Attention to the Unseen

Dominic Tierney writes: When Donald Trump canceled his planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un—before hinting that it might happen anyway after all, as the South Koreans moved into damage-control mode on Saturday with an impromptu summit of their own—it followed days of discussion over a historical parallel: Libya. U.S. National-Security Adviser John Bolton said the basis for a deal with North Korea was the “Libya model” from 2003 to 2004, when Muammar Qaddafi essentially handed over his…

Read More Read More

Ankit Panda writes: In a letter released on Thursday morning, President Trump declared that the scheduled 12 June summit meeting in Singapore between him and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – a meeting that would have been the first of its kind – would no longer take place. Trump justified his decision based on the “tremendous anger and open hostility” shown in a statement released by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency this week. Choe Son-hui, a vice minister…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: President Trump credited his “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and threats with bringing North Korea to the negotiating table to discuss its nuclear weapons program. Now, having abruptly decided to call off an unprecedented summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore next month, Trump looks poised to revert to a hard line approach. There’s just one problem: “The multilateral pressure coalition has fallen apart,” says Mira Rapp-Hooper, an East Asia expert at Yale…

Read More Read More

Susan B Glasser writes: At 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, I was speaking with a senior Administration official involved in the preparations for President Trump’s summit with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. The chances, the official told me, were still “seventy-thirty” that the summit would happen, in Singapore, on June 12th, despite increasingly jittery statements from both sides in recent days. By the time we talked again, after dinner, however, the prospects seemed to be dropping by the minute….

Read More Read More

Will Rahn writes: It’s easy to get the basic gist of the Deep State conspiracy theory, which posits that the FBI and CIA ginned up a devious plot to help Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump. But there’s an arch, coy, almost feline quality to the way these arguments are presented. The allegations are always cloaked for a later reveal. And this is probably because the allegations are bonkers, and would sound that way to anyone not already primed to…

Read More Read More

Eric Levitz writes: American democracy is unwell; on this much, President Trump’s detractors can agree. But when they turn to the tasks of identifying our republic’s symptoms, naming its illness, and writing a prescription, different factions of “the resistance” produce divergent diagnoses. One group — comprised of comparative politics scholars, liberal pundits, and NeverTrump conservatives — have their eyes fixed on Donald Trump. They see the moral cowardice of a Republican elite that declined to deny an illiberal demagogue their…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has cast himself as a reformer, advocating equality for women and granting them the right to drive. But in the past few days, Saudi activists who called for exactly those things were arrested, accused by the authorities of undermining national security and branded “traitors” in pro-government newspapers. The unusually vicious state-led crackdown has targeted Saudi Arabia’s most prominent women’s rights advocates, including activists who led the first protests against…

Read More Read More

Jeffrey Lewis writes: For the past few weeks, new national security adviser John Bolton has been publicly emphasizing that the United States would seek a “Libya-style” agreement with North Korea. A lot of experts, including me, warned that this was a deliberate effort to sabotage the prospect of a summit with North Korea. After all, bringing up instances of leaders who disarmed only to be brutally murdered is not likely to be an effective testament to the security of a…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: From the moment President Trump accepted an audacious invitation to meet Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, he raised expectations that he would finally do what none of his predecessors had: get North Korea to abandon its nuclear arsenal. Yet, as a warning last week from the North made clear — and as most experts on the country have long declared — Mr. Kim may have no intention of giving up his nuclear weapons any time…

Read More Read More

Philip Róin and Mikkel Danielsen write: On Saturday 13 August 2016, six bodyguards from the protection detail of the Gambia’s president, Yahya Jammeh, squeezed into a rental car and drove to the sprawling coastal town of Serekunda. They stopped in Senegambia, the capital’s famous party street, where music blares from bars and white tourists walk around in flip-flops hand-in-hand with young lovers. The men drank some juice and nibbled at some food as they awaited nightfall. At 1am, when they…

Read More Read More