Give President Emmanuel Macron of France an A for effort -- he is pulling out all the stops in his effort to manage the mercurial Donald Trump. Last week, Macron visited Washington for what was surely the handsiest summit in the history of French-American diplomatic relations, as part of his continuing bid to influence a volatile US president by hugging him as tightly as possible.　Macron’s is a strategy that a number of US allies have been pursuing, and so far it has borne some fruit. But now it

Saturday’s announcement by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un that his country will stop testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles is a sign that Kim is ready to do a deal with Donald Trump -- and that he understands how a deal with Trump can be made. It’s a delicate dance that Russian President Vladimir Putin and the leaders of Iran are no doubt watching closely. If Kim can swing this, the devil himself presumably could.　Even before the US enters an agreement with North Korea

The case for high-skilled immigration to the US isn’t hard to make. All those Ph.D.s in science and technology help build the nation’s advanced infrastructure while adding to the store of human capital and generating national wealth.　As a 2016 Congressional Research Service report stated, “This workforce is seen by many as a catalyst of US global economic competitiveness and is likewise considered a key element of the legislative options aimed at stimulating economic growth.”　 The low-skilled im

Something odd is happening in the relationship between Congress and the executive branch regarding the use of military force. For decades, or even longer, countless senators and representatives have complained that presidents are not properly respectful of their constitutional prerogatives in making decisions on employing US military power. And today, most Democrats and a number of Republicans seem to agree that President Donald Trump is an impulsive, erratic, even dangerous commander-in-chief.　

The leader of what was once considered one of the best-managed soccer clubs in the world stepped down Friday and the Twittersphere erupted in two opposite directions: jubilation and sadness.　Half of English football fans seem to regard the departure from the Arsenal Football Club of 68-year-old Arsene Wenger as coming years too late. The other half rues the brutality of a changing industry that turned his virtues into handicaps. Wenger was enormously successful and his club was nicely profitable

When Cuba’s President Raul Castro hands over power, the change will be more symbolic than substantive. The 86-year-old Castro will remain party leader until 2021 -- and his handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, wasn’t chosen for his determination to dismantle Cuba’s police state or abandon its socialist economic system. Nonetheless, the end of the Castros’ era is an opportunity for change, and Diaz-Canel has every reason to try to seize it.Cuba’s economy is in a truly dismal state. After year

If you Google “Trump,” “Nixon” and “China,” you will find billions of pixels devoted to comparing the 37th president’s breakthrough with Beijing to the potential summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.　 The parallel is understandable. It took a committed anti-communist to open relations with Communist China. Perhaps it will take a president who threatened “fire and fury” to open ties to the leader he called “little rocket man.” In 1972 when Mao Zedong hosted President Richard Nixon in Beiji

It sounded like an echo of Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s and 1960s when China’s new defense minister, Wei Fenghe, said at a meeting in Moscow this month, “The Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the armed forces of China and Russia.”　 A full-blown military alliance remains a long ways off, of course, and it is easy to dismiss Wei’s remarks as rhetorical posturing. But that would be a mistake, because Wei nonetheless captured an ominous feature of world politics tod