President Donald Trump has upended expectations and interrupted the drumbeat toward war on the Korean Peninsula with his agreement to meet Kim Jong-un at “a time and place to be determined.” But what happens if talks with “Little Rocket Man” blow up on the launching pad?　The odds are high. Few analysts expect Kim to give up North Korea’s nuclear deterrent, which he sees as vital to his regime’s survival. (See: Moammar Gadhafi, 1942-2011.) Kim’s existential stakes and Trump’s mercurial brinkmansh

Donald Trump’s decision to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is in character. The US president loves outlandish plot twists that confound critics and supporters alike.Agreeing to this meeting was questionable. It’s something previous presidents have refused to do, and with reason: It’s a concession that demanded something valuable from the other side. Trump has not secured that, and he appears to have acted impulsively. This isn’t encouraging -- but the decision has been made and wha

It‘s tempting to interpret the news from Pyongyang on Tuesday with relief and hope. Last November, North Korea’s tyrant Kim Jong-un was testing missiles that could reach the continental United States. President Donald Trump was promising “fire and fury.” And the world looked on in terror.Now envoys for South Korean President Moon Jae-in report that the Kim regime is willing to negotiate away its nuclear program in exchange for security guarantees. Eagles fly with doves. Peace demands it be given

Donald Trump wants to help the steel industry in the US, and he’s announced plans for protective tariffs. By way of explanation, Trump claims that the steel industry has been “decimated by decades of unfair trade and bad policy.”　He’s correct about one thing: This has been a problem many decades in the making. But it’s a problem rooted in disastrous decisions made by the steel companies themselves when Trump was still in elementary school.　At the end of World War II, American steel had no real c

Even since China’s Communist Party revealed that it would scrap term limits on the presidency -- meaning the post’s current occupant, Xi Jinping, can now serve for life -- there has been much hand-wringing over what one-man rule could mean for the Chinese economy. Autocracies, we’re told, never end well, leaving economists and the business community concerned that the reforms the economy requires to return to solid footing, already slow in coming, may never be implemented.　There’s cause for worr

Of all Trump’s departures from tradition, none holds such potentially grave consequences as his decision to build up US nuclear weapons. After a decadeslong trend toward disarmament, Trump’s estimated $1.2 trillion upgrade would not only make current nuclear bombs more lethal but would add new long-range missiles to the US arsenal.　　The rules of the game of war changed in the mid-20th century, when the US and the USSR both acquired the ability to instantly destroy the world hundreds of times ove

In a season of political shocks, President Xi Jinping’s assumption of supreme power has still managed to startle many longstanding observers of China. The Economist magazine dramatically declared, “The West’s 25-year bet on China has failed.” Instead of moving towards democracy, these voices suggest, China is sliding further into authoritarianism.　It’s worth asking, if for no reason than to avoid more such shocks in the near future, why the “West” placed this bet on China at all.The expectation

President Donald Trump says trade wars are easy to win, but that hasn’t always been true in US history. To the contrary, for the first 40 years of the republic, the founders struggled desperately to establish international trade agreements that Americans would find acceptable. The need for trade leverage was the first factor motivating James Madison to call for a new Constitution. And trade wars had a way of turning into shooting wars. The War of 1812, the first declared war in US history, was t

There are two ways to look at Sunday’s Italian general election results. 　One is simply to focus on the arithmetic. From that perspective, the outcome is really not that different from what was expected. There was no outright winner: Neither the center-right coalition, nor the center-left nor the anti-establishment Five Star Movement managed to win a majority of seats. The vote produced a hung parliament, which will make it very hard to form a government. That means a period of instability lies

One thing seems certain about Xi Jinping’s move to establish himself as China’s dictator for life: The bolder and more openly assertive foreign policy he has pursued since taking power five years ago is here to stay. The conventional wisdom is that the US, its Asian allies, and the broader international order are therefore in for a rough stretch, as China demands its place in the sun. 　What’s indisputable is that Xi’s approach to foreign affairs marks the culmination of a break with Deng Xiaopin

US drug dealers, beware. According to a recent report in Axios, President Donald Trump admires the freewheeling and brutal manner in which some Asian governments handle drug offenders. “You know, the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem,” a senior administration official paraphrased Trump as saying. “They just kill them.”　In one sense, Trump is right. Over the last two decades, Asia has executed a disproportionate number of drug suspects compared with the rest of the world. In the Phi

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday made clear his priorities for his next six-year presidential term: He spent about as much time talking about Russia’s new strategic weaponry as about all domestic policies put together.　Revanche and confrontation continue to drive Putin’s agenda. In the meantime, he appears to believe that Russia’s internal problems will largely fix themselves if he sets ambitious enough goals. Putin’s two-hour speech was designed to double as an annual state of the n

The US government has set the stage for an economic experiment with its large, late-cycle fiscal stimulus, but the Trump administration’s trade agenda threatens to undermine the process as soon as it begins.　Tax cuts and spending increases are projected to fuel an ill-advised federal budget deficit for 2019 in excess of $1 trillion. With the economy operating near full employment, the extra impetus from deficit spending could cause inflation to overheat. The Federal Reserve would respond with a

There’s a standard playbook for reviving cities by turning them into technology clusters. But not every town can become the next Silicon Valley, or Robot City, or biotech mecca.　Minneapolis has shown that there is another way.　Cities such as Raleigh, San Diego and Pittsburgh have all followed a similar model: Build around a top-ranked research university; bring together elites from government, business, and academia; facilitate the sharing of ideas among campus labs, startups, and big companies;

China’s defenders are putting an optimistic spin on the country’s tilt toward one-man rule. Now that President Xi Jinping has set himself up to remain in power indefinitely, they suggest, he will have the runway to see through painful but necessary economic reforms that have long been resisted by various actors within China’s political system. In other words, even if last weekend’s scrapping of term limits for the presidency dooms hopes for political liberalization, it increases the prospects fo

The time has come to ask whether membership in the European Union is still a quality assurance seal for democracy and the rule of law among member states. The bloc has clearly failed to enforce its stated values on its periphery. Any additional expansion can only dilute them further.　On Monday, Slovak journalist Jan Kuciak and his girlfriend Martina Kusnirova were found murdered -- shot with a single bullet each -- in the town where they lived near Bratislava. Kuciak had investigated alleged tax

Xi Jinping can hold off on retirement planning for a few more years, now that China’s Communist Party has announced a proposal to eliminate a 10-year, two-term limit for China’s presidency. That sets up the powerful 64-year-old Xi to remain in office well into his golden years. He shouldn’t be the only one.　Set aside for a moment the question of whether China is wise to usher in one-man rule. The fact is that retirement age limits for other Chinese are a drag on China’s economy and the governmen

It has become a widely accepted tenet of modern economics that markets are flawed and need fixing by experts to engineer desired outcomes. At the Winter Games in PyeongChang, which just concluded, the International Olympic Committee appeared to take this conviction to extremes, trying to fill stands through highly restricted, targeted and convoluted ticket sales. The process arguably produced more empty seats than the bitter cold, lack of interest, or fear of North Korea did. Organizers of the 2

China’s nearly 30 year experiment with time-limited government is officially coming to an end. The Chinese Communist Party has suggested amending China’s constitution to allow President Xi Jinping to serve more than two five-year terms. Considering that the party rules the country, and Xi rules the party, that means two things: The constitution will be amended. And Xi is going to be president for life, much like Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping.　From the standpoint of communism, this result isn’t ter

Amazon recently received patents for an “ultrasonic bracelet” that tracks workers’ movements. Pitched as a labor-saving device, they monitor how efficiently workers fill orders as well as giving them positive “haptic feedback” -- a little vibration -- as they reach for the correct bins, reducing unnecessary motion.　If this sounds a bit like planning to turn humans into robots, you are not alone; the news prompted a minor hysteria. However frightening, though, it’s hardly new. In fact, several lo