Give President Emmanuel Macron of France an A for effort -- he is pulling out all the stops in his effort to manage the mercurial Donald Trump. Last week, Macron visited Washington for what was surely the handsiest summit in the history of French-American diplomatic relations, as part of his continuing bid to influence a volatile US president by hugging him as tightly as possible.　Macron’s is a strategy that a number of US allies have been pursuing, and so far it has borne some fruit. But now it

Coral, one of the top British bookmakers, has Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un as favorites -- at 2-to-1 odds -- to win the Nobel Peace Prize this year. They’re ahead of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Saudi activist Raif Badawi, Pope Francis and other potential winners. With Friday’s summit between Kim and his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in, they could both deserve it.　There’s a lesson in this, and it’s about more than “normalization” -- a phrase we’ve been endlessly cautio

In China, religion is big business. The famed Shaolin Temple owns dozens of companies and its abbot is popularly known as the “CEO monk.” Two of China’s four sacred Buddhist mountains are publicly listed. So management at Mount Putuo Tourism Development, which oversees a third holy mountain, probably thought that their own initial public offering would cause little controversy.It didn’t work out that way. Last week, after an unrelenting campaign against the IPO by furious monks, China’s top secu

Saturday’s announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that his country will stop testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a sign that Kim is ready to do a deal with Donald Trump -- and that he understands how a deal with Trump can be made. It’s a delicate dance that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Iran are no doubt watching closely. If Kim can swing this, the devil himself presumably could.　Even before the US enters an agreement with North Korea

Hope is again rising on the Korean Peninsula. On Friday, South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un are to hold a summit in the Demilitarized Zone that has divided the two states for 65 years. The meeting raises the prospect that this pointless and anachronistic conflict can finally be brought to an end, or at the very least, the tensions now threatening global security and world financial markets can be reduced.　But it‘s important to remember that we’ve been here

The case for high-skilled immigration to the US isn’t hard to make. All those Ph.D.s in science and technology help build the nation’s advanced infrastructure while adding to the store of human capital and generating national wealth.　As a 2016 Congressional Research Service report stated, “This workforce is seen by many as a catalyst of US global economic competitiveness and is likewise considered a key element of the legislative options aimed at stimulating economic growth.”　 The low-skilled im

The diplomatic circuit is awash in optimism as the proposed summit between North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and President Donald Trump draws near. Indeed, Trump is right to go to the table with the North Koreans and negotiate for full denuclearization.Still, given the long history of North Korea’s double-dealing, outright lying, and surreptitious construction of weapons of mass destruction, the likelihood of Kim actually surrendering his nuclear weapons is extremely low, no matter what he says

The administration of US President Donald Trump may or may not be right in thinking that its “maximum pressure” campaign has brought North Korea to the bargaining table. What’s certain is that there remain cracks in that campaign. To sustain pressure on the Pyongyang regime and give the US leverage in upcoming talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, they need to be plugged.　Certainly, the Trump administration deserves credit for coordinating the harshest set of sanctions ever le

Something odd is happening in the relationship between Congress and the executive branch regarding the use of military force. For decades, or even longer, countless senators and representatives have complained that presidents are not properly respectful of their constitutional prerogatives in making decisions on employing US military power. And today, most Democrats and a number of Republicans seem to agree that President Donald Trump is an impulsive, erratic, even dangerous commander-in-chief.　

The leader of what was once considered one of the best-managed soccer clubs in the world stepped down Friday and the Twittersphere erupted in two opposite directions: jubilation and sadness.　Half of English football fans seem to regard the departure from the Arsenal Football Club of 68-year-old Arsene Wenger as coming years too late. The other half rues the brutality of a changing industry that turned his virtues into handicaps. Wenger was enormously successful and his club was nicely profitable

We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That pitiful number raises an intriguing question: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer?“Both” is the obvious answer, but to this Amazon aficionado that answer is incomplete.The pay figure, which was disclosed for the first time in Amazon’s annual proxy statement, reflects the large number of low-paid retail and warehouse employe

When Cuba’s President Raul Castro hands over power, the change will be more symbolic than substantive. The 86-year-old Castro will remain party leader until 2021 -- and his handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, wasn’t chosen for his determination to dismantle Cuba’s police state or abandon its socialist economic system. Nonetheless, the end of the Castros’ era is an opportunity for change, and Diaz-Canel has every reason to try to seize it.Cuba’s economy is in a truly dismal state. After year

The steadfast stock market of 2017 turned into a roller coaster this year by the time President Donald Trump tweeted, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” The rhetoric directed at China soon became Trump tariffs on imported aluminum and steel. China responded with duties on 128 products. Daily price fluctuations of publicly traded companies caught in the US-China crossfire are

If you Google “Trump,” “Nixon” and “China,” you will find billions of pixels devoted to comparing the 37th president’s breakthrough with Beijing to the potential summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.　 The parallel is understandable. It took a committed anti-communist to open relations with Communist China. Perhaps it will take a president who threatened “fire and fury” to open ties to the leader he called “little rocket man.” In 1972 when Mao Zedong hosted President Richard Nixon in Beiji

It sounded like an echo of Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s and 1960s when China’s new defense minister, Wei Fenghe, said at a meeting in Moscow this month, “The Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia.”　 A full-blown military alliance remains a long ways off, of course, and it is easy to dismiss Wei’s remarks as rhetorical posturing. But that would be a mistake, because Wei nonetheless captured an ominous feature of world politics tod

Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has mockingly remarked that the German government’s decision to back the US, British and French strikes in Syria with rhetoric but not with missiles “has shown once again that it’s a grandmaster of dialectics.” US President Donald Trump may snort in agreement. But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Hegelian approach to geopolitics makes more sense than her Western allies’ willingness to rattle their weapons.　Merkel’s statement on Saturday morning

The food that people eat has become a major risk factor for disability and death worldwide. Yet countries and their philanthropic supporters seem not to be paying attention. They‘re investing far too little in improving diets and preventing nutrition-related disease.　The problem is part of a larger trend in human mortality. Until recently, in many low- and middle-income countries, malaria, diarrhea and other infectious diseases were the biggest killers. While such illnesses are far from being er

It’s been confirmed that CIA Director Mike Pompeo held direct talks with Kim Jong-un in North Korea, and negotiations between Kim and President Donald Trump really do seem in the offing, so we need to ask how such negotiations might actually succeed.　There are indeed reasons to be optimistic, but not because I see high odds of striking a workable deal with the North Korean totalitarian regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Instead, the best realistic scenarios would have the North Korean lead

So President Donald Trump wants to reform the US Postal Service. Shall we welcome him to the club?　Let’s put aside for a moment the real -- and futile -- purpose of Thursday’s executive order calling for postal reforms: He wants to put the hurt on one of the USPS’ biggest customers, Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post.　The post office does indeed need to be reformed. And do you know who the leading voices for reform are? The people who run the place. Let’s go back

Some strategic games are too complex to be readily modeled, and when we see such games in the real world that’s exactly when we should be the most worried. That’s my immediate reaction to the situation in Syria and environs.　Consider the distinct yet interrelated clashes going on. Not only did the US strike early Saturday at Syria’s chemical weapons facilities after the regime used such weapons against its citizens in Douma, but tensions between Israel and Iran have been escalating. It seems tha