programmes. It may have seemed a very clever move to counter India and Japan, but its consequences are that China now faces a nuclear India and a potentially nuclear Japan.

The current crisis has clear lessons also for dealing with the Iranian nuclear problem. There is of course a direct link between North Korea and Iran — there have even been reports that Pyongyang has shared the results of its nuclear tests with Iran. But there are also other equally direct lessons to be learnt by the international community about negotiating with such hold-out states.

Again, the major powers involved in negotiations with Iran have differences — French President Jacques Chirac recently said that one or two nuclear weapons in Iran’s hands might not be such a problem, setting off a firestorm of controversy. Though he retracted that statement, it only illustrates the continuing differences even between the Western powers. Differences between the US and Russia and China on Iran, of course, are even more serious, with both Russia and China suggesting a milder approach than Washington. Unfortunately, it might take a crisis to get consensus within the international community about how to deal with Iran.

The writer is associate professor in international politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi