North Korea

Kim Jong-il, the pygmy tyrant of North Korea, is dead at the age of 69. His 28-year-old son, Kim Jong-un, now assumes the throne of Pyongyang. According to various press analyses, the new leader is either a bumbling naïf or a clever, multilingual operator who's already formed alliances with key generals. He will either push market reforms or preserve the status quo. He will reach out to the West or step up confrontation or do neither.

Here's the real answer: We really don't know much of anything.

President Barack Obama's political fortunes suffered a dramatic blow on Nov. 2. Since then, whether in domestic policy or the international arena, nations, as well as U.S. politicians, have raised their price for cooperating with him.

The tweets started arriving in August, and they did not mince words. One of the first accused the South Korean government of being "a prostitute of the United States." The Twitter account, under the name "uriminzok," or "our nation," seemed to be part of a sprawling North Korean digital operation that included a Facebook account (registered as a man interested in "meeting other men," but solely for "networking purposes") and a series of YouTube videos meant to celebrate the might of the North Korean military.

On special guided trips, arranged for tourists and permitted by Pyongyang, Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management in Beijing, has twice visited North Korea. On each trip, he and his fellow travelers were accompanied by official guides, only permitted in certain areas, and asked to delete "objectionable" photos from their digital cameras. Yet the visits afforded Chovanec a rare glimpse inside the Hermit Kingdom.

Kang Cheol-Hwan, North Korean defector and activist, thinks Kim Jong Il's brutal North Korean regime will collapse within three years, five years at the most. But the prospect doesn't make him giddy. On the contrary, the imminent fall of the one of the world's most repressive states just means more work. However much he wants North and South Korea to be reunified, he knows that how it happens is as important as reunification itself.

Within Washington, a consensus seems to have emerged that the Obama administration will have to wait for North Korean leader Kim Jong-il to die before re-engaging with Pyongyang.

It worked so well with Fidel Castro.

Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

...Steven Clemons, who also writes the blog The Washington Note, said there were signs within the Administration and the State Department that the lifting of the terrorism designation was imminent.

"This is seen as a key confidence-building step by North Korea and China in moving towards North Korea's eventual return to the nuclear non-proliferation club," he wrote.

Verifying North Korea's nuclear programs is going to be more of a political question than a technical one, with key American negotiators having to make a "gut call" on whether the communist state is being truthful, a U.S. nonproliferation expert said Wednesday.

Jeffrey Lewis, director of nuclear strategy and nonproliferation initiative at the New America Foundation, said the central issue will be North Korea's declaration of its suspected uranium enrichment program.