Kim Jong Il has always been pretty wacky, with his bouffant hair and awkward habit of kidnapping actresses while starving his people, but at least the diminutive Dear Leader was someone you could talk with now and then. Today, with a stroke-damaged Kim apparently in eclipse and North Korea erupting out of control again, Barack Obama has a serious problem. As much as he might like to, it doesn't look as if the president has anyone to engage with, even in North Korea's traditional language of blackmail.

The puzzle in Pyongyang is bad enough for Obama, but it's just one part of a larger problem now facing Washington.

On a number of perilous fronts -- Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Mideast -- this most diplomatically oriented of American presidents, who came into office...