President Obama's speech on nuclear disarmament fell on the same day that North Korea attempted to launch a purportedly satellite-laden rocket into space. Sunday's launch came despite international warnings urging the contrary. Although the United Nations will no doubt clamp on yet more resolutions in response, President Obama's statement that "Rules must be binding...Violations must be punished. Words must mean something," indicates a desire to strengthen the tired cycle of resolution-violation-resolution. I must say, however, "hope" for this end only takes us so far. North Korea has done little to indicate any subordination of national interests to the stipulations of international law.

As I discussed in the last Gathering Storm, what to do about North Korea is just one of many foreign policy questions facing President Obama. Islamic extremism remains a critical challenge lurking ever in the background. But the longevity of its presence in our policy debates does not seem to have negated its ongoing ability to confound and flummox Western leaders. President Obama trying one approach. While in Turkey this week, he gave a speech to the Grand National Assembly in which he said that the United States "is not and never will be at war with Islam." "In fact," he later stated, "our partnership with the Muslim world is critical in rolling back a fringe ideology that people of all faiths reject."

While the importance of the President's overture to Turkey (a key ally in Iraq and a helpful mediator in the multilateral negotiations in the Middle East) should not be downplayed, we must also recognize the failure of his statement to consider the very real ideological differences separating the U.S. from many Arab-Muslim societies, most of which are rooted in distinct conceptions of God. National Review's Andrew McCarthy discusses this reality in an excellent piece entitled "Beyond Terrorism," in which he warns that "in rationalizing that the only real problem is terrorism, our government promotes the project behind the violence by embracing Muslim leaders, no matter how radical they are, as long as they are not currently in the act of terrorizing."

As others have articulated more eloquently than I, if there is any hope toward overcoming the challenge of radical Islam, we cannot turn a blind eye to the religious motivations behind it. But, if the President's speech in Turkey is any indication of what is to come, we may well be on our way to doing just that.