Cuba Si, North Korea No

Those geopoliticians who have been hungering for an aftermath to the cold war -- a tragicomic sequel -- have been richly rewarded over this summer, as two of the last stalwarts of communism, North Korea and Cuba, have rattled their rhetorical sabers, flourished their poker hands and roared their threats into the wind. Though both of them have something of the air of those Japanese soldiers lost in the Southeast Asian jungle and unaware that the war they have been fighting was concluded long ago, both also have the desperate -- and therefore dangerous -- recklessness of isolated dictatorships whose coffers...