The “America First” policy President Donald Trump extolls “has won,” scholar Robert Kagan wrote in a recent op-ed, surmising that the administration’s preference for unilateralism, trade protectionism and immigration restrictions amount to “a new direction of American foreign policy.”But there is reason to believe victory will be fleeting. In time, this period may be recognized more as the high water mark of a short-lived turn toward quasi-isolationism than the beginning of an enduring trend.To

If you thought the US-China relationship couldn‘t get much worse, consider what happened on Thursday alone. First there was a bombshell report from Bloomberg Businessweek of a major Chinese espionage effort targeting dozens of US corporations and the Pentagon. Then came Vice President Mike Pence’s speech, which offered the sharpest, most comprehensive indictment of Beijing’s behavior by any American leader since the Cold War. Pence labeled the situation with China a “great-power competition.” Wh

The Trump administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA is decidedly underwhelming, the product of a toxic process that made only a modest modification of the original deal. The administration’s renaming of NAFTA, however -- it will henceforth be known as the USMCA, for the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement -- could prove to be a stroke of political and marketing genius.　Names really matter, and politicians should give as much thought to them as corporations do. Amazon, Google and Apple, for instance, have b

Americans were confronted Tuesday with a profound problem, one that challenges our commitment to accountable democratic government and justice. It is an awful truth that we must face now that the New York Times has published a richly documented, 14,000-word expose alleging decades of deeply corrupt Trump family finances.After 18 months of interviewing people who worked for or with the Trump family and scrutinizing more than 100,000 documents, the newspaper painted a portrait “unprecedented in sc

Immigrants who want to work in the US can be sponsored either by individuals -- usually family members -- or companies. Regional immigration is a proposed variation on this system, in which a region -- probably a city, but perhaps a county or state -- sponsors an immigrant for a green card or work visa. It’s an idea that’s been tossed around in policy circles as a way to revive “old industrial cities that have been hollowed out.”I used to be against regional immigration. The reason is that if re

President Donald Trump seems convinced that he has found the formula for success in foreign policy: Bully your adversaries, sanction them, squeeze them -- and then flatter them and make a deal. Trump followed this approach with North Korea and he got a showy summit meeting in Singapore in June with Kim Jong-un and a pledge -- encouraging but so far undelivered -- for denuclearization. He adopted the hard-talk/sweet-talk tactics with Mexico and, eventually, after a long pout, with Canada, and he

We place a lot of demands on our fine US military, and the good news is -- at home and in many places around the world -- it’s meeting those demands.Now the bad news: We’re wearing it out. After 17 years of continuous combat operations, it’s in desperate need of a rebuild.To be sure, the US Congress recently provided some welcome additional funding. That money has enabled the services to make progress in reducing maintenance backlogs, replenishing depleted inventories of repair parts and munitio

The global financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 was the greatest economic stress test since the Great Depression, and the greatest challenge to social and political systems since World War II. It not only put financial markets and currencies at risk, it also exposed serious regulatory and governance shortcomings that have yet to be fully addressed.In fact, the 2008 crisis will most likely be remembered as a watershed moment, but not because it led to reforms that strengthened economi

The latest failures of Russia’s military intelligence service, commonly known as the GRU, expose a major flaw in President Vladimir Putin’s habitual way of dealing with public fiascos: He mistakenly believes the uproar will blow over.Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his British counterpart Theresa May said Thursday that the GRU had tried to hack the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, which was testing the substance used to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his d