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

April 22, 2018

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

April 22, 2018

The weather was gloriously sunny here in Moscow on Monday and Tuesday, as if to celebrate the release of tension over the possibility that Saturday’s US missile strike in Syria would lead to US-Russia fighting. Perhaps the most significant lesson of the strike is that the military de-confliction channels between Washington and Moscow still work.　Oblivious to recent tensions, crowds of tourists wandered around the Kremlin walls and St. Basil’s Cathedral on Red Square and the nearby mall inside th

April 22, 2018

First ladies since Eleanor Roosevelt have developed over the years to do more than serve merely as White House hostess-in-chief. Barbara Bush took on an issue, applied her passion, and tried to move the needle on literacy. It’s now time to deploy Melania Trump where she can potentially make a difference. It’s time for her to visit her Central European home region to try and bring those countries back to the American fold.　Foreign-born and bred, Melania is the first modern first lady who cannot a

April 20, 2018

As I was preparing to leave for Moscow, Russian friends were telling me that the TV talk shows -- in expectation of a US missile strike on Syria -- were hyping the advent of World War III.　 President Donald Trump had warned Russia that the “missiles were coming.” But by the time I arrived late Sunday, the mood had totally shifted. Neither TV news, nor Russians I spoke with, were talking about war.　US military officials had given prior warnings to Russian counterparts: the strikes on three Syrian

April 19, 2018

Former German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has mockingly remarked that the German government’s decision to back the US, British and French strikes in Syria with rhetoric but not with missiles “has shown once again that it’s a grandmaster of dialectics.” US President Donald Trump may snort in agreement. But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Hegelian approach to geopolitics makes more sense than her Western allies’ willingness to rattle their weapons.　Merkel’s statement on Saturday morning

April 19, 2018

The food that people eat has become a major risk factor for disability and death worldwide. Yet countries and their philanthropic supporters seem not to be paying attention. They‘re investing far too little in improving diets and preventing nutrition-related disease.　The problem is part of a larger trend in human mortality. Until recently, in many low- and middle-income countries, malaria, diarrhea and other infectious diseases were the biggest killers. While such illnesses are far from being er

April 19, 2018

On Saturday I drove with my family to Peoria, Illinois, for an athletic competition. We stopped at a gas station off Interstate 55 to use the restroom. The station sold fishing tackle and snacks. It also sold bumper stickers.　One of them said “Black Trucks Matter.”　Two days earlier, on Thursday, a 14-year-old African-American boy, Brennan Walker, overslept and missed his school bus. He started walking to school, trying to re-create his bus route, but he got lost.　He approached a house in a subdi

April 18, 2018

This seems to be the year when Americans hit the pause button on the advance of technology in their daily lives and grapple with how we got here and where we’re going.　My Bloomberg colleague Tyler Cowen has written about a looming clash between the values of Washington and of the San Francisco Bay Area. They are indeed quite different cultures, and as each considers the future of tech, they will find models outside the US: the European style, and the Chinese approach.　The European model came up

April 18, 2018

In the spirit with which we mark life’s other landmark events, I would like to wish former first lady Barbara Bush a peaceful passing.　Mrs. Bush is nearing the end of her long and eventful life. It’s reflective of her characteristic candor that this was made public Sunday, when her family announced that she would no longer accept medical treatment other than palliative care.　Death is natural, but the systemic breakdowns that often lead up to it can be wrenching: painful, exhausting, dependent. A

April 18, 2018

CIA Director Mike Pompeo made all the right noises -- well, most of the right noises -- during his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.　The former representative from Kansas and favorite of President Donald Trump promised to exhaust diplomacy before turning to a military solution to North Korea’s nuclear threat. He held out some hope that Trump might not walk away from the Iran nuclear agreement next month if the US and its European allies were close to te

April 17, 2018

So President Donald Trump wants to reform the US Postal Service. Shall we welcome him to the club?　Let’s put aside for a moment the real -- and futile -- purpose of Thursday’s executive order calling for postal reforms: He wants to put the hurt on one of the USPS’ biggest customers, Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post.　The post office does indeed need to be reformed. And do you know who the leading voices for reform are? The people who run the place. Let’s go back

April 17, 2018