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”
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 …
Seventy years ago this coming week, the Soviets blocked all access to West Berlin, prompting President Truman to launch an airlift of food and supplies that saved the city and convinced Josef Stalin to back down 11 months later. The airlift came amid Truman’s broad-scale reinvention of U.S. foreign policy in which — through the …
Continue reading “A timely anniversary of American greatness”
When President Trump announced last month that America would leave the global nuclear deal with Iran and reimpose U.S. sanctions, Europe’s leaders vowed to create financial mechanisms that would enable their firms to do business with Tehran and protect them from U.S. financial retaliation. On the eve of Trump’s May 8 decision, for instance, senior …
Continue reading “When it comes to Iran, America is still running the show”
What’s more pathetic: Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ latest blast of ugly anti-Semitism, or the hopes that the global community has long invested in him as a true Israeli partner for peace? If, as Albert Einstein reportedly said, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” than U.S. and …
Continue reading “Mahmoud Abbas’ exit from the Palestinian Authority is long overdue”
With more freedom to maneuver on foreign than domestic affairs, and with their eyes focused squarely on their legacies, all modern U.S. presidents have sought to craft the elusive deal that will solve a protracted global conflict. So, with dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, we shouldn’t be surprised that President Trump is now pursuing a …
Continue reading “North Korean summit calls for a hard line from Trump”