| | | | Fareed: First Success of Trump-Kim Summit Has Already Happened | | Tuesday's Trump-Kim summit has had one benefit before the two leaders have even met: it has ended the idea that the North Korean regime is crazy, Fareed writes for CNN Opinion. With that idea buried, the United States can make smarter decisions about how to contain Pyongyang's nuclear threat.
"Some of Washington's biggest mistakes have been when it has treated countries or governments as 10 feet tall and fanatical or lunatic. And for years, the conventional wisdom about North Korea was that it was unpredictable, irrational and thus undeterrable," Fareed writes. "In fact, as I have often pointed out, the North Korean regime has been rational, strategic and successful -- given its core goal, survival."
Yes, Fareed, says, the negotiations contain serious risks. "But whatever the risks, it is certainly worth talking to North Korea. In doing so, we will realize that it is a rational regime. And we will also understand that if negotiations fail, it can be contained."
| | How the Summit Can Succeed By Failing | | President Trump seems more interested in the pageantry of the summit than the finer details of negotiating denuclearization. That might be for the best, writes Jeffrey Lewis for Foreign Policy.
"The only way this process succeeds is if Donald Trump is willing to redefine success by abandoning decades of bipartisan but ineffective policy demanding that North Korea disarm as a precondition to everything else," Lewis writes.
"One option would be for Trump to adopt the South Korean approach, which is to defer any concrete action on disarmament until the future, essentially accepting North Korea as a law-abiding country, Kim's right to rule it, and his possession of nuclear weapons. If Trump does, then I think Kim will offer commitments to freeze his program, continuing the moratorium on certain long-range missile tests and nuclear explosions. Kim may also make pledges not to export his capabilities, to adopt softer rhetoric about his nuclear program, and accept denuclearization as an aspiration. But he's not disarming, not anytime soon."
| | "Unprecedented Nastiness" | | President Trump's post-G7 tweets ensured the meeting ended in "unprecedented nastiness," Max Boot writes for The Washington Post. US allies are starting to realize that maybe they really can't count on America anymore.
"A new poll finds that only 14 percent of Germans consider the United States a reliable partner, compared with 36 percent for Russia and 43 percent for China," Boot writes.
"There have been transatlantic spats before, of course, from the Suez Crisis in 1956 to the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the Pershing II missiles in the 1980s and the Iraq War in the 2000s. But none of those disputes called into question the fundamental unity of the West in the way that Trump's stupid and self-destructive actions do. The Atlantic alliance was born in Canada in 1941 and may well have died there in 2018." "The unraveling of G-7 summit works in NK's favor as @realDonaldTrump will not want to bust up 2 summits in a row lest people conclude he is the problem. Increases incentive for Kim to up his asks and limit his compromises and for Trump to do the opposite. Hardly the ideal context."
| | Trump Is the Symptom, Not the Cause | | In the wake of the G7 summit, it is tempting to believe that President Trump has broken the international trade system – and that it will be relatively straightforward to put it back together when he is gone, writes Rana Foroohar in the Financial Times. That's wishful thinking.
"The truth is that this US president is the symptom, not the cause of the problem. While his policy lurches capture headlines, the real story is that the multilateral trading system has been under pressure for some time from deep structural changes in the global economy, namely the rise of China, the shift to a digital economy, and the economic and political disruption those two changes have wrought," Foroohar writes.
"Even if Mr Trump were gone tomorrow, nobody today in the US could run for president and win on a 'let's go back to the 1990s' platform. Laissez-faire trade and globalization in general are under fire in the US (as well as in Europe and any number of developing countries)."
| | The Russia You Won't See on TV This Week? The Real One | | The soccer World Cup kicks off in Russia this week, and the Kremlin is determined to use it as a chance to showcase the merits of Putin's Russia. Don't be fooled, writes Owen Matthews for The Spectator. The country is crumbling.
"When Putin came to power, there were 10,700 hospitals but now there are 5,400. The amount of living space declared unfit for habitation has more than doubled — keeping pace with the numbers of bureaucrats, which has swollen from fewer than 1.2 million at the start of the millennium to 2.2 million today. Despite years of high oil prices, Russia's GDP remains in real terms smaller than it was in 1990. China's economy, over the same period, has more than quadrupled; America's has nearly doubled," Matthews writes.
| | The Trump-Kim summit takes place Tuesday. The Korea Herald editorializes that North Korea shouldn't be allowed to stall. "Their unalterable goal, of course, ought to be reaching a full agreement on a concrete road map -- not a compromise or vague goal -- for the quick, complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of the North's nuclear capability. The North must not be allowed to drag its feet as it has in the past."
Britain's Parliament on Tuesday begins two days of key votes on Brexit. The Guardian editorializes: "Yet as Britain moves closer to leaving the EU at the end of March next year, there is no sense of an approaching closure or of a settled national will on any of these issues, let alone on the fundamental future relationship itself. In fact, Britain is as divided, conflicted and uncertain about its future as ever."
Soccer's World Cup tournament kicks off Thursday, with host nation Russia taking on Saudi Arabia. | | | | | | |
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