Two years ago protestors took over the streets of Istanbul, Turkey’s first city. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan beat them down and last year he was elected president. His critics feared his plan to invest the largely ceremonial post with Putin-like authority. On Sunday, however, Turkish voters revoked his party’s majority.

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. Erdogan initially allied with liberals to systematically dismantle the authoritarian system that had replaced the Ottoman Empire.

The military came to dominate politics. At times, they executed and jailed opponents. Eventually, the nationalist establishment imploded. Weak coalition governments tolerated corruption and delivered economic malaise. In 2002, the AKP won a dramatic victory.

With Erdogan at its head, the party delivered liberty and prosperity. The new government dismantled repressive elements of the “Deep State,” put the military back in its barracks, created a more business-friendly environment, moved towards Europe, and pushed social reforms. The Turkish people rewarded the AKP with a steadily larger proportion of their votes.

Today, however, Erdogan denounces critics domestic and foreign, using every repressive tool of the state against them. He dallies with Islamist and terrorist forces as he tries to make Turkey into a regional Weltmacht. He lives in a $615 million presidential palace, four times the size of Versailles.

But now the Turkish economic engine is slowing. Growth greatly increased opportunities for corruption, yet Erdogan has attempted to shut down all investigations.

Although elections remain free, Freedom House rated Turkey only as partly free. The State Department’s human rights assessment notes interference with freedom of assembly and expression and impunity for security forces.

After battling against misuse of security laws, Erdogan deployed the legislation against military officers and civilians. He has led a particularly virulent campaign of intimidation against journalists, as Turkey has led the world in the number of imprisoned journalists for years.

Several reporters and columnists with whom I spoke feared criticizing the prime minister. Their editors were reluctant to pursue stories against the government. The government also applies sustained though often invisible pressure on media organizations, including the threat of public investigations and loss of television licenses.

After taming the traditional press, the Erdogan government began targeting internet freedoms. Those charged for their comments include a former Miss Turkey and a 16-year-old student.

While relaxing unfair restrictions on Muslims—such as the ban on women wearing headscarves—the government has yet to address the lack of legal protection for religious worship and practice by every faith. Anti-Semitism also is on the rise.

Turkey needs an Arab Spring of sorts, but one within the democratic process. On Sunday, that movement began. The AKP received less than 41 percent of the vote, down from roughly 50 percent four years ago. The ruling party fell 18 seats short of a majority in the 550-member Grand National Assembly.

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu may not survive. Certainly Erdogan’s vision of an enhanced presidency appears dead. The government no longer can even pass common legislation if the opposition unites.

The electoral result also is likely to embolden Erdogan’s opponents. For the first time in more than a decade, AKP rule no longer appears inevitable.

As I point out in Forbes online: “Indeed, Erdogan may find it hard to control his party. Davutoglu holds the stronger institutional position and may enjoy making his own decisions. Erdogan might try to oust his critics, but an intra-party civil war could wreck the AKP and government. Potential aspirants for power abound, led by Abdullah Gul, a former AKP prime minister, foreign minister, and president.”

Of course, fear of losing power could impel Erdogan to launch a crackdown. But doubling down would be risky. He can’t fully trust the military or the police, and has lost popular support.

President Erdogan made the democratic transformation of Turkish politics possible. The Turkish people must take full advantage of their opportunities in a new Turkey. Only they can ensure a prosperous and free Turkey.

As I noted last week, the GOP’s 2016 contenders didn’t do themselves much credit as they ducked, covered, cringed, and pratfell through a series of interview questions about the Iraq War. Still, Jeb Bush had a point when he noted that, at the time, “almost everybody” in political Washington was for the war. True enough: as policy disasters go, the Iraq War was as bipartisan as the subprime loan crisis. 

On the war’s tenth anniversary a couple of years back, the New Republic’s John Judis recalled “what it was like to oppose the Iraq War in 2003.” His memory jibes with mine: it was pretty damned lonely. Well before “Shock and Awe,” hawkish arguments had achieved near full-spectrum dominance over the minds of Beltway policy elites, and the invasion and occupation of Iraq was shaping up as a horrific idea whose time had come. 

But it rankled a bit when Judis wrote that “except for Jessica Mathews at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington’s thinktank honchos were also lined up behind the war.” Not to take anything away from Ms. Mathews, but the late, great Bill Niskanen had to count as a “think tank honcho” if anyone did, and he opposed the war vigorously, early, and often.

In a December 2001 public debate with former CIA director James Woolsey, Niskanen, then Cato’s chairman, offered the first prominent public statement by a DC think-tank leader against that looming debacle: “An Unnecessary War Is an Unjust War,” Bill argued. In the run-up to the invasion, other Cato scholars argued, among other things, that:

• “There is no credible evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The pro-war faction has never explained why the United States cannot deter a garden-variety thug like Saddam Hussein.” 
• It ultimately didn’t matter whether Saddam Hussein had “WMDs”: He and Al Qaeda were anything but natural allies, and “the idea that Hussein views a WMD strike via terrorist intermediaries as a viable strategy is rank speculation, contradicted by his past behavior.” 
• “Ousting Saddam would make Washington responsible for Iraq’s political future and entangle the United States in an endless nation-building mission beset by intractable problems.”
• The idea that regime change would usher in “a democratic transformation in the Middle East, producing new regimes that would be far friendlier to both Israel and the United States” was “a fantasy, not a realistic goal.” 
• “If anything, nation building is likely to create more incentives, targets, and opportunities for terrorism, not fewer.”
• “The strategy of empire is likely to overstretch and bleed America’s economy … and the overextension could hasten the decline of the United States as a superpower, as it did the Soviet Union and Great Britain.”

At the time, opposition to the Iraq War was controversial even within the building—and outside of 1000 Massachusetts Ave., Cato’s Iraq War skeptics had very little company among the Beltway cognoscenti. 

For example, both inside and outside the Bush administration, American Enterprise Institute scholars played a key role in making the case for war. As Bob Woodward reported in his 2006 book State of Denial, in late 2001, Paul Wolfowitz approached then-AEI president Chris DeMuth to put together a secret task force of top thinkers to generate “the kinds of ideas and strategy needed to deal with a crisis of the magnitude of 9/11.” They called themselves “Bletchley II,” after the British cryptographers who cracked Axis communication codes during WWII. 

Bletchley II participants included Fareed Zakaria (who should have known better), James Q. Wilson, Reuel Marc Gehrecht, Fouad Ajami, Robert Kaplan, and Bernard Lewis. The team generated “a seven-page, single-spaced document, called ‘Delta of Terrorism.’ ‘Delta’ was used in the sense of the mouth of a river from which everything flowed.” Rumsfeld adviser Steven Herbits summed up the memo’s message: “We’re facing a two-generation war. And start with Iraq.” (Boy, I’d love to see that memo.) 

Over on the center-left, Brookings scholars proved instrumental as well—Kenneth Pollack’s The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq played a key role in getting center-left opinion leaders behind the war, convincing, among many others, the New Yorker’s David Remnick that “a return to a hollow pursuit of containment will be the most dangerous option of all.” 

It’s supposed to be conservatives’ job to stand athwart history, yelling “stop!” and liberals’ role to resist the rush to war. For the most part, DC’s think tanks left that job to the libertarians, with predictable results. In 2004, after the die was cast, Cato was the first major DC think tank to offer an extended argument for Exiting Iraq, in Chris Preble’s book of that name. 

I wouldn’t call Cato’s Iraq skeptics “prescient,” nor would I claim that everything we wrote holds up well a decade and a half later; for example, like several of my colleagues, I engaged in a little WMD fearmongering of my own in the early days of the war, warning that “components for a ‘dirty bomb’ may already be in the wrong hands” thanks to the invasion. (Cato’s Alan Reynolds, who decried the WMD “hype,” had the better view). But it would be nice if, when a major daily prints one of those “what to do in Iraq?” symposia, they occasionally think to call somebody, like Ted Carpenter or Chris Preble—who got it right in the first place. 

It would be even better if the GOP’s 2016 contenders weren’t still, 12 years later, so eager to seek foreign policy advice from people who got the Iraq War Question spectacularly wrong.

The Washington Post reports that Scott Walker’s “crash course” in foreign policy is led by tutors like “[Elliot] Abrams, Bush’s deputy national security adviser, and [AEI’s] Marc A. Thiessen, a Post columnist and former Bush speechwriter known for his staunch defense of waterboarding and other interrogation tactics barred by President Obama. Walker selected Thiessen to co-write his 2013 book, Unintimidated, and the two men became confidants during hours of Skype conversations each weekend.” Marco Rubio’s team includes a kettle of Iraq hawks like Abrams, Eric Edelman, and Brookings’ Robert Kagan. There’s no word yet on who’s advising Rick Perry, but last time around he sought out Iraq War architect Doug Feith, now with the Hudson Institute. It was a bit unfair for then-CentCom commander Gen. Tommy Franks to call Feith “the dumbest [expletive deleted] guy on the planet,” given Earth’s seven billion-plus people, but Feith’s hardly the first person you’d want to turn to if you wanted to avoid the costly foreign policy blunders of the past decade. 

For his part, Jeb Bush has sought out a number of key figures “present at the creation” of the Iraq debacle, like Paul Wolfowitz, who, as US forces drove toward Baghdad, in March 2003, promised Congress icing on the cakewalk: “There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be U.S. taxpayer money…. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”

Given that background, you might suspect that there’s just no accountability for GOP foreign policy advisers; but that isn’t so. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that “Elbridge Colby, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was being seriously considered for a job as foreign policy director in Mr. Bush’s expanding organization, [but] according to a person familiar with the campaign’s internal deliberations, Mr. Bush’s political operation raised concerns about Mr. Colby’s published views on Iran. Mr. Colby has prominently advocated against a military strike on Iran and has called for the Republican Party to move closer to its roots of pragmatism and containment.” So he’s out. You can’t expect to retain your political and professional credibility after a screw-up like that.

It’s hard not to feel satisfaction at the indictment of soccer officials for apparently corrupting the globe’s Beautiful Game—soccer in America but football to most of the world. Yet emotional satisfaction is a bad basis for government policy. While the U.S. is not the only nation to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction, it does so more often and more broadly than anyone else.

Moreover, punishing foreigners creates future risks. Someday Americans might get indicted by other nations for “crimes” committed in the U.S.

How did Washington become the world’s policeman and prosecutor in the case of soccer? The sport remains a modest phenomenon in America. Most of the alleged crimes involve foreigners acting overseas.

The impact in the U.S. is less than that on almost every other nation on earth, since virtually everywhere the sport commands greater loyalty from a larger percentage of the population. Nevertheless, some of the criminal acts took place in America and the corruption affected interstate (and foreign) commerce, the boilerplate justification used by Uncle Sam for regulating most everything.

As American power has grown, so has Washington’s willingness to apply its laws to the rest of the world. Washington has routinely abducted foreigners overseas for drug offenses. Perhaps the most extreme example was the 1989 invasion of Panama, after which ousted dictator Manuel Noriega was transported to America and convicted of violating U.S. drug laws.

Even more problematic has been the Justice Department crusade to turn foreign banks into arms of the IRS. The U.S. has gone after Swiss banks with the greatest enthusiasm, paying informants, filing criminal prosecutions, and imposing multi-billion dollar fines for accepting deposits from Americans. Yet citizens of Switzerland and the rest of the world have no moral obligation to help fill Uncle Sam’s coffers to finance more waste and wars.

Congress also passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requiring all non-American financial institutions to report any accounts held by Americans. As a result, foreign banks face substantial costs in dealing with U.S. citizens, even those fully compliant with American tax laws. Many foreign banks now refuse to serve Americans.

Perhaps the most expansive form of extraterritoriality is sanctions. By one count Washington imposed 61 different economic penalties between 1993 and 1998, Washington’s dictates are amplified not only by the size of the American market, but through Swift, the Brussels-based organization which manages international financial transfers.

Traditionally sanctions applied to companies formed in the U.S. and their branches, and firms located in America. However, through both legislation and regulation Washington has constantly expanded the extraterritorial reach of U.S. penalties.

Over time Washington began targeting U.S. subsidiaries and licensees. Later sanctions also applied to resale of U.S.-origin goods, transactions with foreign firms, and foreign banks financing prohibited transactions. European companies, in particular, have found themselves fined for activities which are legal under national as well as European Union law.

Explained attorneys Ronald Meltzer and David Ross of WilmerHale, “U.S. law has undergone a significant shift: it effectively creates an expanding regime of secondary sanctions that are triggered by transactions that do not require a nexus to the United States.” Sometimes other governments have enacted “blocking” statutes which prohibit their nationals from complying with foreign, i.e., American, restrictions deemed harmful to their national interest.

As I point out on Forbes online: “The moral fervor behind many of Washington’s many fevered crusades often is laudable. But a desire to do good does not warrant America attempting to play dictatress to the world.”

So it is with the U.S. indictments against corrupt soccer officials, and even more so with Washington’s determination to make foreign banks agents of the IRS and foreign individuals and companies tools of U.S. foreign policy. Such overreach inevitably breeds abuse.

It also invites retaliation in the future, when America no longer so dominates the globe. If Americans eventually find themselves in a foreign court for legal conduct in the U.S., they will have today’s lawmakers and officials to thank.

“GOP Agrees Bush Was Wrong to Invade Iraq, Now What?”—that’s how the US News headline put it last week. A good question, because it’s not at all clear what that grudging concession signifies. It’s nice that 12 years after George W. Bush lumbered into the biggest foreign policy disaster in a generation, the leading Republican contenders are willing to concede, under enhanced interrogation, that maybe it wasn’t the right call. It would be nicer still if we could say they’d learned something from that disaster. 

Alas, the candidates’ peevish and evasive answers to the Iraq Question didn’t provide any evidence for that. Worst of all was Jeb Bush’s attempt to duck the question by using fallen soldiers as the rhetorical equivalent of a human shield. Ohio governor John Kasich flirted with a similar tactic—“There’s a lot of people who lost limbs and lives over there, OK?”—before conceding, “But if the question is, if there were not weapons of mass destruction should we have gone, the answer would’ve been no.” 

That’s how most of the GOP field eventually answered the question, with some version of
the “faulty intelligence” excuse. We thought Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons and was poised for a nuclear breakout; it was just our bad luck
that turned out not to be true; so the war was—well, not a “mistake,” insists Marco Rubio, just, er—whatever the word is for something you definitely wouldn’t do again if you had the
power to travel back in time. As Scott Walker, who’s been studying up super-hard on
foreign policy, explained: you can’t fault President Bush: invading Iraq just made sense, based on “the information he had available” at the time. 

Well, no—invading Iraq was a spectacularly bad idea based on what we knew at the time. If we’d found stockpiles of so-called WMD, it would still have been a spectacularly bad idea. Saddam’s possession of unconventional weapons was a necessary condition in the Bush administration’s case for war, but it wasn’t—or shouldn’t have been—sufficient to make that case compelling, because with or without chemical and biological weapons, Saddam’s Iraq was never a national security threat to the United States. 

Put aside the fact that, as applied to chem/​bio, “WMD” is a misnomer; assume for the sake of argument that President Bush’s claim that “one vial, one canister, one crate” of the stuff could “bring a day of horror like none we have ever known” was an evidence-based, good-faith assessment of those weapons’ potential, instead of a ludicrous and cynical exaggeration. Even so, you’d still have to show that Saddam Hussein was so hell-bent on hitting the U.S., he’d risk near-certain destruction to do it. 

There was never any good reason to believe that. This, after all, was a dictator who, during the 1991 Gulf War, had been deterred from using chemical weapons against US troops in the middle of an ongoing invasion. As then-Secretary of State James Baker later explained, the George H.W. Bush administration:

made it very clear that if Iraq used weapons of mass destruction, chemical weapons, against United States forces that the American people would demand vengeance and that we had the means to achieve it. … we made it clear that in addition to ejecting Iraq from Kuwait, if they used those types of weapons against our forces we would in addition to throwing them out of Kuwait, we would adopt as a goal the elimination of the regime in Baghdad.

Eleven years later, as the George W. Bush administration pushed for another war with Iraq, there wasn’t any convincing evidence that Saddam Hussein had, in the interim, warmed up to the idea of committing regime suicide through the use of CBW. Even the flawed October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) prepared during the run-up to the Iraq War vote concluded that “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.” 

By that time, with Bush 43 sounding the alarm about Iraq’s “growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas [including] missions targeting the United States,” it should have been apparent that the case for war rested on a series of imaginary hobgoblins. As Jim Henley put it a couple of years ago, “In the annals of projection, the US claim that Saddam was building tiny remote-controlled death planes wins some kind of prize.” 

What if the Iraqi dictator instead passed off those weapons to terrorists, “secretly and without fingerprints”? In the 2003 State of the Union, that’s what President Bush argued Saddam just might do: “imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein.” But the notion that Hussein was likely to pass chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda was only slightly less fantastic than the scenario that had him crop-dusting US cities with short-range, Czech-built training drones. As my colleague Doug Bandow pointed out at the time: “Baghdad would be the immediate suspect and likely target of retaliation should any terrorist deploy [WMD], and Saddam knows this.” 

I made similar arguments two weeks before the war in a piece called “Why Hussein Will Not Give Weapons of Mass Destruction to Al Qaeda”: 

The idea that Hussein views a WMD strike via terrorist intermediaries as a viable strategy is rank speculation, contradicted by his past behavior. Hussein’s hostility toward Israel predates his struggle with the United States. He’s had longstanding ties with anti-Israeli terror groups and he’s had chemical weapons for over 20 years. Yet there has never been a nerve gas attack in Israel. Why? Because Israel has nuclear weapons and conventional superiority, and Hussein wants to live. If he’s ever considered passing off chemical weapons to Palestinian terrorists, he decided that he wouldn’t get away with it. He has even less reason to trust Al Qaeda with a potentially regime-ending secret.

In its 2004 after-action reassessment of the administration’s case for preventive war, the Carnegie Endowment concluded: 

there was no positive evidence to support the claim that Iraq would have transferred WMD or agents to terrorist groups and much evidence to counter it. Bin Laden and Saddam were known to detest and fear each other, the one for his radical religious beliefs and the other for his aggressively secular rule and persecution of Islamists. Bin Laden labeled the Iraqi ruler an infidel and an apostate, had offered to go to battle against him after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and had frequently called for his overthrow. … the most intensive searching over the last two years has produced no solid evidence of a cooperative relationship between Saddam’s government and Al Qaeda. ….the Iraqi regime had a long history of sponsoring terrorism against Israel, Kuwait, and Iran, providing money and weapons to these groups. Yet over many years Saddam did not transfer chemical, biological, or radiological materials or weapons to any of them “probably because he knew that they could one day be used against his secular regime.”

In the judgment of U.S. intelligence, a transfer of WMD by Saddam to terrorists was likely only if he were “sufficiently desperate” in the face of an impending invasion. Even then, the NIE concluded, he would likely use his own operatives before terrorists. Even without the particular relationship between Saddam and bin Laden, the notion that any government would turn over its principal security assets to people it could not control is highly dubious. States have multiple interests and land, people, and resources to protect. They have a future. Governments that made such a transfer would put themselves at the mercy of groups that have none of these. Terrorists would not even have to use the weapons but merely allow the transfer to become known to U.S. intelligence to call down the full wrath of the United States on the donor state, thereby opening opportunities for themselves. 

You don’t have to “know what we know now” to recognize the poverty of the case for war. You just had to know what we knew then. 

Even so, it’s possible that GOP hawks have learned something from the Iraq debacle, however loathe they are to admit it. Like Saddam’s Iraq, the Syrian and Iranian regimes have long had unconventional weapons and links to terrorist proxies. But I haven’t heard even Lindsey Graham or Marco Rubio invoke the risk of terrorist transfer to make the case for war with Iran or Syria. Perhaps that’s because it’s as unpersuasive an argument now as it should have been then. 

Besides, maybe it’s asking too much to expect professional politicians to depart entirely from the sentiments of the people they want to vote for them. A recent Vox Populi/​Daily Caller poll asked Republican voters in early primary states: “Looking back now, and regardless of what you thought at the time, do you think it was the right decision for the United States to invade Iraq in 2003?” Nearly 60 percent of them answered in the affirmative. The GOP’s 2016 contenders may not have good answers to the Iraq Question, but, apparently, they’re miles ahead of their constituents. 

Officials often try to implement dubious or controversial initiatives over weekends or holidays, when journalists and the public are likely to be less vigilant than normal. Three-day holiday weekends are especially popular candidates for such maneuvers. It is perhaps unsurprising that there were indications of a significant change regarding U.S. policy toward Syria on the Sunday before Memorial Day. Turkey’s foreign minister announced that his country and the United States had agreed in principle to provide air protection for some 15,000 Syrian rebels being trained by Ankara and Washington once those insurgents re-enter Syrian territory.

Granted, an agreement in principle could break down over the details of implementation, and the Obama administration has yet to confirm the Turkish account. Nevertheless, there are hints of an impending escalation of U.S. involvement in Syria’s murky civil war. A lobbying effort by proponents of U.S. aid to factions trying to unseat dictator Bashar al-Assad is definitely taking place. The number two Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durban of Illinois, has openly endorsed establishing and protecting “safe zones” for insurgents, and he is hardly alone. 

In essence, the United States and its Turkish ally appear to be contemplating the imposition of a “no fly” zone over northern Syria to prevent Assad’s forces from suppressing the rebel fighters. It is pertinent to recall that a fateful step in America’s disastrous entanglement in Iraq was the creation of such zones against Saddam Hussein to protect Kurdish and Shiite insurgents in the 1990s. A similar measure should not be undertaken lightly in Syria.

Indeed, the Syrian conflict is a cauldron of ethno-religious feuds involving multiple factions. To a significant extent, it represents a bitter struggle for power between Assad’s coalition of religious minorities (including his Alawite political base and its Christian allies) and the Sunni Islamic majority. That, in turn, is at least partly a broader regional power struggle between Shiite Iran and the major Sunni powers, primarily Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, using Syrian factions as proxies. To make matters even more complex, Kurdish secessionists are exploiting the turmoil to try to establish an autonomous region in Syria’s north and northeast akin to the successful de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq.

To be blunt, America does not have a dog in that fight. It is especially naïve to believe that U.S. and Turkish-trained insurgents would be a strong “moderate” alternative to both Assad and ISIS. The mythical moderate Syrian majority is just that: mythical. Too many of the supposedly moderate rebel factions that we supported earlier in the conflict turned out to be radical Islamic fellow travelers. Having been burned by that experience, U.S. policymakers should be doubly cautious about further entangling the United States in Syria’s troubles.

Establishing a de facto no fly zone would be a momentous, potentially very dangerous step. At a minimum, such a change should be implemented only after a far-reaching public discussion, an extended debate in Congress, and a formal congressional vote authorizing that action. It is disgraceful that officials might even consider trying to smuggle such an escalation of policy into practice through an announcement by an allied government in the middle of a holiday weekend.

Secretary of State John Kerry recently visited Seoul and South Korean President Park Geun-hye will head to Washington later this month. The main agenda item: what to do about North Korea.

As usual, no one knows what is going on in Pyongyang. Its internal politics appears to be bloodier than usual. Ironically, this might provide an opportunity for Washington to initiate talks over a more open bilateral relationship.

The latest rumor is that young dictator Kim Jong-un had his defense minister executed with anti-aircraft fire for disrespectful conduct. Hyon Yong-chol probably has been purged, though South Korea’s intelligence agency acknowledged that it could not confirm his gruesome death. If Hyon was executed, it probably was because the military man was plotting, or at least feared to be plotting, against the North’s leadership.

There has been striking turnover among party and military officials since Kim Jong-un took over after his father’s death in December 2011. Most dramatic was the arrest and execution of Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-taek, seen as the regime’s number two, in December 2013. Overall some 70 top apparatchiks and more than 400 lower level officials apparently have been killed this year.

This brutality towards the power elite sets Kim apart from his father and grandfather. While Kim Jong-un’s apparent penchant for executions may reflect a peculiarly sadistic nature, it more likely grows out of insecurity. Only 28 or maybe 27 when his father died, Kim’s succession was pushed extremely quickly after his father suffered a stroke in August 2008.

Although there is no sign of organized resistance to the latest Kim, continuing turnover suggests that Kim is not, or at least does not see himself, as yet secure. Instead of cowing resistance, promiscuous executions, even for acts short of actual rebellion, might make subordinates believe it is worth going for broke.

Repression is rising in other ways. For instance, the regime apparently has been employing “Patrol Teams” as press gangs to fill out its construction work force for projects to be finished by October, the 70^th anniversary of the founding of the Korean Workers’ Party. The regime also has strengthened border controls with China.

If Kim retains control, none of this might matter. However, everyone is wary of something other than the usual predictable unpredictability in Pyongyang. South Korean President Park Geun-hye noted “growing concern” over “an extreme reign of terror within North Korea.”

Governance matters since the North continues to expand its nuclear capabilities. While nothing suggests that Kim is suicidal—members of the dynasty appear to prefer their virgins in this world rather than the next—Pyongyang’s decision-making process could become more unilateral, unpredictable, or both.

Unfortunately, there is little that the U.S. can do to directly influence events within the DPRK. War would be foolhardy, tougher sanctions aren’t likely to work, and the Kim regime is well beyond the reach of moral suasion.

Nor is negotiation likely to have much effect. While the North recently launched an international charm offensive, it continues to highlight weapons development and spout rehashed threats against America and the South. The Kim regime is not likely trade away the one factor causing the world to follow events in the DPRK.

Nevertheless, as I point out in Forbes, “the possibility of division and dissension in Pyongyang gives Washington a new reason to suggest direct discussions without preconditions, but with the prospect of benefits for a change in direction. If the regime is unsettled, those disaffected might benefit if Washington stood ready to reward a new approach.”

A peace treaty, diplomatic relations, and end of economic sanctions all should be on the table. It’s still a long-shot, but so is almost any other proposal to address the North.

Someday Pyongyang will change. Engagement is the best way to prepare for that day.

This morning, a car bomb exploded outside a mosque in Saudi Arabia, the second such attack in a week. The attacks, which have killed at least 25 people, were aimed at the minority Saudi Shi’a community. In doing so, ISIS is expertly capitalizing on Saudi Arabia’s internal sectarian divide, which is worsened not only by domestic repression, but by the propaganda supporting Saudi Arabia’s activist foreign policy in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. Saudi rulers should remember that sectarianism, though convenient for political purposes, also carries substantial risk.

In an interview shortly before the recent Camp David summit, President Obama committed the faux-pas of pointing out the internal problems faced by many of the GCC states. He noted that these states contain “populations that, in some cases, are alienated, youth that are underemployed, an ideology that is destructive and nihilistic, and in some cases, just a belief that there are no legitimate political outlets for grievances… The biggest threats that they face may not be coming from Iran invading. It’s going to be from dissatisfaction inside their own countries.”

He’s not wrong. Saudi Arabia is well-known as one of the world’s most repressive states, with little political representation and no rights for women or minorities. Further, oil prices remain low, and while the Saudi state has massive cash reserves, the rise of shale oil has diminished its role as the world’s main oil producer. Saudi Arabia also has a growing youth population, with 51% of the population under the age of twenty five.

This is itself less concerning than the inability of the oil-dependent Saudi state to provide stable employment opportunities; the unemployment rate for those between fifteen and twenty-five years of age is at least 30%. It is no wonder that many of the unemployed youth of Saudi Arabia are attracted by movements like ISIS. Indeed, by some estimates, more than 2,500 of the foreign fighters in Syria come from Saudi Arabia. The newest iteration of this threat is seen in attacks like those of the last week, as young men susceptible to ISIS avoid travel to Syria, and instead carry out attacks inside Saudi borders.

Yet the ISIS attacks also highlight the pernicious influence of state-supported sectarianism. The bombers astutely aimed the bombings not at Sunnis, but at the state’s minority Shi’a population. While targeting Sunnis would likely have increased resolve among Saudi citizens, targeting Shi’a mosques instead served to cast worshippers as heretics, highlighting domestic sectarian tensions.

The attacks remind Saudi Shi’ites that their own government uses sectarian messaging on state TV, and has close ties to clerics which rail against Shi’a heretics. Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia don’t even enjoy the same minimal political rights that their Sunni compatriots do, and the state has repeatedly cracked down on calls for increased representation.

These tensions are being further inflamed by the war in Yemen, which is being presented by Saudi state TV as a crusade against Houthi Shi’ites. The same applies to the state’s newly activist foreign policy, which is portrayed broadly as a challenge to Iranian and Shi’a interests across the region. The high civilian death toll in Yemen – as many as 2,000 people – and the reticence of the Saudi government to seek a political settlement with the Houthis also contributes.

In short, the ISIS attacks targeted a potential cause of instability within the Saudi state, requiring Saudi rulers to strike a delicate balancing act. They must show support for the attacked communities, while avoiding upsetting the hardline Sunni clerics which support the royal family. Balancing these factors while continuing to use sectarian language to justify the state’s wars in Yemen and elsewhere may prove impossible.

As the Arab Spring illustrated, even states which appear relatively stable can suffer from instability and chaos. It also showed that once the Pandora’s Box of sectarianism has been opened, it is extremely difficult to shut. As ISIS attacks within Saudi Arabia seek to increase tensions between Sunni and Shi’a populations, this is a lesson Saudi Arabia’s rulers would be wise to bear in mind.