[Adam Minter] Autonomous ships will be great

It sounds like a ghost story: a huge cargo vessel sails up and down the Norwegian coast, silently going about its business, without a captain or crew in sight. But if all goes as planned, it’s actually the future of shipping.Last week, Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, a Norwegian maritime-technology firm, and Yara ASA, a fertilizer manufacturer, announced a partnership to build the world’s first fully autonomous cargo containership. Manned voyages will start in 2018, and in 2020 the Yara Birkeland will se

May 18, 2017

[David Ignatius] The bull in the intelligence china shop

Think of the intelligence community and its fragile array of secret relationships as a china shop. Think of President Trump as a bull, restless and undisciplined. For months, we’ve been watching the disastrous collision of the two. Trump’s latest self-inflicted spy scandal was the disclosure this week that he had boastfully revealed to Russian visitors his knowledge of highly classified reports about threats by the Islamic State to attack planes with undetectable bombs hidden in laptops. This is

May 18, 2017

[Christopher Balding] Trump makes decent deal with China

President Donald Trump’s administration has announced a deal with China to open its markets across a range of industries, from beef to financial services. “This is more than has been done in the whole history of US-China relations on trade,” declared Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, with Trumpian modesty.Rhetoric aside, Trump has put China on notice that he intends to target a long list of protectionist economic policies. Given the industries covered, it seems likely that President Barack Obama’s

May 17, 2017

[The Japan News] Will ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative enable China to build new world order?

In Beijing, the administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping has held its first-ever international cooperation conference under the theme of its “One Belt, One Road” initiative, by which it seeks to establish a huge economic bloc.This scheme was proposed by Xi in the autumn of 2013. The initiative aims to link Asia to Europe by reviving the ancient trade routes of the overland Silk Road and maritime Silk Road as a central pillar of the plan, thereby improving infrastructure in countries along

May 17, 2017

[Other view] A new start in Korea: The liberal president could alter the calculus

It is interesting to look at the new situation on the Korean Peninsula and, in particular, America’s relationship with the various parties there -- South Korea, North Korea, China, Japan and even Russia -- in light of the election last week of relatively liberal Moon Jae-in as president of South Korea. He succeeds the more conservative President Park Geun-hye, ousted in March.Moon, the flag-bearer of the Democratic Party, won in a field of 13 candidates, the first liberal to occupy presidency in

May 17, 2017

[Timothy L. O’Brien] Don’t bother waiting for Trump-Comey tapes

President Donald Trump seemed to threaten the former FBI director, James Comey, last week, insinuating -- on Twitter, of course -- that he might release tapes of their conversations at a dinner in the White House and twice over the telephone.　Scary!　A lot pivots on this, of course. Trump says that Comey assured him that he was not a target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. News accounts hav

May 17, 2017

[Daniel Shapiro] How Trump can have an impact in the Holy Land

In planning for President Donald Trump’s first trip abroad, White House staffers will be looking for images and achievements that will reinforce the president’s agenda, appeal to him personally, and present him to the world as a global statesman. While in Israel and the Palestinian Authority from May 22-23, there is an easy stop he should make to accomplish all three goals: President Trump should visit Rawabi.Rawabi is the first new, entirely planned Palestinian city in the West Bank, long heral

May 16, 2017

[Albert R. Hunt] The age of Trump is ‘defining deviancy down’

Pat Moynihan, the great politician-intellectual, warned about the dangers of “defining deviancy down,” in which worse and worse behavior comes to be accepted as the norm.　The late New York senator’s essay, almost a quarter century ago, was about crime and family structure. Today it applies to the Trump presidency: the danger that chronic lying, ignorance of history and policy, petty invective, racial demagoguery and personal greed fall within the realm of the norm.If President Donald Trump gives

May 16, 2017

[Mihir Sharma] The populist wave hasn’t crested yet

At a victory rally for France’s young new President Emmanuel Macron outside the Louvre last week, I was struck by the generational gap between the candidate and his most animated supporters. Most younger people in the crowd looked relieved but far from overjoyed; the most visibly enthusiastic among them were of West African or Arab descent. And when Macron took the stage and began to speak, it was the older heads in the crowd that nodded at his words.I remember, in 2002, watching French students

May 16, 2017

[Editorial] No time for dialogue

North Korea said Monday that it had successfully test-fired a new intermediate-range ballistic missile which could be tipped with a large nuclear warhead. The North Korean Central News Agency said, “The newly developed land-to-land missile, called “Hwasong-12,” rose 2111.5 kilometers and hit its target zone in international waters, 787 kilometers away from the launch site.” The agency said the warhead detonation system had worked in the harsh conditions of atmospheric re-entry, a key stage in th

May 16, 2017

[Other view] US risks rupture by supporting Kurdish group

The slow pace of US efforts to take Islamic State strongholds Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq have produced a risky US move in relations with NATO ally Turkey.　The US will begin providing heavy weaponry, including armored vehicles, to the Syrian Kurdish group, YPG. Its forces have been fighting alongside US Special Operations troops and other enemies of the Islamic State in Syria in a long effort to take Raqqa. The problem is that Turkey considers the YPG to be a mortal enemy, allied with the P

May 16, 2017

[The Record] After Comey’s firing, bring in special counsel

There may be a case for firing James Comey, the now-former director of the FBI. But President Donald Trump did not make the case Tuesday when he abruptly fired him. The dismissal was so abrupt that Comey first learned of it while speaking in Los Angeles as the news broke on television. He first thought it was a joke. It was a not a joke.　The decision to fire Comey was made on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The reasons given relat

May 15, 2017

[Other view] Please stop talking about Russia, Mr. President

Since President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday, the White House has offered an evolving series of rationales for the decision. Trump himself offered a new one on Thursday -- several, actually -- but he didn‘t exactly clarify things.In an interview with NBC News, after making the implausible claim that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been in turmoil under Comey’s watch, Trump said: “And in fact when I decided to just do it” -- that is, to fire Comey -- “I said to m

May 15, 2017

[Christopher Balding] Is China really deleveraging?

There’s growing evidence that China is finally scaling back its epic borrowing binge. That’s important for a lot of reasons, not least for reducing risk and avoiding a financial crisis. The question is whether the government can sustain the pain.Regulators in Beijing are well aware of the risks that excessive leverage poses, and have tried many times over the years to crack down. Yet they routinely fail to rein in local government officials who get promoted by boosting economic growth, regardles

May 15, 2017