Ever since its founding in 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea has maintained an aggressive and bellicose international security posture. Today, fully two decades after the end of the Cold War, North Korea's external defense and security policies look arguably more extreme and anomalous than ever.

A potential European banking crisis would spill over to the US financial system, which has very close links to the European banking system.

The European financial crisis and the ineffective effort to stop Iran’s nuclear-weapons program are crashing into each other. As the European Union adopts new restrictions on importing Iranian oil, the most-troubled EU economies will continue to seek delays and exceptions.

In May 2010, the European debt crisis forced the European Commission to abandon its earlier "no bail out" policy and establish a massive safety net for the European periphery. But by the end of November, 2010, markets demanded record high interest rates on the European periphery's sovereign debt.

There will be a further significant intensification of the Euro-zone debt crisis in the months immediately ahead that could result in the Euro's unraveling within the next twelve months. This crisis poses serious risk to the US economic recovery.

The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (also known as the DPRK, and North Korea) is a special case in the annals of modern economic development, and not a good one: for it is an economy that once achieved a relatively advanced level of modernization, but then proceeded into prolonged, even catastrophic decline.

When economies are already laboring under too much spending, and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.

The United States should choose its policies to best further the national interest. That requires a compound calculation of both the gains available from a change in Chinese policy and the probability of U.S. initiatives effecting such a change.