Attention to the Unseen

Robin Wright writes: French President Emmanuel Macron masterfully works Donald Trump, perhaps better than any U.S. ally. By the end of the day Tuesday, it looked like he might—just might—prevent an angry showdown between the United States and Iran. Trump began the day by virtually declaring war on the Islamic Republic if the nuclear deal unravels and Tehran resumes uranium enrichment, a fuel process for both peaceful nuclear energy and bombs. “They’re not going to be restarting anything,” the President…

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Politico reports: Europe’s most dynamic political leader, Emmanuel Macron, pays a state visit to Washington this week. The French president has struck up a surprisingly cordial relationship with President Donald Trump, especially when you consider that Macron has emerged as the West’s most formidable opponent of the kind of populist nationalism Trump channels here. Speaking last week to the European Parliament, Macron warned of a “European civil war” and urged the European Union to defend liberal democracy against a surging…

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Der Spiegel reports: Not even five years have passed since the spate of essays and opinion pieces about Germany’s hegemonic power over the Continent. The cold reality, the Economist wrote, is that “Germany is the power in Europe that counts the most. Top brass in Brussels, or Paris, can talk as much as they like. But until Ms. Merkel agrees, nothing happens.” The danger, it added, is not that Germany will grow too strong, but that it could refuse to…

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Patrick Radden Keefe writes: When Donald Trump had a phone conversation with Vladimir Putin on the morning of March 20th, the two were at an excruciatingly delicate juncture. American intelligence officials had concluded that Russia had interfered in the 2016 Presidential election, with the goal of helping Trump win, and Trump had become the subject of an investigation, by the special counsel Robert Mueller, into allegations of collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign. On March 4th, a former…

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The Guardian reports: The US and Russian nuclear arsenals could soon be unconstrained by any binding arms control agreements for the first time since 1972, triggering an expensive and dangerous new arms race, a group of former officials and experts from the US, Europe and Russia has warned. In a statement to be published on Wednesday, the signatories point out that the 2010 New Start treaty limiting the deployed strategic warheads and delivery systems of the US and Russia, will…

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Politico reports: A woman from Honduras, who shall be identified only by her initials, L.C., was granted asylum in an immigration court in Chicago early this year. She came to the United States with her teenage daughter, fording the Rio Grande in Texas, after the girl had the extremely bad fortune of being a passer-by witness to a noonday massacre on a street near their home. Gunmen from the Mara 18 gang murdered eight people, mostly bus dispatchers, because the…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump rejected, for now at least, a fresh round of sanctions set to be imposed against Russia on Monday, a course change that underscored the schism between the president and his national security team. The president’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, had announced on Sunday that the administration would place sanctions on Russian companies found to be assisting Syria’s chemical weapons program. The sanctions were listed on a menu of further…

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