North Korea, once designated by George Bush as part of the "axis of evil", has agreed to drop its nuclear weapons development. In return, the US gave an assurance that it had no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula and no intention of attacking or invading Pyongyang with nuclear or conventional weapons.
"This is the most important result since the six-party talks started more than two years ago," said China's deputy foreign minister, Wu Dawei.
If there is a sense of déjà vu to all of this, it's because we are essentially back where we were in 1994. At the time, the Clinton administration - with the help of former president Jimmy Carter - negotiated a deal in which North Korea was promised two light-water reactors provided it abandoned plans to develop nuclear weapons.
Even before Bush took office in 2001, the 1994 framework agreement, as it was called, was in trouble. Western intelligence agencies suspected that North Korea had secretly resumed enriching uranium - one method of building an atomic bomb - and in 1998, it tested a long range missile.
The situation deteriorated in July 2000, when North Korea threatened to restart its nuclear programme unless Washington compensated it for loss of electricity due to delays in building nuclear power plants.
The impasse was crying out for a major diplomatic push. But the new president wanted a clean break from the Clinton presidency. To general astonishment, Bush announced during a visit by the South Korean president Kim Dae-jung in March 2001, that the US would not resume talks with North Korea.
For Kim, who was desperately seeking US support for the so-called "sunshine policy" of rapprochement with North Korea, it was the crudest sort of rebuff, delivered at the White House in front of the world's media. Yet in a flip-flop three months later, Bush decided to resume talks he had previously spurned.
The president, however, hardly created the right atmosphere for negotiations when he lumped North Korea with Iran and Iraq in an "axis of evil" in his state of the union address in January 2002. Later that year, North Korean officials told a visiting US delegation that it had a second covert nuclear weapons programme.
Now two years after the six-party talks began involving the US, Japan, China, Russia, North and South Korean, we have a deal that looks remarkably similar to the one crafted over a decade ago.
One can't help thinking that Bush frittered a lot of time by preferring a lot of posturing that did no favours to the diplomats who had to deal with already recalcitrant customers. Letting John Bolton - now head of the US mission at the UN and a man hardly renowned for unctuous charm - loose on the North Koreans probably did not help the diplomatic process.
Yes, North Korea has one of the world's nastiest regimes. But Bush has had to learn the hard way that personal revulsion should not preclude diplomatic dealing, which in this case has led to results. Much scepticism remains as to whether North Korea will stick to its pledges, but at least today's agreement is a first step.
