President Trump hopes to use a second summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un in the coming weeks to jumpstart progress on dismantling the North’s nuclear program, but Kim’s recent statements and Pyongyang’s clandestine work on its program raise serious questions about the President’s approach. To be sure, Kim has maintained his freeze on nuclear or …
Continue reading “Second Trump-Kim summit risks US credibility”
“There is danger for every one [of us] in Pakistan now,” a leader of that nation’s Muslim Uighur community told Al Jazeera this week. Apparently not satisfied with persecuting the Muslim Uighur community in its own Xinjiang province by, among other things, throwing an estimated million or more of them in torturous “re-education camps,” Beijing …
Continue reading “China’s Uighur abuse augurs poorly for world”
WASHINGTON – “We are most certainly not the experts when it comes to the historical disputes in this region,” Airbnb stated in announcing that it would no longer list rentals by Israeli citizens in the West Bank. Airbnb’s modesty is commendable, but its ignorance is insidious. Its policy for the West Bank subjects Israel to …
Continue reading “Airbnb unfairly sides with Palestinians in West Bank”
WASHINGTON – Let’s be clear: the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was a despicable act by a regime that, even after enacting modest reforms recently, still tolerates virtually no domestic dissent. We should all be outraged, we should demand the truth, and we should look for ways to condemn such action in …
The signs of breakdown in the liberal international order are mounting, and they’re coming from disparate directions: Washington battles its closest allies on trade, Beijing and Moscow come together more closely militarily in an anti-U.S. alliance, and Beijing seeks to make its territorial expansion a fait accompli in the Pacific. But the liberal order is …
U.S. foreign policy toward Iran is approaching a “back to the future” moment, with the Trump White House resurrecting the strategy pursued by President George W. Bush (and, for a while, President Barack Obama) of pressuring Iran economically into abandoning its nuclear pursuits. The question now is whether President Trump, or if necessary a successor, …
Continue reading “Can Iran Wait out Trump’s Pressure Campaign?”
An American president meets his Russian counterpart in Helsinki. Critics worry that he’ll validate Russia’s rule over its conquered neighbors, while human rights advocates fret that he won’t discuss their issue. Trump and Putin? Actually, it was President Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev in Finland’s capital in 1975 — although, at the time, Russia was …