| | | | Fareed: US Lacks Reliability on International Commitments | | Difficult as nuclear negotiations may be, America's unreliability only complicates things, Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column.
"One of the challenges with North Korea is trying to get an agreement that locks in concessions at the start, because history tells us that Pyongyang will not follow through, fully implement or honor its commitments," Fareed writes. "But, in truth, the United States does not have a great track record of honoring its international commitments, either."
With North Korea, that history goes back to the Clinton and Bush administrations, but President Trump has only made things worse, pulling out of international agreements—notably the Iran deal, in this context—and leaving little doubt that he holds the commitments of his predecessor, Barack Obama, in low regard, Fareed argues.
On most fronts, president have usually upheld their predecessors' commitments, but that's changed with current politics: "The United States' bitter polarization at home exacts a price in the nation's credibility and consistency abroad," Fareed writes.
| | Back to Regular Diplomacy? | | Sudden, high-level talks have been the most notable feature of President Trump's approach to Kim Jong-Un.
Typically, lower-level diplomats hammer out details for months before national leaders meet, but none of that seems to be happening with the US and North Korea. (The Post's Josh Rogin suggests Kim essentially lured Trump to Hanoi for a meeting destined to fail; that lack of planning may have helped deliver the failure.)
After the collapse of the summit, and the failure of Trump's top-down approach, one question we're left with is whether the US and North Korea will revert to traditional diplomacy. "The main outlines of some sort of agreement are likely in place already," writes Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "It may well have been a matter of details and sequencing around concessions, and details could be worked through in working-level meetings, without the pressure of time and prestige of the Hanoi summit."
Both the US and North Korea say they want to keep talking—but if details are the problem, one wonders if we'll see a reversion to the slower grind of lower-level engagement. | | Inside the 'Dumpster Fire' | | It's well known that President Trump has shaken up the foreign-policy-planning process, and that his administration has seen its share of turmoil. But Politico Magazine paints an especially unflattering picture of the early days of Trump's National Security Council—the White House body that, under most administrations, liaises with the State Department and Pentagon to drive foreign and national-security policy at a careful pace.
Career staffers communicated in secret, feared Trump's political appointees, and found their professional advice summarily disregarded. It took a personal toll on the staffers involved—and led one to call the president a "dumpster fire" in a goodbye message.
It's not a comforting picture of how the current administration makes policy, but it's also not a surprising one, given what we know about the president's tendency to take on complicated issues himself, and with his own style.
| | The world has an urgent problem with emissions and global warming, and there's one, grand-scale solution that's been overlooked, Andrew Sullivan writes: nuclear energy. Renewables may be attractive, but they're not going to save us in time, his argument goes—so why not take a more proven approach?
"Focus on a non-carbon energy source that is already proven to be technologically feasible, can be quickly scaled up, and can potentially meet all our energy demands. What we need, given how little time we have, is a massive nuclear energy program," Sullivan writes.
It'd be expensive, but cheaper than the Green New Deal, Sullivan argues, posing it as a conservative alternative to cutting emissions in time. | | In Afghanistan, Talking Is Better Than Not | | It's better to negotiate with the Taliban than to simply walk away, and those are the two choices America realistically has under President Trump, Barnett Rubin argues in Foreign Affairs. Despite fears that the Taliban might be an unreliable negotiating partner, history teaches us that withdrawal without any conditions produces governmental collapse and civil war, as in Vietnam and in Afghanistan after the Soviets left.
"The United States could catastrophically reduce its military and financial assistance with or without negotiations—but the negotiations provide the only path to stability after the inevitable withdrawal," Barnett writes.
It's not an answer to concerns that negotiations are flawed, per se, but an argument that negotiations are better than none. | | | | | | |
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