A Russian woman who visited East Germany in 1986 on a Soviet school trip described to me recently how their East German official hosts explained the Berlin wall as a necessary defence against the hordes of West Germans who wished to storm into East Germany to escape West German economic misery and join in East Germany's success. And she and her 13-year-old Soviet friends had at the time no reason to doubt this, never in their lives having been told anything different.

The age of hybrid governance is already upon us. China today is a hybrid of 19th-century communist ideology and 21st-century capitalist practice, yet it stands on the cusp of becoming the world’s largest economy. Asian state capitalism is actually a centuries-old European practice dating back at least to the government of Victorian Britain, which gradually brought the British East India Company under its direct supervision and control over the course of the 19th-century, absorbing all of its colonies and wealth.

There's never been a better time to visit North Korea. The specter of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, a potential nuclear test, assassinations of defectors in South Korea, and general saber-rattling haven't prevented a record 4,000 tourists from arriving in Pyongyang this year. There's even a hopeful air among diplomats that the two Koreas, as well as China and Japan, might find the right balance of words and gestures to smooth out their emotional grievances that fuel regular nationalist flare-ups.

The impact of drones in the counterterror campaign is hard to overstate:  terror groups, like many organizations, develop into global threats not because they can recruit suicide bombers but because they have leaders with vision, capability, commitment, and experience.  Tactical leaders might view a local government as their primary adversary; strategic leaders, from Osama bin Laden to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq to Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, have broader horizons.