Strait To Hell, Kim Jong Boom, Armenian Roulette

It’s war in our time. After flirting with peace for a few miserable hours, the US and Iran are back to what they know best: taking uneven chunks out of each other amidst the world’s prime oil pathway.

This week, Iran levelled a terminal of Kuwait’s airport, and attacked the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Then there was that mysterious Apache helicopter crash off Hormuz.

Now, after the crisp kinetic strikes of the first few weeks – then the tentative tests of strength – the war is entering a new phase.

One in which Iran shows that the US will not be able to achieve on the negotiating table what it did not achieve on the battlefield.

Meanwhile, it’s a thriving Asian tiger, the skyscraper skyline of its capital shows the bustle and optimism of the Rising East. Mobile phones. Electric cars. That’s right — North Korea is this year’s big economic success story, according to a new piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Turns out the Hermit Kingdom is less hermetic these days. North Koreans have made good money providing weapons to Russia in Ukraine, and China has turned on the trade taps. Pyongyang no longer rations electricity to a few hours every day.

So what happens when North Korea is no longer a Potemkin village but a Potemkin megalopolis?

Meanwhile, lose a war, get voted back in. Three years after the catastrophe in Nagorno-Karabakh, what inspired the Armenian people to re-elect Nikol Pashinyan? Perhaps it was precisely because of how vulnerable the country feels itself to be.

The strategy is to buy off and shore up: peace with Azerbaijan, EU candidacy, and normalisation with old enemy Turkey. But how low can you lie in a region that Russia sees as its backyard?

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