President Bush’s latest contribution to the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program was to call its leader, Kim Jung Il, “a tyrant” and “a dangerous person.” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry fired back, calling Mr. Bush “a half-baked man in term of morality and a philistine whom we can never deal with.” It also called him a “hooligan.”

So much for diplomacy. Meanwhile, North Korea claims to be producing nuclear weapons and launched a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan on the eve of the current United Nations conference on nuclear proliferation. The Bush administration takes that claim seriously. Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee recently that North Korea could mount a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike American territory, although the Pentagon later backed off a bit, saying it wasn’t sure.

Aside from name-calling, the Bush administration seems unable to do much about this North Korea problem. It insists on trying to get six-nation talks going again, but North Korea says it won’t come back. It threatens economic sanctions, but other members of the interrupted negotiations – South Korea, Japan, China and Russia – don’t like that idea. A U.S. military strike seems out of the question, since it could involve South Korea and possibly Japan and China in a major regional war. North Korea isn’t at all likely

to start a war, since Kim Jung Il, while eccentric and undemocratic, is neither crazy nor self-destructive.

A specialist in nuclear proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace says that part of the problem is that the administration has never developed a unified strategy. He says a battle continues to go on between the hardliners and those who favor negotiation. He suspects that one of the hardliners, a group headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, was able to get the word “tyrant” into Mr. Bush’s latest press conference remarks as a provocation that would make further negotiations even less likely.

American name-calling, led by Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and John Bolton, now defending his controversial nomination for the United Nations ambassadorship, has accomplished nothing positive. On the negative side, it has persuaded many in South Korea, Japan and China that the real bully is the United States, not North Korea. The United States needs the respect of its allies.

By this time, there is little hope that North Korea will give up its nuclear weapons program. But it may still be possible to get it to stop peddling nuclear materials and know-how around the world. Bilateral conversations would be the best route, possibly in the context of renewed six-power talks. But the first step should be to halt the tough rhetoric.