Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, explores the politics and future of the United Arab Emirates in an article in the winter edition of City Journal.

Writing in the National Interest, Ted Galen Carpenter examines the latest episode of North Korean non-compliance with its nonproliferation obligations. In analyzing the situation, Carpenter notes:

It is possible that the North Koreans are merely engaging in bargaining tactics to obtain larger quantities of energy and financial aid than have already been promised, and if they gain further concessions, they will eventually make a full disclosure. But American and east Asian leaders also need to consider another possibility — that Pyongyang is merely stalling while it continues to build nuclear weapons from the plutonium it has already extracted from the Yongbyon reactor. For all of its promises to the contrary, North Korea may be determined to crash the global nuclear weapons party.

Carpenter misses the forest for the trees in this analysis. Simply, there is no benefit for North Korea to come in from the cold and give up its mantle as a rogue state. Such an action would lead to the demise of the regime. On the other end of the spectrum is all out confrontation with the US, which would also result in the destruction of the regime. The North Koreans have chosen a middle path that avoids the extremes and seeks to maximize the chances of regime survival. As such, North Korea has oscillated between conflict and cooperation, stick and carrot, and breaking then keeping promises. It is not clear to me what will end this pattern as North Korea benefits from keeping enough attention on it to bring in cash, aid, and prestige while at the same time remaining shy of all-out war.

The interesting question, to me at least, is whether the Bush administration fully realized this or whether they believed that North Korea could be permanently brought to heel with tough talk and tough actions or whether they simply sought to manage a bad situation as best as possible during their time in office.

The U.S. - Iran naval shenanigans in the Straits of Hormuz garnered a significant amount of media coverage in recent weeks. Malcolm Nance, writing at Small Wars Journal, penned an informative and easy to follow post on the history, context, and ramifications of the incident.