Selig S. Harrison, Director of the Asia program at the Center for International Policy and author of Korean Endgame, writes, “Pyongyang is ready to rule out the development of additional nuclear weapons in future negotiations, but when, and whether, it will give up its existing arsenal depends on how relations with Washington evolve… Faced with this new hard line, the United States should choose between two approaches, benign neglect and limiting the North’s arsenal to four or five weapons.”

Alexander Vorontsov, Head of the Korea and Mongolia Department at the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences, writes, “there are grounds to believe that Seoul has opted for a DPRK strategy that in a number of basic features repeats the ‘regime change’ policy towards North Korea that was pursued in the first six years of George W. Bush administration.”

Mark J. Valencia, Visiting Senior Fellow at the Maritime Institute of Malaysia (MIMA), and Nazery Khalid, Senior Fellow at MIMA, write, “Rather than extend the Somali intervention ‘lessons’ to Southeast Asia, the international community should extend to the GOA and Somalian waters the lessons from Southeast Asia, i.e. assistance to enhance political and social stability, economic development, and anti-piracy technology and training with the goal of indigenous control of the anti-piracy response.”