President Donald Trump finally did it. On Thursday he pulled the plug on next month’s big summit with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un. In sadness, but not anger, Trump said Kim’s insults were too much for now. That said, he left the door open for a future meeting. Why did Kim get cold feet and resume that anti-US rhetoric?North Korean apparatus tell us that their dear leader is skittish about negotiations after Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, suggested the “Libya model” for ridd

The latest salvo in President Donald Trump’s trade war promises to do more damage than good to an already anxious American auto industry.　Trump on Wednesday ordered the US Commerce Department to probe whether auto imports threaten national security under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act -- the same executive power he used to apply tariffs on steel and aluminum earlier this year.　The president’s latest idea risks unwinding a global supply chain that powers sales of almost 20 million cars a

The new government finally taking shape in Italy is one of the weirdest coalitions you could imagine -- and a pretty effective combination if your aim was to sabotage the European Union. Although predictions about where this Italian misadventure is heading are difficult, it could easily be worse than Brexit for the EU.　 The coalition partners -- the left-populist Five Star Movement led by Luigi Di Maio and the right-populist League led by Matteo Salvini -- are poles apart in most respects, but c

It looks like China’s decadesold policy of limiting births is finally going to bite the dust. As Bloomberg News reports from Beijing:　 China is planning to scrap all limits on the number of children a family can have, according to people familiar with the matter, in what would be a historic end to a policy that spurred countless human-rights abuses and left the world’s second-largest economy short of workers.　It would in fact be a historic move. Will it have much of an impact on China’s birth ra

There has been a great deal of discussion of social division and polarization in recent times, but those terms are inadequate. What besets the United States is much worse.　Both the right and the left are increasingly defined by a form of Manichaeism, in which the forces of light are taken to be in a death struggle with the forces of darkness. We are in a Manichaean moment.　Manichaeism was a religion founded in the third century by the prophet Mani, born in what is now Iraq. Seeking to synthesize

Legalizing marijuana makes sense for a lot of reasons, but there’s one valuable thing we’ll lose when police stop arresting people for smoking pot: A sense of just how misleading our crime data are.　Data on arrests and reported crime play a big role in public policy and law enforcement. Politicians employ them to gauge their success in making neighborhoods and the entire country safe. Police departments use them to determine where to deploy more officers to look for more crime. They are fed into

Questions remain about just how many more US exports China’s promised to buy to avert a trade war: US officials have floated the figure of $200 billion annually, which would cut the bilateral trade deficit in half. Even if that were true, however -- and Chinese officials have denied it -- that massive buying spree wouldn’t bring down the overall US trade deficit one whit.　China should be able to rebalance its trade relationship with the US relatively quickly by reorienting its purchases of indus

Oil has touched a level above $80 a barrel for the first time since November 2014. OPEC’s inventory target for output cuts has been met.　But even though its oil companies want to turn on the taps and its finance ministry may be worried about prices rising too far, Russia won’t bring its output deal with the group to a juddering halt when the participants meet in Vienna next month. Instead, it will stand alongside its Saudi partner and continue to toe the line on production restraint.　Its partici

In the forthcoming movie “Crazy Rich Asians,” an American woman discovers that her boyfriend belongs to Singapore’s secretive, obnoxious jet set. It’s fun to laugh at the ultrarich when they’re just a caricature on a screen. But it’s possible that the increasing visibility of crazy rich Americans is fueling rising anger about inequality.　In the past few decades, the US has greatly improved its social safety net. And the country’s middle class has seen real income gains. But a 2015 New York Times

The determination of European nations, Russia and China to keep the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran alive isn’t necessarily futile. Europe has more influence than the US on SWIFT, the Brussels-based global payments network.　The system was founded in the 1970s by a group of global banks that wanted to standardize the way they shared transaction information, instead of letting each country, or even big banks, impose their own standards. SWIFT is owned by its members and provides the backbone of m

One of the oddities of our political moment is how frequently we are asked to tease out the layers of meaning of remarks by President Donald Trump as though he had chosen them with the care of a good poet. The latest controversy -- although by the time this appears it may have been overtaken by another one -- concerns the president’s comment, “These aren’t people. They’re animals.”　The New York Times and USA Today were among the media outlets that suggested that Trump had referred to illegal imm

The US demands that China either open up to increased foreign competition or agree on hard targets for boosting imports that overlook the weakness of that nation’s economy. If President Donald Trump’s team doesn’t recognize this fragility and Beijing’s wariness, it overlooks a profound unspoken worry.　Few are inclined to think of the Chinese economy as wobbly. According to official data, 2017 marked the first acceleration in real gross domestic product growth, to 6.9 percent, since 2010. Nominal

There’s been a lot of talk recently about journalism and paywalls. Much of the general conversation has been focused on the economics of supporting quality reporting.　I’d like to widen the frame on both counts -- by sharing my experience in Russia. There, the record is more complicated. In Russia, paywalls have been essential for maintaining journalistic integrity. At the same time, they have shown that charging for journalism can reduce its impact. In authoritarian countries, this can in turn l

When President Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal last week, he emphasized a broader message to foes and friends about US credibility: “The United States no longer makes empty threats.”　That was primarily directed at foreign banks and corporations that would now have to choose between the Iranian and American economy under renewed sanctions.　But the president was also saying he will not be hemmed in by advisers, the Republican Party or Washington’s foreign pol

Here’s something you may not know about North Korea’s dear leader, Kim Jong-un: He really cares about North Koreans.　Yes, he presides over a Gulag state in which his people live in constant fear. Yes, he has recklessly built nuclear weapons despite severe international sanctions. And yes, he allegedly dispatched an agent to poison his half-brother in Malaysia with a nerve agent.　But deep down, the dear leader really wants a modern, open economy.　This is at least what President Donald Trump and h

Germans have never liked US President Donald Trump, and the backlash against his actions is stronger than ever after he pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal last week. But there’s a growing gap between the German establishment and German voters: The former may be anti-Trump, but the latter are increasingly anti-American.　German Chancellor Angel Merkel vented her frustration with Trump in a speech in the North Rhine-Westphalia city of Muenster on Friday, saying his Iran decision “undermines

“Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” a senior British official was quoted as saying to Newsweek in 2002, witnessing the competitive bellicosity in the Bush administration’s run-up to the war in Iraq.　US President Donald Trump asserted his claim to be a real man as he tore up the nuclear deal with Iran. But he has inadvertently accelerated rather than delayed an inevitable process: the emergence of Iran as a major geopolitical and scientific power in a world that is n

It wouldn’t be hard for North Korea to become the next Vietnam, if only Kim Jong-un loosened up a bit.　North Korea today looks remarkably similar to the Southeast Asian nation in 1986, when its communist neighbor undertook “Doi Moi” reforms to tiptoe toward capitalism. North Korea may have a head start, because it’s richer and more industrialized.　Vietnam is now a huge manufacturing hub, boasting an economy that’s six times larger than North Korea’s. Last year, it expanded 6.8 percent, the faste

US President Donald Trump’s sudden concern over Chinese jobs may indicate a realization that neither a failed nor a nationalized Chinese telecoms equipment maker would be in America’s best interests.　It may also indicate just how important his meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un really is.　To recap: ZTE Corp. is a Chinese company that makes telecoms equipment and mobile phones. It previously broke a US embargo on Iran by using American chips in equipment it sold to the Midd

Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, was a canny politician, an extraordinary statesman and an astute analyst of geopolitics. At times it was hard to tell which hat he was wearing.That seems to have been the case when, speaking to the press in 1996, a little more than three decades after his city was ejected by Malaysia and forced to become a nation-state, Senior Minister Lee boldly speculated on the idea of a re-merger.　Let politicians across the causeway that links the neighbors dro