Asia

North Korea said today that it would no longer send liaison officers for routine border talks with the U.S.-led U.N. agency that monitors the armistice that ended the Korean War.

This is part of the continuing effort by North Korea to get American involvement in negotiations. Presumably they are trying to play a kind of brinkmanship bargaining, trading limited cooperation on the matter of WOMD for food and money. Historically this has been a very successful tactic, but the world has changed, and it has always been clear that North Korea had no more intention of honoring its disarmament agreements than Hussein.

Unfortunately, North Korea is a much thornier problem than Iraq, given that there are some reports indicating that they may already possess crude nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. Even discounting those, South Korea is vulnerable to conventional forces. It's a tough problem and there are no easy answers.

The blast that killed nearly 200 people on the Indonesian resort island of Bali this weekend is a different type of terrorism from what the Bush administration has campaigned against, and will open a new geographic front in that campaign, Western officials said yesterday.

The target was not an American embassy, military outpost or financial institution that would represent American power, of the sort that terrorists have attacked in the past. Rather, it was a nightclub whose revelers were mostly Europeans and Australians; indeed, Indonesians were often turned away at the door.

Conflicting reports about whether North Korea test-fired a short-range missile off its east coast brought new tensions to the region today.