| | | | Should Trump Offer Peace in Hanoi? | | President Trump's second nuclear summit with Kim Jong-Un will be nothing if not unpredictable, and while no one can say what will happen, there's a healthy debate over what Trump's goals should be.
Counterintuitively, some argue he should focus less on nuclear weapons. Instead, Trump should work toward declaring an official end to the Korean War, Harry J. Kazianis argues at The National Interest, as a low-cost way to lower tensions and deliver some security to South Korea and Japan. The South China Morning Post agrees, writing in an editorial that ending the state of perpetual war could allow North Korea to develop economically and gradually enter the world community. Showing good will, in exchange for less North Korean bellicosity, has its value—as long as we realize Kim will still be in power and still have the bomb, Jeffrey Lewis writes at Foreign Policy.
That's a more optimistic approach than, say, striving for a roadmap to denuclearization, but it's one that has attracted some support. | | Transatlantic Alliance, R.I.P. | | America's alliance with Europe is clearly troubled, but is it actually dead? Writing in Foreign Affairs, Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro say it is.
President Trump fundamentally doesn't believe in alliances, the list of his affronts has mounted, and European leaders have gotten nowhere making nice with him. Trump's vision of transactional diplomacy has finally won, and the alliance simply doesn't exist anymore.
That doesn't mean it can't be resurrected, they write, but its future will depend on the American 2020 election. Any future Democratic president will restore ties, but if Trump wins, the relationship will become a "populist, nationalist, and racist partnership between the United States and governments in Hungary, Poland, Italy, or others." | | India and Pakistan Enter a New Phase | | India's air strike in Pakistani territory is more than just an escalation in the two countries' ongoing, simmering tensions that occasionally flare into conflict. It's a "significant shift," The Economist writes, as military raids deep into Pakistani or Indian territory have previously been considered off limits. On top of that, it's the first use of air power between India and Pakistan since 1971.
The airstrike will do little to deter Pakistan, Shekhar Gupta writes in the Hindustan Times: Pakistan has been able to use militant groups as low-cost proxies for a long time, and that habit will continue; Pakistan's control of internal media, meanwhile, will allow its government to limit public knowledge of India's operation and avoid public-opinion consequences. | | France is dealing with a disturbing wave of anti-Semitism, from the desecration of Jewish graves to more instances of vandalism to the harassment of a Jewish philosopher on the street in Paris, but it might be part of a larger problem.
Der Spiegel's Julia Amalia Heyer wonders if French politics have turned toward hatred, generally. As discontent has grown, norms of decency seem to have eroded on many fronts, and anti-Semitism could be a symptom of a wider shift toward hatred as a dominant tone in French political expression, regardless of its object. Disturbingly, Heyer likens the French political mood to "A Clockwork Orange." | | ISIS and the Value of Citizenship | | The cases of two ISIS women, one British and one American, are raising broader questions about citizenship, Graeme Wood writes at The Atlantic. Most important among them, Wood argues, is whether it's morally right to denaturalize these two women over security concerns, a desire not to deal with them, and the notion that they left to fight for an enemy. To strip them of citizenship, Wood writes, is to deny that these women are "products of our own societies."
Hassan Shibly raises another point at Newsweek: As Americans, even ISIS devotees have the right to take responsibility for their actions in court—and the rest of America has "an immediate, vital interest" in that right being preserved. | | | | | | |
