With U.S. and North Korea resuming high-level diplomacy and North Korea’s nuclear arsenal again on the table, what went wrong with the 1994 Agreed Framework is again on the table. That diplomatic deal meant to end North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and prevent the reclusive communist state from abandoning the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but didn’t fulfill its promise. Why?

Partisans have long argued the fault lies in Washington and, more specifically, with Republicans. Glenn Kessler, who had previously covered Korea as a Washington Post reporter took a nuanced approach when he sought to correct the assertion by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., that the 1994 nuclear deal was faulty. The Atlantic Council’s Barbara Slavin, for example, tweeted that “GW Bush wrecked [the Agreed Framework] by stopping fuel oil deliveries and putting North Korea on an ‘axis of evil’?” Those who had a hand in negotiating the deal have long defended their work and also blamed the deal’s collapse not on North Korean cheating, but rather on subsequent management of the Korea portfolio by the George W. Bush administration. What actually happened?