Although most observers tend to treat them as separate phenomena, there is an intimate connection between North Korea's recent nuclear and long-range missile tests and China's growing push to control the vast oil and gas resources in the South China Sea and the associated sea lanes through which trillions of dollars in commerce travel.

Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry all but confirmed that it plans to sell its longtime ally Pakistan a new 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor. The deal, reportedly signed in February, is a cause for concern in Washington. Though nominally a U.S. ally, Pakistan already has the world's fastest-growing nuclear-weapons arsenal and one of the world's worst nuclear-proliferation records. It is a country perpetually under threat from religious fanaticism, political instability and economic mismanagement.

During Secretary of State John Kerry's listening tour of the Middle East, one troubling regional issue might go unspoken: the possibility that Iran already has nuclear weapons capability.

Just what will it take to bring Iran’s nuclear ambitions to heel? The past year has seen a dramatic expansion of economic pressure against the Iranian regime by the United States and Europe, all with a single-minded purpose: to ratchet up the costs to Iran of its stubborn atomic endeavor.

When the South Korean government collected and analyzed the debris from North Korea's mid-December launch of a rocket into space, it made two new—and disturbing—discoveries. The first was that, while the rocket technology used by Pyongyang was partly Chinese in origin, it appeared to have been largely "home grown." The second was that the range of the rocket fired by the North was greater than originally believed, and perhaps as much as 6,000 miles in distance.

Today, the United States confronts no shortage of strategic challenges in the Middle East. Initial optimism about democratic change among the countries of the “Arab Spring” has given way to deep apprehension over the ascendance of Islamist forces in places like Egypt and Libya. The post-Saddam government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki remains fragile and unstable, riven by sectarian divisions and propelled by divisive power politics. And al-Qaeda, although down in the wake of the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, is decidedly not out, as frequent bombings in Iraq and mounting unrest in Yemen underscore.

During the tenure of the Bush administration, the United States entered into numerous agreements with many countries, including our Cold War adversary Russia, to deal with the growing danger of nuclear terrorism.

For the moment, let's set aside the friction in U.S.-Israeli relations over Iran's nuclear program, which serves neither Washington nor Jerusalem.

The West isn't the only part of the world going to Asia for commerce. Confronted with Western sanctions over its nuclear ambitions, Iran is increasingly turning to Asia's vast markets and its sympathetic governments.

Japan looks to reposition Aegis; Iran-Russia missile collusion; Seoul, Washington plan new Asian defenses; Russia beefs up radar capabilities; MEADS on the chopping block

Washington grants China a waiver from Iran sanctions;
China Defense Minister opposes DPRK provocations

After early signs it might try to exert pressure on Iran, China seems to be easing up. Unfortunately for the West, all roads lead through Beijing.

What is less understood is Tehran's abuse of the financial sector, banks, front companies, and other deceptive techniques to evade controls responsible countries have instituted to stop it from achieving nuclearization.

When it comes to international diplomacy, success tends to be in the eye of the beholder. That’s certainly been the case in the latest bout of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program.

Calls to ease sanctions on Iran to spur global negotiations over its nuclear program will backfire, making a deal far less likely and greatly raising the risk of an Israeli military strike to cripple the program.

To its proponents, sanctions-easing is a necessary confidence-boosting measure to assure Iran that the United States and the other "P5+1" negotiators - Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China - want a deal.

Kremlin targets social vices with new taxes;

Has the endgame on the Iranian nuclear program finally arrived? Is a deal in the cards? A broad swath of the foreign-policy cognoscenti, including Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, the National Interest’s Paul Pillar, The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus, Esquire’s Richard Barnett and a host of others, seems to think so. They are optimistic about the current round of negotiations between Iran and the West and confident that - even if negotiations should somehow break down - Iran will not, indeed cannot, pose a real threat to the United States.

Tomorrow, the United States and its fellow members of the “P5+1” (Russia, China, France, England and Germany) will sit down once again with Iran for what has been billed as the Islamic Republic’s “last chance” to come to terms with the West regarding its nuclear ambitions. The likely outcome of those talks, however, is already within view—and it is far from encouraging.

In the aftermath of the landmark U.S.-India nuclear deal passed in 2008, Washington and New Delhi have deftly navigated the periodic irritants that plague all great power relations.

History, they say, has a funny way of repeating itself.

During the decades of the Cold War, it became something of an article of faith within the Washington Beltway that strategic arms control with the Soviet Union was a key guarantor of global security. This was so despite ample evidence that the intricate “balance of terror” erected between Moscow and Washington as a result of a quarter-century of arms control actually had made America considerably less safe—and that catastrophic crisis had been narrowly avoided on a number of occasions.