Kim simply went too far for China to overlook the need for sanctions. As expected, Beijing's strong backing of sanctions had an immediate effect on North Korea's recent bullying. There are several lessons to be learned from this. Naturally, the first one has to do with China's emergence as a major player in the diplomatic stage. But that's not really a surprise. China has refused to play a proactive diplomatic role simply because it rarely has had the need to do so. Beijing's pragmatic - some might say cynical - diplomatic position has been to act only in the case where Chinese interests have been specifically threatened. And that's exactly where Kim Jong Il got his nuclear bet wrong: Beijing cannot afford a nuclear and unstable North Korea.

The second lesson is that sanctions are effective when imposed forcefully and multilaterally. Kim Jong Il may be crazy, but he's certainly not suicidal. The sanctions imposed on Pyongyang have worked because they've hit the regime where it hurts the most. Kim Jong Il's bravado ends where the real threat to his regime's survival begins. The same could surely be said of Iran. If the Security Council acted with this sense of justice and compromise in other instances, many a conflict could have been averted.