We can update Every Mint Every Time we have long network links ....
I made this with my friend a few years ago, for our inquiry project back in grade 5. I'm going to show you my method of producing your own. Why Create This? Each morning, everybody has two pieces of delicious toast were butter is spread for the taste. We are in the 21st century! The method of ac...
I've often read on the internet that such things like molecular gastronomy and deconstructed food items are "pretentious". I have to agree when it comes to things like nachos, spaghetti, and burgers, however, I feel it's definitely fun to play with your food sometimes, and thus this deconstructed ba...
Enjoy this step by step walk-through of creating the perfect steak. By utilizing sous vide cooking you can not only lock in great steak flavor, but also add flavors of your own. The Maillard Reaction creates the brown crust of outer deliciousness that every great steak is known for. Enjoy, and thank...
So I have done an instructable on a wood pen, but this is a wood and acrylic pen that requires different methods to complete the blanks..Funny story, a gal at work asked if I would make her a pen like the one I made for another employee..(It was a Money Pen. See photo 1. Chopped up money in acrylic)...
Some time ago I came across 3d printed business cards that you can assemble. I really liked this idea but I didn't like that there wasn't enough area to really put any of your info. This got my thinking about a simplified design that would have a large plaque for your info but also be able to have s...
"Fungi are the grand recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration" Paul StametsMushroom foraging is fun for young and old and therefore makes a great family activity!Being outdoors together,enjoying nature, sharing a common experience and at the same time learning somethi...
Hi again! I'm back with another easy DIY project— and this time it's a Galaxy Hanging Wall Decoration! This project is very easy and perfect for anyone who likes galaxy/space-themed things to brighten up their room or work space. The materials should be easily found in your homes and It is very impo...
Before you think about throwing out those cardboard boxes, newspaper ads and even that pile of leaves in your yard, be sure to read this instructable! You could turn your trash into biodegradable treasures!It is easy for us to simply throw out trash and not think of all the possibilities you can mak...
Headphone cable tangle is SOOO annoying!!! don't you agree with me?And despite the veriety of accessories which try and combat this problem, none really tackle the problem from the right angle. What we really need is a pair of decent headphones (maybe the one we already have?) with a retractable cor...
Dead bug soldering is a style of soldering circuits without using a Printed Circuit Board (PCB).Typically, the goal is to just wire up the circuit so it works, but what if we arrange the components in such a way so it looks like something... say a dog?! Tools and Parts List Of course you will nee...
All owners of a Desktop 3D printer have already experienced the frustration of not knowing what to do with an empty filament spool. Most of the time empty spools are not accepted in local recycling programs and very few filament companies have a buy back or recycle program of their own. As a result,...
I have the most amazing life hack for you guys!Have you ever tried being on a hike and trying to stuff a handful of trail mix into your mouth, hands dirty and all, while dropping way too much of the precious nibbles along the way? Or have you tried letting the kids eat snacks in the car and then fou...
So you want a cool phone holder but don't want to use programming or a raspberry pi.Never fear, the Sci-Fi Computer Phone Holder thingy is here! I created the model and animations so they align and fit together. Watch the video to learn more! You might be thinking, will this fit my phone? It can! If...
I have been getting into table top games recently and when gaming I like to use particularly fun and quirky dice. I could remember the Oogie Boogie dice from nightmare before Christmas being particularly fun So i set about crafting some relatively screen accurate ones. This project uses some very sc...
MakingGrill from scrap raw materials. In what way ?This is the "LEGO" waste-processing system in the home mode way. Lego cubes are known around the world. We can build products that we want, depending on our knowledge and imagination. In the real world, there are waste materials for me like LEGO cub...
Corrugated sheets are light weight, low cost, recyclable material which is mostly used as packaging boxes.but nowadays it is used to make furnitures,crafts many more.and you all know this.So lets make a simple corrugated sheet table.it costed me just less than 1000rupees..isn't it low costI had a wo...
Ever want to video an Eclipse of the Sun indoors ?This will show you how STEP INSIDE a PINHOLE BOX CAMERA You need to Fully Darken a Room, by using metal aluminum foil ( kitchen foil ) in the window glass facing the Sun and shades on the other non-sun side windows.In preparation to a stellar S...
Hello folks! Ever wonder what to do with the white “bubbly” plastic frames usually found in packaging for electronic goods other than throwing it away? Today I’ll share with you my project of up-cycling the white plastic frames or expanded polystyrene (EPS) into a desktop clock. The inspiration come...
Dowel joints are a great alternative to biscuits or dominos for creating strong joints in woodworking. They also help keep larger glue-ups aligned and surfaces flush. While there are many drill jigs available to buy, I designed and 3D printed a simple jig with interchangeable inserts to drill perfec...
Popcorn has been a snack celebrated by millions since its discovery back in 1885. Within each kernel of this magical specie of corn contains a small amount of water and a small amount of starch, when every kernel is heated, the small amount of water expands and expands causing high pressure and stea...The problem with football, as Arsène Wenger is rapidly finding out, is that there is never any guarantee of a happy ending. Wenger had been clapped to his seat but the hospitality did not extend to the pitch. His team had conceded a 91st-minute winner and, however rich the tributes might be for the departing manager, Arsenal have now lost six successive away fixtures in the league for the first time since Billy Wright was their manager in 1966.
Wenger left Old Trafford with a silver vase, presented by Sir Alex Ferguson, and the lingering memory of this game will be the applause that followed the Frenchman along the touchline before the start. By the end, however, Old Trafford had reverted to type. “We want you to stay” was the cry, directed towards Wenger, after the stoppage-time header from Marouane Fellaini that meant Arsenal’s manager will remember his final visit to this stadium with little affection.
Continue reading...Barcelona were crowned La Liga champions for the 25th time after beating Deportivo La Coruña 4-2 with the help of a hat-trick from Lionel Messi but while their coach Ernesto Valverde praised their consistency he acknowledged they have “lacked brilliance” at times.
Barça needed only a draw to clinch the title and complete an eighth domestic double after winning the King’s Cup last week and they marched into a 2-0 lead with goals from their record signing, Philippe Coutinho, and top scorer, Messi, in the first half. The result also relegated Deportivo.
Continue reading...Trent Alexander-Arnold has said that Liverpool’s Champions League quarter-final win at Manchester City provides the template for exploiting Roma’s need to score three times at the Stadio Olimpico on Wednesday.
Liverpool take a commanding 5-2 lead into the Champions League semi-final second leg in Italy where Roma must repeat their 3-0 comeback against Barcelona in the previous round to deny the Anfield club an eighth European Cup final appearance.
Continue reading...It is difficult to know which statistic should cause the most embarrassment for West Ham. Perhaps the one about this being the 15th time they have shipped at least three goals in this season’s Premier League will be your favourite. But we also need to remember they have the leakiest defence in the top flight, with 67 conceded in 35 games, and that their fourth 4-1 defeat in 2018 means they have let in three goals or more in 13 home fixtures since moving to the London Stadium two years ago.
Put in that grim context, it becomes harder to write off their latest collapse against Manchester City as a one-off. City are a devastating team, of course, and the champions created enough chances to score the six goals that would have seen them break Chelsea’s record of 103 from the 2009-10 season. Two more will do the trick, though, and it also seems a safe bet that Pep Guardiola’s side will secure the win they need to beat Chelsea’s tally of 95 points from 13 years ago.
Continue reading...Dusan Tadic has urged the Southampton board to retain Mark Hughes as manager beyond the end of the season after the club improved their survival chances by beating Bournemouth. Tadic, who scored twice in Southampton’s first home win since November, has credited Hughes with galvanising the club since his appointment on a short-term contract in March.
A mutual decision between the Welshman and the club hierarchy is expected to take place after the final game of the season, at home to Manchester City, one of Hughes’s former clubs, as to whether he will extend his stay. If he keeps Southampton in the top flight he is set to earn a survival bonus of almost £1m.
Continue reading...Sunderland lost a manager but gained new owners on Sunday when Ellis Short sacked Chris Coleman before announcing he had cleared the struggling club’s debts and sold it to an international consortium headed by the chairman of non-league Eastleigh.
While Coleman paid the price for failing to prevent Sunderland from falling into League One, the outgoing Short wrote off tens of millions of pounds in liabilities, thereby facilitating the takeover spearheaded by Stewart Donald.
Continue reading...Napoli’s dream of winning the Serie A title lies in tatters after they were humbled 3-0 by Fiorentina, for whom Giovanni Simeone scored a hat-trick.
A famous victory at the leaders, Juventus, the weekend before had closed the gap to a single point but the Bianconeri won 3-2 at Internazionale in dramatic fashion on Saturday and Napoli could not keep step. After Kalidou Koulibaly was sent off for fouling Simeone the Argentinian struck thrice to lift La Viola to a first win in four games.
Continue reading...Claude Puel has conceded that Leicester City’s players have appeared distracted over recent weeks, with results tailing off alarmingly as the Frenchman seeks to convince the club hierarchy that he should oversee a summer overhaul of the squad.
Leicester remain in the top half but the 5-0 thrashing at Crystal Palace on Saturday left Puel with only four wins in his past 18 league games amid growing unease at the club over the 56-year-old’s management style. The Guardian reported this month that players had been left increasingly bemused by his chopping and changing of the team, and frustrated at a perceived lack of intensity to training, with communication apparently an issue.
Continue reading...• Manager ‘really proud’ after sealing title with 5-0 rout of old rival
• Club have ‘very good chance’ of keeping loanee Odsonne Édouard
Brendan Rodgers insisted Rangers got off lightly after the 5-0 Old Firm success that sealed Celtic’s seventh successive title. His team reached that lead with 37 minutes still to play, only a combination of poor finishing and fine goalkeeping sparing Rangers further embarrassment.
“We’re about running hard, fast and aggressive and when we do that we give ourselves a chance to create lots of opportunities,” Rodgers said. “We scored five and it was probably going on seven or eight; their keeper made some great saves.
Continue reading...• Olympique Lyon 1-0 Manchester City (1-0 agg)
• Former City player Bronze scores the only goal of the tie
Manchester City’s hopes of claiming a first Women’s Champions League title were dashed by an Englishwoman abroad as Lucy Bronze’s goal saw Lyon through to the final for the third consecutive year.
Bronze, a City player until last summer, scored the only goal in either leg of this semi-final with a delightful right-foot volley. With her pace, power and technique, she epitomised the qualities of her new team and the Berwick-upon-Tweed native looked very much at home in Europe’s dominant club side.
Continue reading...Your weekend round-up of the best photography from England’s top flight
• Follow Guardian sport on Instagram for more great photography
Continue reading...Alex Ferguson’s presentation to his former rival served to highlight just how much the Arsenal side have declined in recent years
The first question received an emphatic answer: Arsène Wenger was given a rousing ovation as he strode along the Old Trafford touchline that ended with an embrace from the waiting Sir Alex Ferguson.
It occurred between the Manchester United and Arsenal dugouts, the kind of warming moment José Mourinho had wondered, during the build-up, if the Frenchman might enjoy.
Continue reading...• Wolfsburg 2-0 Chelsea (Wolfsburg win 5-1 on aggregate)
• Ellen White hat-trick for Birmingham in WSL win over Arsenal
Wolfsburg Ladies ended Chelsea’s outside hopes of making the Champions League final by winning 2-0 in their second-leg match to take the tie 5-1 on aggregate.
Chelsea, who went down 3-1 in the first leg at Kingsmeadow and needed a minimum of three away goals to make the final, were denied what looked like a good shout for a penalty in the first half, when Eniola Aluko was brought down by a Lena Gössling challenge.
Continue reading...In happier times for Sam Allardyce, back in the days when he was managing Bolton Wanderers and not carrying the same baggage that now weighs him down, he wanted some advice about the best way to deal with the media if, as he confidently assumed, his career in football management was going to continue on its upward trajectory.
The man he asked was Alastair Campbell and the trick, according to Labour’s spin doctor, was to see the difficult questions coming in advance, be prepared with a diversion tactic and, if necessary, veer off on a tangent rather than providing a direct answer.
Continue reading...Perhaps it is David Blaine who Rangers require rather than Steven Gerrard. Presumably the former Liverpool captain, while contemplating whether to begin his managerial career at Ibrox, took in this latest Old Firm meeting from afar. The evidence pointed to a vast chasm between the Glasgow clubs. Celtic, who have now won seven titles in succession, humiliated their arch rival in even more brutal fashion than a fortnight ago, when four goals separated the teams in the Scottish Cup semi-final.
Celtic revelled in proving again which club is currently Scotland’s dominant force. History says these scenarios are cyclical but there is no sign at all of Rangers clawing their way back to a position where they can go toe-to-toe with the champions. As job adverts go, this was an act of light-blue self-harm.
Continue reading...• City just two points shy of Chelsea’s record tally with three to play
• ‘It is incredible. We have something special in terms of confidence’
Pep Guardiola has urged his Manchester City side to establish themselves as “the best team in history” after the champions moved to within two points of Chelsea’s record tally for a season in the top flight.
City’s 4-1 thrashing of West Ham took them to 93 points with three games still to play, and to within one goal of the 103 Carlo Ancelotti’s Chelsea rattled up in 2010.
Continue reading...• Sir Alex Ferguson presents Arsenal manager with vase
• ‘My successor will watch game and come to positive conclusion’
Arsène Wenger joked that his warm reception before Arsenal’s 2-1 defeat against Manchester United was because he is no longer a “danger”.
Wenger, who finishes 22 years at Arsenal at the end of the season, was managing them for the final time at Old Trafford. To mark the occasion, before kick-off Sir Alex Ferguson presented on United’s behalf a vase to the 68-year-old Frenchman. Asked about his ovation as he walked along the touchline, Wenger said: “When you’re not a danger any more, people love you.
Continue reading...Chris Hughton felt Brighton could have taken more than a point in their battle for survival but was more unhappy with the treatment of Gaëtan Bong by Burnley supporters. While the home fans could celebrate their team being virtually assured of European football next season for the first time in more than 50 years, some showed their backing for the club’s former striker Jay Rodriguez by booing Bong’s every touch.
Rodriguez, now at West Brom, was accused of racially abusing the Brighton defender when the two Albions met in January. This month the charge was found to be “not proven” by an independent commission but both clubs continue to back their own player’s version of events. Hughton said of Bong’s treatment at Turf Moor: “I thought the reaction of the Burnley supporters every time he got the ball was shameful. They should look at the two statements that came out – one from the independent committee and one from the FA – because I thought their reaction was shameful.”
Continue reading...Home supporters were pouring away from the ground long before the final whistle, their mood more one of resignation than disgust, with West Ham’s Premier League status feeling ever more precarious.
Breathing space from the bottom three has been squeezed to an unnerving three points and, while there is no disgrace in losing to the champions, the manner in which they surrendered was disturbing. Manchester City sauntered to a thrashing and the near silence in the stands was significant.
Continue reading...The US owners have transformed Anfield, healed rifts with the community and addressed blight but poverty remains stark
Throughout Tuesday’s exhilarating Champions League night at Anfield, when Roma were overpowered by Jürgen Klopp’s resurgent Liverpool, there was an irresistible sense of a whole club, not just a team, coming to fruition. Eight years after the Boston Red Sox owners, Fenway Sports Group, bought Liverpool and cleared the £200m debt from the dismal 2007 acquisition by Tom Hicks and George Gillett, the club have been greatly renewed. Their old ground, in which supporters’ songs recall European adventures under Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley, has been transformed by the booming new £114m main stand and the strolling and shopping space outside that was claimed around it.
It may seem an odd fate for the few people who were left in Lothair Road and one side of Alroy Road after 20 years of shocking blight, to be moved and the three rows knocked down to make way for that space, but Liverpool have done it up tastefully. It is not all about the new corporate areas and megastore and the Hilton hotel shortly expected to be announced; the memorial to the 96 people killed at Hillsborough 29 years ago is a centerpiece outside the stand.
Continue reading...Spartak Trnava’s workaholic coach discusses fleeing Serbia as a child, being compared to Pep Guardiola and learning his craft in West Sussex’s amateur leagues
After his Spartak Trnava side beat Slovan Bratislava 1-0 in a game that may very well have decided the destination of Slovakia’s league championship three weeks ago, Spartak’s 35-year-old British coach climbed on top of his dugout and celebrated wildly with the fans.
With five games left until the end of the season and a healthy lead at the top of the table, Spartak Trnava are close to their first league title since 1973, back when Slovakia was part of Czechoslovakia. The curiously named Nestor El Maestro – and we will come to that name later – has led them to the division’s summit in his first season as a head coach and such is his animated touchline demeanour, the club’s fans have likened him to Pep Guardiola.
Continue reading...The week in football – also featuring: Sepp, a resurrection and men seeking worms
Related: The rise of Russia’s neo-Nazi football hooligans
Continue reading...When a football club moves from its historic home to a shiny new stadium, it leaves more than memories behind – as West Ham supporters are discovering at the London Stadium
It’s a mild Monday evening in April and 56,795 people, officially at least, have come along to London Stadium at the Olympic Park in Stratford to watch West Ham United play Stoke City in a bottom-of-the-table Premier League match. That’s a large crowd, by any standards, but judging by the fans milling around the huge concourse outside the ground, it’s not a happy one.
Of course, football fans are not renowned for their cheery optimism. By and large, it’s a grim business being a supporter, a forlorn struggle between daydreams and despair. As Nick Hornby wrote in Fever Pitch: “The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.”
Continue reading...It’s once again time to appreciate the most incompetent teams in the Premier League, from those who throw the ball straight to opposition to goalkeepers who can’t keep goal
Welcome to the Guardian’s fourth annual index of ineptitude, its directory of disappointment and catalogue of clumsiness.
Towards the end of the season, it is traditional to pick out the best the league has had to offer. But the reason those screamers, outrageous assists, and crunching tackles stand out is because, well, how to put this … the rest of the Premier League matchday experience can be rubbish.
Continue reading...CNN |
Journalist among dead in twin Afghanistan blasts
CNN Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) At least 21 people have died in two explosions on Monday morning in the Afghan capital Kabul, according to government officials. The first blast took place at around at 8 a.m. local time in the Shashdarak area of the city ... Deadly Blasts Hit Kabul Kabul bombings: Photographer Shah Marai among 21 dead Twin blasts in Kabul kill at least 21, including journalist |
Riley McGree scored an incredible backheel from the edge of the box to bring Newcastle Jets level against Melbourne City. The Jets went on to win the tie and progress to their first final since 2008. After some intricate play in midfield McGree's stunning improvisation will go down as one of the great A-league goals.
Continue reading...Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp has called for 'responsibility from everyone' after a Liverpool supporter was assaulted on Tuesday evening. There are concerns from travelling fans over the level of security in Rome ahead of the Champions League semi-final second leg this Wednesday
Premier League managers have had their say after it emerged that the home of English football, Wembley Stadium, could be sold by the Football Association in the next 12 weeks. Swansea's manager Carlos Carvalhal argued 'it's culture, and we can't sell the culture'
“Is this ridiculous, what I’m trying to do?” says South Korean violinist Hyungjoon Won in the short documentary 9at38. Catherine Lee’s film, premiering on The Atlantic today, follows Won as he attempts to stage a peace concert at the 38th Parallel Demilitarized Zone to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Korea’s independence. “I’ve made an official pitch to the South and North Korean governments for a choir from the North and orchestra from the South to play Beethoven’s 9th,” explains Won in the film. “The lyrics mention a mysterious force that unites what’s divided, making us brothers.”
Won, a Julliard-trained musician, makes many personal sacrifices in pursuit of the concert. So, too, did Lee. Frequently during the two-year process of filming, the humanitarian aid worker-turned-documentarian questioned the potential impact of the musical performance. “When I would run out of funds or when I would be pulling consecutive all-nighters, I would ask myself, why am I making this movie at such cost?” Lee told The Atlantic. “After all, people have been telling [Won] for years that one song isn’t going to change anything.”
Ultimately, Lee concluded that music could indeed become an instrument of peace. “If a single young North Korean musician and a South Korean counterpart can look into each other’s eyes as they adjust pitch or dynamic, then a domino effect begins,” she said. “Interactions need not be grand to start a butterfly effect to shake the prejudices taught by school and society. Music is an especially meaningful interaction because it requires listening to each other, adjusting, and achieving that moment of perfect harmony.”
On the morning of Friday, April 27th, the day before 9at38’s final screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, Lee awoke to footage of Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae taking turns crossing the border at Panmunjom. The declaration that the two leaders signed agrees to eliminate military provocations, including the removal of all nuclear weapons from their peninsula. “But whether a permanent peace agreement will be signed, ending seven decades of temporary armistice and the final unresolved violent conflict of the Cold War, remains to be seen,” said Lee.
During her career as an aid worker across 18 countries, Lee came to see that positive human-to-human interaction could bridge chasms between groups of people in conflict. “Empathy—relatability, something only bred through familiarity—is the only effective counter to the ‘us versus them’ mentality,” she said. “It makes all the difference between war and peace. 9at38 is a symbol of possibilities, not just for Korea but all hostile parts of the globe.”
As anyone who reads the news knows, Donald Trump will decide by May 12 whether to “withdraw from” or “pull out of” or “abandon” or “scrap” or “jettison” (the synonyms keep coming) the nuclear deal with Iran. Why May 12? Because last October, Trump declared that Iran isn’t complying with the agreement. Under a law passed by Congress, that “decertification” means Trump can reimpose the sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear activities that were waived as part of the deal. Trump hasn’t reimposed those sanctions yet. But he’s demanded that Iran make vast new concessions. And he’s threatened that if Iran does not do so by May 12, “American nuclear sanctions would automatically resume.”
There’s an irony here. For all of the drama surrounding Trump’s decision to decertify Iranian compliance with the deal, there’s little doubt that Iran is complying. The International Atomic Energy Agency has said so nine times. America’s European allies have said so. So has Trump’s own Defense Secretary, James Mattis. This very month, Trump’s State Department issued a report declaring that, “Iran continued to fulfill its nuclear-related commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” the technical name for the nuclear deal. (The deal’s opponents often cite the two times Iran narrowly exceeded the agreement’s 130 metric ton cap on heavy water, which is used in nuclear reactors: In both cases Iran shipped the excess out of the country, and it remains in compliance with the deal.)
The more interesting question isn’t whether Iran has been complying with the nuclear deal. It’s whether America has. American journalists often describe the agreement as a trade. In the words of one CNN report, it “obliges Iran to limit its nuclear program in exchange for the suspension of economic sanctions.” But there’s more to it than that. The deal doesn’t only require the United States to lift nuclear sanctions. It requires the United States not to inhibit Iran’s reintegration into the global economy. Section 26 commits the U.S. (and its allies) “to prevent interference with the realisation of the full benefit by Iran of the sanctions lifting specified” in the deal. Section 29 commits the U.S. and Europe to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.” Section 33 commits them to “agree on steps to ensure Iran’s access in areas of trade, technology, finance and energy.”
The Trump administration has likely been violating these clauses. The Washington Post reported that at a NATO summit last May, “Trump tried to persuade European partners to stop making trade and business deals with Iran.” Then, in July, Trump’s director of legislative affairs boasted that at a G20 summit in Germany, Trump had “underscored the need for nations … to stop doing business with nations that sponsor terrorism, especially Iran.” Both of these lobbying efforts appear to violate America’s pledge to “refrain from any policy specifically intended to directly and adversely affect the normalisation of trade and economic relations with Iran.”
The Trump administration may have committed other violations as well. Section 22 of the deal specifically obliges the United States, subject to some restrictions, to “allow for the sale of commercial passenger aircraft and related parts and services to Iran.” To do business with Iran, any U.S. company—or even any foreign company that gets more than 10 percent of its components from U.S. companies—must get a permit from the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). OFAC must certify, for instance, that the transaction isn’t with an Iranian company designated under other U.S. sanctions programs such as those targeting terrorism. And under the Obama administration, OFAC began issuing these permits, albeit slowly. In November 2016, for instance, OFAC allowed the sale of 106 planes by Airbus to Iran Air.
But since Trump took over, notes Al-Monitor, “requests concerning permits to export planes to Iran have been piling up … OFAC has not responded to aircraft sales licensing requests since the first of such licenses were issued during the Barack Obama administration.” Erich Ferrari, a lawyer in Washington who works on sanctions issues, told me there’s “definitely been a shift. Certain transactions that we’ve seen licensed in the past under the Obama administration, are now being denied.”
The Trump administration still issues licenses for routine personal divestment transactions: for instance, people who want to sell off their property or close their bank accounts in Iran. But as far as Ferrari can tell, the Trump administration has issued few, if any, licenses for commercial transactions. That’s hard to verify: There is no public database of OFAC licenses, and the Treasury Department didn’t respond to my request for comment. But in recent months, two close observers of the Iran deal have echoed Ferrari’s observation. As the pro-nuclear deal National Iranian American Council’s Reza Marashi reported earlier this year, “To hear senior Western diplomats tell it, the Trump administration has not approved a single Iran-related OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) license since taking office.” If true, this too likely violates the Iran deal.
We’ve seen a version of this movie before. In 1994, the Clinton administration signed a nuclear deal with North Korea. Pyongyang promised to freeze its nuclear program. In return, the U.S. promised to provide “heavy fuel oil” to compensate for the electricity North Korea would lose by shutting down its plutonium reactor; to help build an entirely new, “light water” reactor; and to move toward normalizing relations. But that November, Republicans—many of whom were skeptical of the deal—took control of the House and Senate. And in the following years Congress hindered both America’s promised delivery of fuel oil and its promised help in building a light-water reactor. The North Koreans warned that if the U.S. didn’t abide by the deal, they wouldn’t either.
And they didn’t. While North Korea mostly met its promises not to build a bomb using plutonium, it secretly operated an alternative nuclear program based on enriched uranium.
Whether North Korea cheated in response to U.S. cheating, or intended to cheat all along, is a subject of debate. Either way, the Bush administration in 2002 confronted Pyongyang about its uranium-enrichment program. North Korean officials conceded its existence, while falsely claiming the deal covered only the plutonium route to a bomb. And they proposed a new, more comprehensive agreement, which would also cover uranium enrichment and require the U.S. to recognize North Korea, stop threatening it militarily, and lift sanctions. But the hawks in the Bush administration, who had opposed the 1994 deal from the beginning, refused to negotiate seriously. As John Bolton explained, the uranium-enrichment program “was the hammer I had been looking for to shatter the Agreed Framework.”
Now Bolton is back, and looking for another hammer. If Trump stops him from wielding it, and the U.S. doesn’t reimpose nuclear sanctions on Iran, many in the media will celebrate America’s decision to continue complying with the nuclear deal. But that will be wrong. The Trump administration has never fully complied with the nuclear deal, and likely never will. The real question isn’t whether Trump violates it, but how.
The truth is that, at least in the post-Cold War era, the United States hasn’t always been very good about keeping the promises it makes in nuclear deals. It’s important Americans know that. It might be nice to think that the U.S., as a democracy, is more trustworthy than its authoritarian adversaries. But America’s government won’t hold itself to a higher standard unless its people do.
President Donald Trump evidently doesn’t need the State Department to conduct foreign policy. When Mike Pompeo went to North Korea over Easter, no one from the State Department accompanied him. Pompeo, still the CIA director at the time, hadn’t been confirmed by the Senate as secretary of state, and his trip had to be quietly declared “not diplomacy.” Meanwhile, Trump has no ambassador in South Korea, no permanent assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and nothing resembling the unit of diplomats that shepherded negotiations with North Korea under past presidents. And yet the possibility making of some kind of deal with North Korea is real, even without the close involvement of America’s professional diplomatic corps.
This, according to the journalist Ronan Farrow, is diplomacy by moonshot. “Whether we get played or this is used to leverage our way into lasting gains in the North Korea crisis is highly dependent on whether we assemble a corps of experts and diplomats to guide this kind of intervention,” Farrow told me in an interview prior to Friday’s high-profile North Korea summit. He’s in a position to know. Better known for his Pulitzer-winning reporting on Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds, Farrow spent the early part of his career as one of those professional diplomats the Trump administration has sidelined. For a new book, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence, Farrow spoke to every living former secretary of state and a host of other civil servants, policy experts, and at least one prominent U.S.-backed warlord. The resulting picture of American foreign policy is both grimmer and in some ways more hopeful than any other recent portrait of the State Department: grimmer because the decline in American diplomacy long predates the Trump administration, and hopeful because it reveals how past presidents have acted to arrest that decline.
At the heart of the problem with diplomacy is an unbalanced relationship among the key agents of American power: the military, the intelligence agencies, and the civilian diplomats of the State Department. “There's a reason we structure our government in terms of checks and balances and different agencies with different interests and areas of expertise,” Farrow told me. “When those agencies work in concert it creates an effective policy process. Right now, when you have everything run through the military and intelligence communities, you really do lose something.” Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang is Exhibit A for this problem. Time and again, foreign policy led by military and intelligence officials has led the U.S. into tactical deals with unsavory foreign governments or other local actors that have later undermined American interests. “When you don't have a counterbalancing force, civilians voices saying, here's how this fits into a 10 or 20 year development strategy, you really do lose something,” said Farrow.
The war in Afghanistan is the clearest example of foreign policy without sufficient diplomacy. In the initial invasion, the U.S. chose to rely on local partners—many of them warlords—to carry out the bulk of the fighting. One was Abdul Rashid Dostum, the current vice president of Afghanistan, who admitted to Farrow that his forces were responsible for massacring prisoners in the aftermath of the U.S. intervention. Dostum committed war crimes even as his military contribution was invaluable to achieving U.S. objectives the early phase of the war. But nearly two decades later, Dostum is still sowing chaos—he has even hinted he might turn his militia fighters against his own government. (He now prefers the term “peacelord,” he told Farrow.) In that saga, Farrow saw a failure to involve civilians in setting the broad course of American strategy. “The problem is that when you don't have diplomats introducing some kind of strategy into the way that unfolds in the long-term, not just in those weeks [after the invasion], but in the months and years to follow, you end up with the downside of the Dostum relationships, which is a lack of accountability, and violent and erratic characters woven into the structure of the new government that we create in these places, and no way to rein in people we've empowered.”
The U.S. relationship with Pakistan is similarly problematic. Military and intelligence officials can strike deals with Pakistani leaders behind closed doors, but each side knows the other will say something else in public. That has allowed the U.S. to pursue tactical deals that come at the expense of American interests in a rights-respecting, stable Pakistani government. Former CIA director Michael Hayden was bracing in his conversations with Farrow about the tradeoffs he was willing to make with the ISI, Pakistan’s military intelligence service. “We already know that the ISI were apparently killing journalists. Alright? That may affect my overall view of ISI, but it doesn’t affect my working with ISI to try and capture an al-Qaeda operative in Wana or Mir Ali,” Hayden is quoted as telling Farrow. “Look, I mean, the director of the CIA is not going to cause the government of Pakistan to change course based upon a conversation he has in either Washington or Islamabad,” Hayden said in another exchange. That requires the balancing power of civilian authority, but in recent administrations, civilian foreign policy experts have rarely had the same access to the president as military and intelligence officials.
For a brief moment under President Barack Obama, a strong civilian voice came from Richard Holbrooke, a veteran American diplomat who had led the negotiations to end the war in Bosnia under President Bill Clinton. Under Obama, Holbrooke assembled a team of diplomats to address Afghanistan and Pakistan—a unit that Farrow joined. But that effort failed to find purchase before Holbrooke’s death in 2010. Farrow recounts that, despite Holbrooke’s efforts, Obama’s Afghanistan strategy was “pure mil-think,” according to Holbrooke’s audio diaries. Holbrooke and David Petraeus, the general Obama appointed to lead the war, were meant to be equals, but that was never true in practice. “And while I had great respect for the military, uh, and Petraeus was brilliant, I liked them as individuals and they were great Americans, they should not dictate political strategy, which is what’s happening now,” said Holbrooke in the diaries. He made his frustration with Petraeus plain to Farrow and the team: “His job should be to drop the bombs when I tell him to.”
Obama’s Iran strategy shows the other side of foreign policy. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told Farrow that in the latter half of the presidency, the administration moved away from its reliance on generals. “I think there was a slow, admittedly, but steady reprioritization of diplomacy,” Rhodes said. The Iran deal, according to Farrow, shows how diplomacy is meant to work. “If you have leadership that says, OK, diplomats, we've got your back, the White House will support you, we're not going to micromanage you, go to town, this is one of our top priorities, you can pretty rapidly mobilize results,” said Farrow. And those results have (so far) proved relatively difficult for the deals opponents to undo, particularly because U.S. allies like France signed onto Obama’s plan. (A key difference, however, is that, unlike Afghanistan, the U.S. is not in direct military conflict in Iran, potentially giving civilians a larger opportunity to control policy.)
Governments do poorly when they are run purely by the whim of their leaders. The diplomatic whiplash over the Iran deal is one example; the confusion created by the U.S. entrance into and exit from the Paris Climate Accords is another. Institutions staffed by apolitical professionals are meant to dampen these kinds of vibrations. Farrow raises the question of what happens if the State Department can no longer be a stabilizing institution for the United States. “There’s no way around the fact that all these secretaries of state described a generational problem,” he said. The ranks of experienced diplomats are being depleted, Farrow argues, as foreign service officers serve for shorter and shorter periods than their predecessors. More-junior officers are serving in positions previously reserved for those with more experience. And that was true before the Trump presidency, which has yet to make nominations for dozens of ambassador positions, according to the American Foreign Service Association. Trump has found the edifice of America diplomacy crumbling, and, instead of rebuilding it, has kicked away the scaffolding.
Mike Pompeo is now formally in the role of chief diplomat, but his title alone doesn’t automatically convey the depth of civilian experience that a fully staffed, in-the-loop State Department was able to provide in decades past. Nor does it ensure him any more access to the president than his predecessors in that role had—though his personal relationship with Trump might. That means any deal the United States strikes with North Korea is in danger of suffering all the faults of previous diplomacy-light deals: it may be overly tactical, focused on short-term wins, and constructed without regard to the interests of American allies. Moonshots succeed every now and then. But they’re no way to run a government.
RedState was a rare thing these days in the conservative media: a platform for an array of different opinions about President Trump.
That now seems to be a thing of the past, as media on the right has split into two camps: the full-on Trump boosterism of Breitbart or Fox News’s opinion programs, or anti-Trump critique as exemplified by National Review. On Friday, several contract writers were let go from the conservative website RedState and its editor, Caleb Howe, was fired. One thing many of them had in common was their vocal criticism of Trump.
Howe got the news while driving from his home in North Carolina to Washington to meet with Townhall Media, the arm of Salem Media which owns RedState, about Facebook strategy. Jonathan Garthwaite, the vice president and general manager of Townhall Media, called him before he got to the meeting and fired him over the phone, Howe told me. Garthwaite did not reply to multiple requests for comment.
I spoke to Howe while he was still in his car in D.C. He said that around 10 writers had been let go, and their contracts (which pay writers based on the number of times their articles are viewed) terminated.
“The site has been doing well. I don’t think there’s any reason to panic or that they would need a sudden and instantaneous change to how things are done,” Howe said. The site had drawn roughly 7 or 8 million pageviews each month, according to Howe, down from 10 or 12 million a month during the election. Dips in audience after elections are common throughout the digital media. Howe said that even the impact of Facebook’s algorithm change, which conservative publishers have blamed for a decline in traffic, was relatively moderate: “We took a relatively small traffic hit from the new Facebook guidelines,” he said.
His brother, the conservative writer Ben Howe, passed along the email he had received from Garthwaite cutting him loose. The email suggests that the cuts were made for financial reasons. “Unfortunately, we have reached the conclusion that we can no longer support the entire current roster of writers,” Garthwaite wrote. “Therefore, effective today, we are terminating our independent contractor agreement with you with your writing responsibilities ending immediately. This is a 30-day notice of the end of our compensation payments to you. You will be paid for April 2018 in the normal manner. At the end of May, we will tabulate the total page views that accumulated during May for content written prior to April 28th and you will be paid for May 2018 page views based upon those reports.” (Garthwaite did not respond to a request for comment.)
But sources I spoke with were skeptical of that explanation. “I think the ones who were shitcanned—and this is just my opinion—could probably be easily defined as the loudest and most vocal Trump critics,” Ben Howe said.
“There’s a clear pattern that the people who were let go were all critics of Donald Trump,” said Patrick Frey, a lawyer who blogs as Patterico and whose contract was also terminated on Friday.
“It was a complete surprise,” Frey said. “There’d been rumors of contract changes but being fired was a complete surprise.”
Jay Caruso, a former RedState editor, now works for The Dallas Morning News but maintained a contract with the site until Friday morning. “When you look at he names across the board, the people that were let go had a clear bias against President Trump,” he said.
Caleb Howe pointed out that RedState is keeping some Trump-critical writers. But he emphasized that one of those fired was Susan Wright, an anti-Trump writer who, he said, had consistently been one of the highest-trafficked writers on the site.
“The most Trump-critical people, the most vocally critical were on the list, especially Susan Wright,” he said. “Susan also happens to be the number one traffic draw at RedState, so it’s sort of weird if it’s a monetary decision.”
“Over the last two years I’ve been working for them, I’ve consistently been one of their top three writers,” Wright told me. “More often than not their top writer … They can’t say it’s a money issue.” She tried to file a piece on Friday morning, and found herself locked out of the system. She then received an email from Garthwaite nearly identical to the one Ben Howe received.
In the modern conservative media, is there an audience for RedState’s mix of views? Or is it bad for business to not choose a side?
“If nothing else, this shows you how deep, how solid that wall is down through the Republican Party, the conservative movement, what happened when Trump got introduced into the bloodstream,” Wright said. “Partisans on one side, conservatives on the other side.”
The Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year showed the extent to which Trump has overwhelmed the conservative movement. His ascendancy has either marginalized movement conservatives or co-opted them, remaking their worldview in his image. RedState, which was founded in 2004, now seems a relic from a time when Tea Party activism propelled a new set of writers into the conservative media, blessed with a certain freedom in being in the opposition to the party in power. It’s not that there weren’t intra-party and intra-movement fights; there were. But the fighting over Mitt Romney pales in comparison to the savage infighting caused by the rise of Trump.
Before Howe, the site was led by Erick Erickson and then Leon Wolf, both now vocal critics of Trump. Erickson wrote on his website on Friday that he had felt even before the firings that RedState was in decline. “They've really stopped driving a conversation among conservatives in the past few years as they turned to clickbait and now will really just be a clickbait site it seems,” he wrote.
“One of the things I was always really proud of at the website was that it’s representative of the current schism in the Republican movement,” Caleb Howe said.
“RedState gained and retained traffic in a way that many conservative blogs were not able to, and we survived the slaughter of the Trump years and the slaughter of being anti-Trump,” Howe said. “We kept never-Trumpers on the front page, like Susan Wright, all the way up until this week, successfully.”
Frey says he’s grateful for his time at RedState and emphasized that the company has the right to fire people. But he worried that the remaining writers were being sent a clear message about what kind of views were now permissible. “It seems like the message of the firings is very clear,” he said. “We won’t tolerate strong criticism of this president.”
“What this says is ‘Toe this line,’ and it’s not behind a movement, it’s behind a man,” Wright said.
Though it’s not yet clear what will become of RedState, Caleb Howe said his impression is that management will not install a new editor to replace him, instead turning the site into a Twitchy-style network. “RedState as an independent editorial point of view will no longer exist. It will now be subject to the editorial control of Townhall,” he said.
“Breitbart-lite or something,” predicted Caruso.
Come the 2020 Democratic National Convention, it is entirely possible that the party’s presidential nominee will be committed to “Medicare for all,” at least two tuition-free years at a public college or university, a $15 minimum wage, a sharp increase in Social Security benefits, a dramatic expansion of wage subsidies, and a federal jobs guarantee. Bernie Sanders, who came very close to securing the Democratic nomination in 2016, has endorsed all of the above, and though most of the party’s younger presidential aspirants eschew the socialist label, all have been galloping in the same leftward direction. Most striking has been the evolution of Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom came of age at a time when Democrats felt obligated to present themselves as scrupulously moderate, and who earlier on flirted with various centrist and even conservative commitments, yet who have now reinvented themselves as stalwart progressives.
Whereas Sanders is notably comfortable with taking contrarian stands, having endured marginalization and ridicule for decades, Booker and Gillibrand are best understood as weathervanes: They see which way the wind is blowing among enthusiastic Democratic primary voters and small-dollar donors, and they have no intention of beating up against it. At times, the two junior senators seem to be duking it out to see which of them can one-up the other: Booker proposes a new jobs program, Gillibrand calls for a public option for banking, and so on. Though I doubt either of the two will ever call for, say, raising taxes on their upper-middle-income constituents—that would be dangerously radical—it is a safe bet that we will hear many more inventive ideas from them between now and the New Hampshire primary.
What I want to know, though, is how Republican doctrine might evolve in response to this ideological phase shift among Democrats. The most straightforward interpretation of what might be called the Democratic Party’s social-democratic turn is that the shock of Donald Trump’s victory has prompted a larger rethinking of its agenda. In light of Democratic defeats in the Rust Belt, the party could have responded by adjusting its cultural stance, to win back voters alienated by its social liberalism and its commitment to high immigration levels. Yet doing so risked alienating many of its core constituencies. And so mainstream Democrats are instead pursuing a more populist course on economic and fiscal issues, with an eye towards increasing their salience. Their hope, as I understand it, is that blue-collar voters who dissent from the party’s social liberalism will nevertheless embrace its economic populism, which would compare favorably with the faux populism of Trump. It is a strategy that makes sense. It’s worth remembering, however, that Republicans can make adjustments of their own.
In his 2012 book The Lost Majority, political analyst Sean Trende observed that predictions of durable partisan dominance are almost never realized in practice. Every emerging Republican majority soon gives way to an emerging Democratic majority, and vice versa. As the Democratic (or Republican) coalition expands, Republican (or Democratic) politicians have a powerful incentive to exploit its internal fissures, and to prize off some of its disgruntled supporters. We have seen this dynamic play out over the course of the Obama years: As the Democratic Party has grown more appealing to college-educated white voters, including some erstwhile Republicans, and to younger voters of color, the GOP has successfully wooed a large number of non-college-educated white voters, many of whom were once loyal Democrats. And as non-college-educated white voters have come to represent a shrinking share of the Democratic primary electorate, its politicians have adapted to the new dispensation, growing less solicitous of older whites with traditionalist cultural beliefs and more inclined to champion ambitious social programs, to be designed and administered by credentialed professionals. If Booker and Gillibrand were wooing the same primary voters Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton sought to win over in 2008, they wouldn’t be talking up job guarantees and free college; they might tout their fondness for charter schools and private equity, in the case of Booker, or gun rights and immigration enforcement, in the case of Gillibrand.
Which leads me to the GOP. Republican politicians increasingly depend on disaffected Democrats and independents who are more favorably disposed toward government than many stalwart conservatives, yet who find themselves alienated from the new Democratic consensus. It stands to reason that this influx of blue-collar voters will influence Republican sensibilities, if only out of the desire of politicians for their own political survival. So far, we have seen the GOP consensus on trade shift from reflexive support for lower trade barriers to an increased openness to protectionist measures, ranging from currency intervention to tariffs. When it comes to the welfare state, however, Republicans find themselves at a crossroads.
As my colleague Yoni Appelbaum has observed, there is considerable evidence that Donald Trump’s white working-class supporters maintain a distinction between universal social-insurance programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, and means-tested social-welfare programs, such as SNAP and TANF. Whereas the former are seen as benefiting deserving workers, who have paid into the system over the years, the latter are often resented as programs that chiefly benefit the idle poor. Republican policymakers can thus go in one of two directions: either make means-tested social-welfare programs more punitive, to make life more difficult for supposed shirkers, or transform them into more universal programs, so they are of greater benefit to the (putatively) more deserving majority. Thus far, Republicans have been emphasizing the former over the latter. But in a few years’ time, I suspect that will change.
Consider, for example, the new GOP farm bill. Michael Conaway, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, has crafted legislation that would, among other things, impose stringent new work requirements on SNAP beneficiaries. Though these would only apply to able-bodied adults under the age of 59 who do not have children under the age of 6, there is no question that they are demanding. To meet the new requirements, applicants would have to spend at least 20 hours a week in work or in work-related activities, such as taking part in a supervised job search. And if you fail to meet the requirement in a given month, you’d be barred from receiving benefits for an entire year for your first infraction and three years for your second. Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation, who for decades has championed more stringent SNAP work requirements, has criticized these sanctions as too harsh. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a center-left think tank, was even more stinging in its indictment of the bill, warning that the new work requirements would compel state governments to “create a massive reporting and paperwork system that will be expensive and hard to navigate for participants, states, and possibly those who employ SNAP participants.”
On the other side of the ledger, the bill goes beyond imposing a work requirement. To help ensure that its work requirements are met, it greatly increases funds for employment and training programs, and it stipulates that access to these programs is guaranteed to all eligible applicants. If you show up to fulfill your work requirement, a state agency will either place you in a job or help you find one. When compared to Booker’s job-guarantee pilot program, which would guarantee all comers a $15-an-hour job with health insurance and a suite of other fringe benefits, the farm bill seems punitive and stingy. Yet it is in many respects more generous than previous Republican-only proposals to overhaul SNAP, and it will become more so if it is to have any hope of making it through the Senate. Robert VerBruggen, writing in National Review, argues that a softer version of the work requirements—e.g., expecting childless, able-bodied beneficiaries to devote six hours a week to community service—is the right way to go, and there is no question that it would be an improvement.
Regardless, softening SNAP reform won’t address the larger political challenge, which is the Trump coalition’s apparent appetite for programs that are more universal, not less. Even if SNAP is overhauled in such a way that it makes life a bit more difficult for those who can’t or won’t work, it still won’t do much for lower-middle-class families trying to keep their heads above water. This is where a more universal approach could come in.
In recent years, a number of conservative reformers have touted the benefits of a refundable child credit. During the debate over the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee endeavored to make the child credit more refundable, with mixed success. Champions of the idea, such as the sociologist Josh McCabe, emphasize that a more generous child benefit would greatly improve family stability: Whereas families lose SNAP benefits and the earned-income tax credit as they climb out of poverty, a child credit could be designed so that families only lose it at very high levels of income. Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown, Democratic senators from Colorado and Ohio, respectively, have proposed a child credit that fits the bill, yet which has been met with less enthusiasm on the left than single-payer and the jobs guarantee. Part of the reason could simply be that Democratic policymakers have an awful lot of competing priorities to spend money on. Younger liberals badly want their student-loan debt forgiven. Public-sector unions long for a dramatic expansion of the public-sector workforce. A growing majority of Democrats want the federal government to cover everyone’s medical bills. It is easy to see how a universal child benefit might get lost in the shuffle.
Whatever the reason, Republican reformers would be wise to embrace Bennet-Brown, or something very much like it. For one, it is a proposal that has the potential to benefit large numbers of working-class Republican voters. And unlike many existing means-tested programs, it is unambiguously pro-marriage, pro-family, and pro-work—a formula that could have great appeal for a more populist GOP.
A cliffside convenience store in China, a Peruvian sunset, a nesting stork in Belarus, Fashion Week in Brazil, flower fields in California, three lost bear cubs in Bulgaria, fire dancing in the Philippines, Lego art in Paris, a historic handshake in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, and much more.
All politics, even geopolitics, is domestic. (Sorry, Tip.) Friday’s historic meeting between North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-In represents an important milestone on the Korean Peninsula, but it is also an important moment for President Trump, for whom North Korean proliferation has been a major foreign-policy challenge.
Discerning what the latest news means for Trump, however, is no easy feat. Using nearly the identical set of publicly available facts, one can make a plausible argument that either Trump has succeeded where others have failed for decades, or that Trump is falling into the same trap his predecessors did. In fact, that is just what I have tried to do here.
The Korean Rapprochement Is Trump’s Vindication
On North Korea, Trump Is the Only One Falling for His Rhetoric
When he was running for president, Donald Trump promised to bring unorthodox, fresh thinking to global problems, shaking up the stale consensus from the right and left. Most people can agree that that the results have been tumultuous, but a landmark meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea is a major win for his strategy. For years, American leaders vacillated within a narrow mainstream range, but Trump, with a series of brash threats, has produced real progress—including a historic moment as the leaders of the two nations stepped into each other’s countries.
“South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula,” North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in said in a joint statement.
The president took a deserved victory lap on Twitter:
KOREAN WAR TO END! The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2018
Trump’s strategy was a modern reinvention of Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory for dealing with the Soviet Union. And it was flamboyantly batty: Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” at the United Nations, threatened “fire and fury” against the North, and boasted about the comparative sizes of their nuclear buttons, as the North’s weapons capacity increased.
But unlike Nixon’s feint, Trump’s worked. The North agreed to talks ahead of the Olympics, welcomed then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo for secret talks, and is negotiating a summit meeting between Trump and Kim. Then came Friday’s meeting. The speed with which the shift has happened, after decades of stalemate, is a testament to the efficacy of Trump’s stratagem. Not only is there progress toward ending the war, but North Korea consented to language about a “nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”
While Trump has tended to pick fights with allies, his work with China to pressure North Korea deserves particular notice. He cultivated Xi Jinping and persuaded China to use its muscle to further isolate North Korea and force it to the negotiating table. In what could be a sign of personal growth, Trump even managed to share the credit, without boasting, in another Friday tweet: “Please do not forget the great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the Border of North Korea. Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher, process!”
As Trump said on Fox and Friends on Thursday, a date and time for the Kim-Trump summit isn’t set yet, but negotiations are ongoing. That meeting can and should serve as the crowning moment of the process. The statement from the leaders on Friday leaves many details unresolved, but it is a huge step forward. Just a few months ago, many of foreign policy’s wise men and women were wringing their hands, afraid Trump would start a nuclear war. Instead, he has done what they couldn’t, and nearly achieved peace between the Koreas.
As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to bring a fresh approach to intractable foreign-policy problems. Rhetorically, that has been true, with the president offering threats and bluster. What is clear now, and was clear to many people then, was that Trump really had very little understanding of what he was talking about. On Friday, after a historic meeting between the leaders of North and South Korea, Trump tried to take a victory lap. In reality, he’s walking into an old North Korean trap, showing how little he knows.
The president tweeted:
KOREAN WAR TO END! The United States, and all of its GREAT people, should be very proud of what is now taking place in Korea!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 27, 2018
Trump’s madman act, including bringing the U.S. and North Korea closer to nuclear war than at any time in recent memory, may indeed have convinced Kim Jong-Un to make some overtures to both Washington and Seoul. But as Trump would know if he studied his history, his predecessors, and South Korean President Moon Jae-In’s, have had some success getting North Korean leaders to talk. Getting them to act is another thing entirely. What emerged from Friday’s meeting was a concise statement. Ending a war requires a treaty, and that’s something entirely different.
As Nicholas Eberstadt wrote this week in The New York Times, North and South Korea have embraced and offered warm, fuzzy statements several times before: 1992, 2000, 2007. “All of these deals were then trash-canned,” Eberstadt wrote. “The North Korean promises in them were worthless, indeed deceitful. These agreements only seemed to hold force until, well, they no longer did, when Pyongyang unilaterally decided to ignore, violate or repudiate them.” Trump is quick (and correct) to point to his predecessors’ failures to contain North Korea’s nuclear program, but he hasn’t studied the reasons well enough to avoid falling into the same traps.
The speed with which matters have progressed from fear of a shooting war to hand-holding in the DMZ should be reason for uneasiness, not optimism. Few major diplomatic breakthroughs happen overnight. Besides, if Trump was able to convince Kim that he was just crazy enough to act, that impression will not quickly dissolve: North Korea would reasonably conclude that it should take any American promises with a full cellar’s worth of salt.
Consider also the statement that Moon and Kim released: “South and North Korea confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.” Optimists promptly focused on the use of the word “denuclearization,” which is notable, but worth no more than the paper it is printed on. North Korea did not explicitly commit to ending its own nuclear program, and as Jeffrey Lewis has noted, “denuclearization” has a different meaning in Korean negotiations than it does in plain English. Nor did Kim mention denuclearization in his own remarks.
It’s easy to deride this as diplomatic jargon, but ignore its import at your own peril. Of course, Trump has happily disregarded such fragile but essential diplomatic fictions in the past, too. The president had no one to warn him about this, though, because not only did former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ignore career diplomats, but Trump froze Tillerson out of Korean negotiations in favor of Mike Pompeo, who was then CIA director but was confirmed as secretary of state Thursday.
Trump deserves credit for persuading China to put fresh pressure on North Korea. “Please do not forget the great help that my good friend, President Xi of China, has given to the United States, particularly at the Border of North Korea. Without him it would have been a much longer, tougher, process!” he tweeted Friday. But here again, Trump’s inconstancy is a danger. Even as the president relies on Beijing to help seal a deal on the Korean Peninsula, he’s pushing the U.S. toward a trade war with China.
The developments on Friday increase the risks of Trump’s as-yet unscheduled meeting with Kim. U.S. aides have expressed skepticism that the meeting would ever occur, but the positive encounter in the DMZ probably makes it more likely, and on Thursday, Trump said Washington and Pyongyang have narrowed down a series of dates and locations. That summit offers many chances for disaster. If Trump and Kim can’t reach a deal, it’s unclear what the next step is. But Trump, despite his boasts about his negotiating prowess, has proven to be a pushover in face-to-face meetings with foreign leaders. The fact that he is taking North Korea’s overtures Friday at face value does not impart confidence that he can outfox Kim.
This doesn’t mean that Friday’s meeting in the DMZ is a bad thing. It would be churlish to argue otherwise. But the president’s haste to congratulate himself is not so much a sign that his hard line against North Korea solved the problem as a sign that he has bought into his own rhetoric.
