This study compared and evaluated the conduct of US policies towards North Korea in order to address the North Korean nuclear threat under the Clinton (1993-2000) and the Bush (2001-2004) administrations. The capabilities of the two administrations to carry out their preferred policies toward the global threat were evaluated in view of the systemic and domestic constraints that they faced. Domestic constraints identified were the US Congress, American political culture and public opinion and bureaucratic problems. Systemic constraints were the lack of coordination and differences in policy frameworks of South Korea, Japan, China and Russia, and the difficulty of dealing with the Kim regime. These systemic and domestic constraints were deemed by this study as the primary factors in their inclination towards the middle ground in dealing with North Korea hence, becoming similar. CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK Even a half a century after the Korean War, a dominant problem in United States foreign policy remains the question of relations with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) and, in particular, that country's movement toward a nuclear weapons program. Since the 1990s, North Korea's development of nuclear weapons-and the missile technology to develop them-has posed an ongoing crisis for both the Clinton Administration (1993-2001) and, since then, the second George Bush Administration since 2001. Despite the seeming clarity of the threat, dealing with the North Korean regime has involved complex policy choices, ones centering around the pursuit of alternative negotiating frameworks, bilateral or multilateral diplomacy, the precise balance between coercion (sticks) and incentives (carrots), and the extent to which these policy choices are tied to international regimes such as the Non-Proliferation Treat (NPT) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The debates over such policy instruments have attracted much attention throughout the American policy community and