Three decades ago, North Korean agents abducted a dozen or more Japanese men, women and children, seizing them on the street, then hustling the victims onto waiting ships for the short trip to North Korea. The plan was to train them to be spies.

In 2002, Kim Jung il, the North Korean leader, admitted that his government had kidnapped 13 Japanese. He returned five of them. Since then, however, learning the fate of the others has grown into a fevered national obsession so potent that no Japanese politician can dare ignore it. Now that fixation has ensnared a seemingly unrelated issue — North Korea's agreement to abandon its nuclear-weapons program.

That agreement, President Bush's single significant foreign-policy achievement, is teetering on the edge of collapse — in part because of Japan. But Bush appears to side with Japan, effectively kicking sand in the faces of his own diplomats who are trying to salvage the agreement.

Japan is one of the six nations that negotiated the agreement last year. Japan is also a critical U.S. ally. If the United States proceeded to improve relations with North Korea, as Kim is insisting, before North Korea accounted for the abductees, "Japan would raise holy hell," said Michael Green, who was the East Asia expert on Bush's National Security Council until two years ago.

"They would view it as a betrayal," he told me.

I traveled to Asia with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Christopher Hill, her chief aide on this issue, several times for discussions of North Korea with allies. And during all that time, Rice, Hill and the others said they considered the abduction problem as a tertiary consideration at best.

When asked, Rice explicitly refuses to link reaching final agreement with North Korea to resolution of the abduction issue. Last fall, she expressed sympathy for Japan but then concluded: "Right now I think we're just concentrating on trying to get a disablement schedule and a declaration that is full and complete."

North Korea is disabling one of its reactors but has refused to provide the full and complete declaration of all of its nuclear programs. That was due Dec. 31.

Instead, the Koreans referred back to a document they provided in November that described their enriched plutonium stores. Almost everyone involved in the issue believes North Korea also has a secret uranium-enrichment program. The suspicion is hardly speculative. As part of its disarmament obligations last fall, North Korea handed over some aluminum tubes. When examined, the tubes were suffused with traces of enriched uranium.

Confronted with that, North Korea changed its tune, as it often does when backed into a corner. Now the Koreans are arguing that the United States is not fulfilling its promise to remove North Korea from its list of state-sponsored terrorist nations. The agreement does say Washington is supposed to begin that process "in parallel" with North Korea's initial disarmament actions. And that's where the Japanese abductee problem comes into play.

How hard would it be to remove North Korea from that list — if that would prompt Kim to move forward with his agreements? It's just a list! But here we are six weeks after the deadline, and no one in Washington is talking about that. Could it be that everyone at the State Department knows full well how President Bush feels? After all, last year he actually met at the White House with Sakai Yokota, a parent of one of the abductees, and called the session "one of the most moving moments since I've been president."

That's the most sustained public attention he has ever devoted to anything having to do with the North Korea negotiations — far more than he has ever accorded to his aides, the ones who actually negotiated the disarmament agreement. During his State of the Union speech last week, Bush never even mentioned North Korea.

The Republican right wing has howled with disapproval since the agreement was concluded last year. North Korea cannot be trusted, they exclaimed. Bush obviously agrees.

Last fall, when Israel bombed a suspected nuclear development site in Syria — containing equipment theoretically supplied by North Korea — the exclamations grew to yowls.

It's true that North Korea cannot be trusted. But Kim is already dismantling one nuclear site. Aren't we better off?

Last week, responding to Japanese complaints, North Korea issued a screed about mistreatment of Koreans during the Japanese occupation in the last century. North Korea's abductions were reprehensible acts. But should we get involved in a dueling war-crimes debate?

Call Kim's bluff. Revise the terrorists list. If after that he still does not live up to his obligations, then it's time to accept that North Korea is simply a renegade state.

Joel Brinkley is professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former New York Times foreign correspondent. He wrote this commentary for McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.