A challenging Fareed Zakaria column arguing that sanctions and the declaration of regime change as our policy (e.g., our Iraq policy prior to the invasion) is not terribly effective:

Don’t get me wrong. I think the regimes in Tehran and Havana are ugly and deserve to pass into the night. But do our policies actually make that more likely? Washington has a simple solution to most governments it doesn’t like: isolate them, slap sanctions on them and wait for their downfall. As Richard Haass argues intelligently in his new book, “The Opportunity,” regime change has become a substitute for an actual policy toward countries like North Korea and Iran, with which we have serious security problems. Rather than tackling the issue of North Korean nukes, we’re waiting for the country to collapse. We might be waiting awhile.