Even assuming the best publicly available information sources, we are never going to find out what is really going on with Iran and North Korea. With Iran, conservatives can use Foxnews as a filter, the analagous hard Left-wingers (in this context) will use Al Jazeera, you will use CNN and I’ll have you all beat with CBC, but none of us will have the real story until it is declassified many years from now (those in the know will not leak onto a blog).

North Korea, Israel, Iran; none of these nations will invent diamond(oid) MNT. Israel may conceivably contribute some expertise to a American-led Nanhattan…less likely, Tehran could chip into a Chinese bloc or something, but it is only the largest surface sciences communities that will matter.
For the next few decades: USA, EU nations (but their militaries aren’t harmonized…), Japan, maybe South Korea or Russia will have an outside shot.
Emerging will be China, India, Brazil (maybe).…
If you really want to play the Muslim angle, focus upon how Pakistan affects the India China dynamic, or upon The Philippines or Indonesian influence to neighbouring Asian *powers*. If you really think North Korea will develop a modern UHV SPM surface science scaleable industrial output about 10000X the world’s entire existing surface sciences industrial capital with a whole bunch of SPM techniques not demostratable yet in any cleanroom on Earth today, plz explain why. :)
An interesting and opening question is whether the EU nations would go it alone or ally here. Same for Asia in the future. Whatever Fox news shows on TV now is surely dwarved in importance by simple factors like demographics (Europe and Japan in even worse shape than the US here). I’m disagreeing with the depth of analysis we get with current events (assuming info sources not designed to keep embedded wealthy interests fat). Both the past and the future offer a richer tapestry here.
I’ll get around to posting links to examples of what I mean later. There is a great deal of depth in geopolitical analysis in some circles today, but it isn’t garnered from newspaper headlines.

http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20070203/bob8.asp

“I do see the regressive counter-response as significant.”

Good, then you see the relevance in geopolitical posts.

“Yet it is almost as if Lifeboat Foundation is cheerleading for a larger military-industrial complex here.”

Nope…

There are 250000 Lebanese civilians still displaced as a result of the (mercifully) brief 2006 Israeli invasion. In terms of Human Extinction Threats this is a non-event but it is still more relevant than Iran’s rhetoric (garnering all-time highs in publkic approval ratings for Iran’s leader). I’m not trying to earn political brownie points here. I wish I was a first-hand observer for some of the 20th century political events so I could’ve been supportive of Israeli and US foreign policies; events where they were clearly the good guys.