Last week proved to be a busy one for international efforts to negotiate a settlement to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Although some progress occurred, longstanding obstacles persist while new impediments have arisen. The policies of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) represent a major obstacle toward realization of U.S. President Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize-winning nuclear arms control agenda. Obama delivered his well-received April 5 speech in Prague just days after North Korea resumed testing long-range “rockets” despite a U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolution prohibiting such missile-related activities. More recently, the president also singled out North Korea, as well [...]
America awoke last Friday to the stunning news that its young president, Barack Obama, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Naturally, in these hyper-partisan times, the award has elicited wild praise and unbalanced scorn back home, with darn near everybody trying to figure out why Obama was tapped for such a high honor just months into his first term. But as with all such awards, more was revealed about the selectors than the selected. So if the choice of Obama is inarguably premature, then what signal was Norway, one of America’s oldest and most sensible friends, trying to send? [...]
As if absurdity weren’t already the norm in U.S.-Cuba relations, three years ago the U.S. Interest Section, housed in a rectangular seven-story building in the Vedado district of Havana, began broadcasting a news ticker across its sixth-floor windows. The five-foot, red-orange lettering crept from one end of the building to the other, like anachronistic soldiers leftover from an ideological war settled long ago. Unfortunately, however, nobody seems to have told either the Americans or the Cubans. In kind, Fidel Castro ordered a million people to march on the building in protest. The Cuban government proceeded to block the ticker’s view [...]
