POOR BILL CLINTON. He tried so hard to be a peacemaker, and until recently it appeared that he had at least partially succeeded. Sure, Middle East peace didn't emerge from the frenzied negotiations at Camp David in July 2000. But at least he had succeeded in brokering deals to bring "peace" to Northern Ireland and the Korean peninsula. Then--oops--it all unraveled last week.

From Northern Ireland came word that Britain was suspending the local assembly in which Protestants and Catholics were supposed to share power. The legislative body had been set up as a result of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, brokered by Clinton's special envoy, George Mitchell. As a condition of power-sharing, the Irish Republican Army was supposed to disarm and become a nice, housebroken political party, like the Tories or Labour. But it never has.

Until now, the IRA's transgressions--whether its failure to turn over its weapons, its role in training Colombia's FARC guerrillas, or its occasional bombings--could be explained away by peace process supporters as the work of "dissidents" and "factions." That illusion became harder to sustain last week, after police raids uncovered evidence that leaders of Sinn Fein, the public face of the IRA, were involved in planning terrorist acts. The Good Friday Agreement--for which Clinton and Mitchell have already taken numerous victory laps--appears to be in the intensive care unit, perhaps headed for the hospice.

Even more disquieting news arrived from North Korea. In 1993 Pyongyang refused to allow international monitors to inspect its nuclear facilities, as required under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Pact that it had signed. The Clinton administration averted a crisis by negotiating a much-touted peace agreement. North Korea would promise to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. In return, the United States, Japan, and South Korea would shower all sorts of goodies on the Stalinist regime, including help in building two light-water nuclear reactors for allegedly civilian use. The United States delivered its end of the bargain--ground was broken on the first of the Western-funded reactors in August--but North Korea neglected to do the same. Last week Pyongyang brazenly announced that it had unilaterally abrogated the 1994 Agreed Framework and was developing nukes and even "more powerful weapons."

You might think that these events would tend to discredit the Clinton presidency. But it's too late for that. Two years after the Marc Rich pardon, one year after September 11, the Clinton administration cannot be discredited any further. The real question is whether these events will discredit the idea that peace comes from a "process." I rather think not, for like all true faiths it is impervious to empirical refutation.

As it happens, at roughly the same time that North Korea was building nuclear weapons and the IRA was plotting further terrorism, the Nobel Peace Prize committee was awarding this year's laurel to Jimmy Carter. One might wonder how he earned the honor. The world, after all, was a considerably less peaceful (and, more important, less free) place after four years of the Carter presidency, which saw the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and advances by Soviet allies from Nicaragua to Angola. Skirting this issue, the Nobel committee justified its award by pointing to Carter's post-presidential work.

Much of it is unobjectionable, even laudable--his charitable activities with Habitat for Humanity, or his championing of human rights in places like Cuba. But Carter has also been a leading champion of the view that there is no dispute in the world so intractable as to resist mediation. Some of his efforts--notably the Israel-Egypt accord of 1978--have done little harm (though it's hard to see how regional security was enhanced by Israel's giving up the Sinai). But most of his work--in places like Haiti, Sudan, Liberia, Venezuela, Congo--has conspicuously failed to deliver tangible results.