You have to admit: The current crop of Latin American socialist leaders is the gift that just keeps on giving.

This month, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev sent a bill to the Duma calling for the reinstatement of direct gubernatorial elections by the people of Russia’s provinces.

The past year has been a most tumultuous one for the nations of the eurozone, from the sunny shores of debt-ridden Greece to her disgruntled northern neighbors. The seventeen-member union has approached the brink of disaster and backed down seemingly several times a day for months, exhausting lenders and spectators, while inciting political unrest throughout the region.

This week, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran asserted that Iran was ready for negotiations on its nuclear (weapons) program. Indeed, he insisted that it always had been, and that European and American declarations to the contrary were, in fact, “excuses.”

On December 6 this past year, I was anxious to get to Goma, a city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), to witness the nation’s presidential election.

The problem with megalomaniacs is that they never stick to the script. Newt Gingrich is one of the few men in American public life that can get away with saying whatever he wants. Whatever nuance exists in his public persona is masked by the verbal violence he does to anyone who gets in his way. The conventional wisdom is that this strength, by far his greatest, will be his undoing. The reality is more complicated.

On December 17, 2011, North Korea lost Kim Jong-il ­– its “Dear Leader” – to a heart attack. Without missing a beat, North Korea’s state-run media anointed his third son Kim Jong-un as the “Great Successor” and placed the fate of the North Korean people squarely in his 28-year-old hands. One look at North Korea’s pudgy new protagonist is enough to make me worry not only about the fate of the North Korean people, but about the future security of the East Asian region as a whole.