Kim Jong Un, the youngest son of Kim Jong Il, looks to be the next ruler of North Korea. Will he usher in a period of perestroika? Or are we to expect more of the same provocation we've witnessed in the past two months?

Unless the global aid community reverses its support of agricultural privatization and begins to cultivate Malawi-style state subsidies, continuing localized food crises may transform into an unprecedented global famine.

The Chinese Communist Party's top priority remains what it has always been: the maintenance of absolute political power.

Africa is now paralyzed by the rise of failed democracies—countries that hold elections but do not develop institutions to support civil society—sparking conflict rather than easing it. The result across broad swaths of the continent has been the concentration of power with the people who make the continent's conflicts worse.

Unless Beijing can get its economy going again, the government is likely to face their first sustained wave of protests in decades. Thus far, China has kept labor protests separate from one another, preventing them from developing a common theme or a common leader. But if China's downturn turns into an outright recession, the country could face its first serious threat to the regime.

Asia once was regarded as the vanguard of a global wave of democratization that, over the past three decades, has swept through southern Europe, Latin America, and Africa as well. In recent years, however, Asia has witnessed a democracy backlash.

The success of "state capitalism" – a capitalist economy run with a high degree of state control – has made it a model for states across the developing world. Western powers may now be wondering whether their brand of capitalism will triumph after all.

Today's financial crisis in America looks remarkably like the crisis that struck Japan 20 years ago, when a stock market meltdown exposed years of speculative lending, mostly dependent on real estate, and led to an economic collapse. The United States can take lessons from the Japanese experience as it attempts to engineer its own recovery.

After nearly two decades, the Sunday Perspective section of the Bangkok Post, Thailand's leading English newspaper, closed down. In a society where the elites long went unquestioned, Perspective allowed Thais to question the powerful. A city that returns to entrenched ways of the past is a city that no longer needs Perspective, since it is a city that no longer cares for reform.

Seasoned diplomats are leaving the State Department in droves, leaving America critically short on diplomatic expertise just when it is needed most.