The year 2006 may best be remembered as a year when outsize personalities drove events -- rather than abstract political forces -- although there were, as always, lingering issues that defied resolution. In Pyongyang, supreme leader Kim Jong Il continued his brinkmanship, struggling to keep the world's attention without earning its enmity. At the beginning of the year, he made a secret trip to China, walking in the footsteps of Deng Xiaoping, ostensibly studying the economic policies that provided a foundation for China's staggering growth. Six months later, he ended a six-year moratorium and launched a battery of short- and medium-range missiles; three months after that, he went ahead with the nuclear test that enabled North Korea to claim its membership in the elite club of nuclear-weapons possessing nations.
Mr. Kim's objective is simple: He wants to keep aid flowing to his impoverished state and threatens instability to the surrounding region if he does not get it. So far, he has succeeded.
Mr. Kim's doppelganger is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose calls for the destruction of Israel and denial of the Holocaust would be disturbing in any case, but are especially so when the speaker is a head of state and who oversees a program that is suspected to be committed to developing nuclear weapons. Messrs Kim and Ahmadinejad are running interference for each other, gauging international reaction to the other's provocations and quickly pushing the envelope in defying world opinion. It looks as if they will get away with it.