| | | | How to Fix the Supreme Court | | The future of Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court appeared uncertain Monday following an allegation of sexual assault. The Economist suggests that whatever happens, it's time for a change: term limits for Supreme Court justices.
The deepening partisanship surrounding picks "is bad for the judiciary and bad for the country. It risks hobbling the court, in two ways. First, if the only time a president can fill a seat is when his party controls the Senate, then the court will spend long periods at less than full strength. Second, the court's legitimacy depends on its reputation as a credible neutral arbiter," The Economist says.
One "change would be to appoint justices for single 18-year terms—staggered, so that each president gets two appointments per term—rather than for life. Each presidential term would thus leave an equal mark on the court, and no single justice would remain on the bench for 30 or 40 years. New blood would make the court more vital and dynamic."
| | Why Moon Is Giving Team Trump a Chill | | | South Korean President Moon Jae-in is expected to travel to North Korea on Tuesday for his third meeting with Kim Jong Un. Simon Denyer suggests for The Washington Post that the warmer ties are leaving a chill among Washington and its allies.
"Only by building trust, Moon's supporters argue, will Kim be convinced to dismantle his nuclear weapons program," Denyer writes. "It is an outside-the-box strategy that just might work."
But the "Moon government's interactions with the North often sidestep the fact that Kim still leads the world's most repressive totalitarian regime. The South's eagerness to embrace the North Korea leader also has left Trump's 'maximum pressure' campaign in some disarray, critics point out.
"The fraying is most evident with China, the linchpin in the coalition that the US president painstakingly built last year to persuade Kim to negotiate." "North Korea is making nuclear fuel and building weapons as actively as ever, the publicly available evidence suggests. But he now appears to be borrowing a page from Israel, Pakistan and India: He is keeping quiet about it, conducting no public nuclear demonstrations and creating no crises, allowing Mr. Trump to portray a denuclearization effort as on track," Sanger writes. - A little less conversation, a little more action, please. The Korea Herald editorializes that the time for "promises" is over and Kim must explain his plan for providing an "inventory of nuclear materials and facilities and [the] opening [of] them to international inspection."
| | Age of Empires, China Style | | | China has long justified its tough policies toward Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang by raising the specter of terrorism and separatist violence. But there's something else at play, argues Robert Kaplan in the Wall Street Journal.
"Don't underestimate national pride and resentment in this process. Hong Kong and Macao have been taken back from the European colonialists, formally ending an era of humiliating foreign intrusion in China's core…Xinjiang now looms as the last holdout before Greater China is truly realized on land, allowing China to concentrate fully on dominating the East and South China seas…Who says that the age of empire has passed?" Kaplan writes.
"Because the US is located half a world away, it is at a distinct disadvantage in thwarting this new imperial rise. Washington still has a geopolitical interest in making sure no individual state holds sway over the Eastern Hemisphere as the US once influenced the Western Hemisphere. A Chinese Silk Route that runs through Iran and beyond, with a naval presence over the navigable southern rimland of Eurasia, would do that." | | When it comes to electric vehicles, Tesla grabs the headlines. But the future of the industry is more likely to be found in China, writes Nick Butler for the Financial Times.
"As China has become more prosperous, car ownership has boomed and is now within the reach of the growing middle class, with possession rising from barely 20 per 1,000 of the population at the turn of the century to more than 100 per 1,000," Butler writes.
"The key to sustainable rapid growth for EVs lies in compulsion. If, for instance, China insisted that a quarter of new licenses be given to EVs over the next five years, some 25 million to 30 million would be added to the global total. To speed up the pace of change, older vehicles running on internal combustion engines could be taxed or regulated out of existence. And in some cities licenses could be restricted to EVs alone.
"This is no fantasy. Several big cities across China are experimenting with incentives and restrictions to force EV take-up."
| | The UN General Assembly opens in New York on Tuesday. Anne-Marie Slaughter writes for the Financial Times that if the United Nations wants to stay relevant, its entities "must stop thinking of the UN as a global power center, full of people who can order others to take action and solve problems. The power of the UN comes from the fact that its many constituent parts have the legitimacy and centrality to bring vast webs of global actors together, move them towards common goals and measure their progress."
Polish President Andrzej Duda is expected to meet with President Trump at the White House on Tuesday. Writing in the Washington Times ahead of the visit, the country's defense minister lays out the case for permanently stationing US troops in Poland. Doing so "would be an effective deterrence against Russian incursion and would provide a vital strategic anchor for US engagement in Europe's currently volatile security environment. Permanent US engagement, including an increase in assets on Polish territory, would be a game changer in European security and trans-Atlantic relations." | | | | | | |
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