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“My real goal, though,” he added, “is to change just one government department and how it does business.” That is what happened in Bangalore, where Bhaskar Rao, the transport commissioner for the state of Karnataka, used the data collected on I Paid a Bribe to push through reforms in the motor vehicle department.

Mr. King said the sites also were likely to have a deterrent effect that was difficult to measure. “As the information because more public over time and awareness of such reporting grows,” he said, “I suspect those who might have been tempted to engage in this type of corruption are less likely to because the risk of being caught is much greater.”

The brutal tactics, some experts say, may expose Al Qaeda to a Sunni backlash, much as in 2006 and 2007 when Sunni tribes aligned themselves with American forces against the Qaeda extremists.

Ayad Shaker, a police officer in Anbar, said that Al Qaeda had replenished its ranks with a series of prison breakouts, and that the group had also grown stronger because of the limited abilities of Iraqi forces, the conflict in Syria and tensions between Mr. Maliki and the Sunnis.

“I fought Al Qaeda,” he said. “I am sad today when I see them have the highest authority in Anbar, moving and working under the sun without deterrent.”

The Korean Peninsula remains technically in a state of war after the Korean War was halted in 1953 in a truce but without a peace treaty. North Korea has long said that it needed to build nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the presence of 28,500 American troops in the South, the Pentagon’s annual joint war games with South Korea’s 650,000-member military and its possession of wartime control of combined forces.

. The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.

The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary. Such action should be combined with vigorous American support for Iran’s opposition, aimed at regime change in Tehran.

“It was André Glucksmann who dealt the decisive blow to Communism in France,”

“In the West, he presented the anti-totalitarian case more starkly and more passionately than anyone else in modern times,

“He was a passionate defender of the superoppressed, whether it was the prisoners of the Gulag, the Bosnians and Kosovars, gays during the height of the AIDS crisis, the Chechens under Putin or the Iraqis under Saddam,” he said. “When he turned against Communism, it was because he realized that Communists were not on the same side.”

After earning the teaching degree known as an agrégation from the École Normale Supérieure de Saint-Cloud in 1961, Mr. Glucksmann enrolled in the National Center for Scientific Research to pursue a doctorate under Raymond Aron — an odd matchup because Aron was France’s leading anti-Marxist intellectual.

His subsequent turn away from Marxism made him a reviled figure on the left, and former comrades looked on aghast as he became one of France’s most outspoken defenders of the United States. He argued for President Ronald Reagan’s policy of nuclear deterrence toward the Soviet Union, intervention in the Balkans and both American invasions of Iraq. In 2007, he supported the candidacy of Nicolas Sarkozy for the French presidency.

“There is the Glucksmann who was right and the Glucksmann who could — with the same fervor, the same feeling of being in the right — be wrong,” Mr. Lévy wrote in a posthumous appreciation for Le Monde. “What set him apart from others under such circumstances is that he would admit his error, and when he came around he was fanatical about studying his mistake, mulling it over, understanding it.”

In his most recent book, “Voltaire Counterattacks,” published this year, he positioned France’s greatest philosopher, long out of favor, as a penetrating voice perfectly suited to the present moment.

“I think thought is an individual action, not one of a party,” Mr. Glucksmann told The Chicago Tribune in 1991. “First you think. And if that corresponds with the Left, then you are of the Left; if Right, then you are of the Right. But this idea of thinking Left or Right is a sin against the spirit and an illusion.”

ocial Democrat Dan Jørgensen addressed opponents of the bill, demanding: “To those saying what we are doing is wrong, my question is: What is your alternative?

“The alternative is that we continue to be [one of] the most attractive countries in Europe to come to, and then we end up like Sweden.”

We’re simply applying the same rules we apply to Danish citizens who wish to take money from the Danish government,” Knuth said.

“Morally it is a horrible way to treat people fleeing mass crimes, war, rapes. They are fleeing from war and how do we treat them? We take their jewellery.”

“A Danish citizen could be searched in an extreme case if the municipality has a suspicion of fraud, but you need court permission to do so. For refugees, you would not need a court permission.”

The law introduces restrictive measures on asylum seekers that increasingly hinder their ability to apply for asylum in Denmark. We are particularly concerned by reduced social benefits and restricted access to family reunification. We are also concerned that refugees with temporary protection are only allowed to reside in Denmark for one year and yet are only able to apply for family reunification after three years.”

Beijing says the Thaad anti-missile system compromises its security and would undermine its nuclear deterrent.

Uses hit-to-kill technology - where kinetic energy destroys the incoming warhead Has a range of 200km and can reach an altitude of 150km

The enemy launches a missile2. The Thaad radar system detects the launch, which is relayed to command and control3. Thaad command and control instructs the launch of an interceptor missile4. The interceptor missile is fired at the enemy projectile5. The enemy projectile is destroyed in the terminal phase of flightThe launcher trucks can hold up to eight interceptor missiles.

What would such sanctions look like? A Senate bill introduced on Aug. 2, again with sponsors from both parties, is a good start: Prohibit any transaction related to Russian energy projects and bar the purchase of new Russian sovereign debt. Washington should encourage its allies to join in these efforts.

Putin is afraid of one thing. He is afraid that one day the Russian middle class will finally rebel against his regime and rush into the streets demanding change.

Madison’s worst fears of mob rule have been realized—and the cooling mechanisms he designed to slow down the formation of impetuous majorities have broken.

We are living, in short, in a Madisonian nightmare. How did we get here, and how can we escape?

During the election of 1912, the progressive populists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson insisted that the president derived his authority directly from the people. Since then, the office has moved in precisely the direction the Founders had hoped to avoid: Presidents now make emotional appeals, communicate directly with voters, and pander to the mob.

Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms have accelerated public discourse to warp speed, creating virtual versions of the mob. Inflammatory posts based on passion travel farther and faster than arguments based on reason. Rather than encouraging deliberation, mass media undermine it by creating bubbles and echo chambers in which citizens see only those opinions they already embrace.

The polarization of Congress, reflecting an electorate that has not been this divided since about the time of the Civil War, has led to ideological warfare between parties that directly channels the passions of their most extreme constituents and donors—precisely the type of factionalism the Founders abhorred.

Whatever benefits the parties offered in the 19th and early 20th centuries, however, have long since disappeared. The moderating effects of parties were undermined by a series of populist reforms, including the direct election of senators, the popular-ballot initiative, and direct primaries in presidential elections, which became widespread in the 1970s.

As the historian Sean Wilentz has noted, the great movements for constitutional and social change in the 19th century—from the abolition of slavery to the Progressive movement—were the product of strong and diverse political parties.

The Founders’ greatest failure of imagination was in not anticipating the rise of mass political parties. The first parties played an unexpected cooling function, uniting diverse economic and regional interests through shared constitutional visions

More recently, geographical and political self-sorting has produced voters and representatives who are willing to support the party line at all costs. After the Republicans took both chambers of Congress in 1994, the House of Representatives, under Speaker Newt Gingrich, adjusted its rules to enforce party discipline, taking power away from committee chairs and making it easier for leadership to push bills into law with little debate or support from across the aisle.

The rise of what the presidential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “imperial presidency” has unbalanced the equilibrium among the three branches. Modern presidents rule by executive order rather than consulting with Congress. They direct a massive administrative state, with jurisdiction over everything from environmental policy to the regulation of the airwaves.

The passions, hyper-partisanship, and split-second decision making that Madison feared from large, concentrated groups meeting face-to-face have proved to be even more dangerous from exponentially larger, dispersed groups that meet online.

some promising, if modest, fixes are on the horizon. Nathaniel Persily, a professor at Stanford Law School who leads an independent commission that will examine the impact of Facebook on democracy, notes one step the company has taken to address the problem of “clickbait,” which lures users with sensational headlines. Articles that persuade many users to click previously appeared high on Facebook’s News Feed. The company now prioritizes those articles users have actually taken the time to read.

“The democratic character of the internet is itself posing a threat to democracy, and there’s no clear solution to the problem,” Persily told me. “Censorship, delay, demotion of information online, deterrence, and dilution of bad content—all pose classic free-speech problems, and everyone should be concerned at every step of the government regulatory parade.”

At the moment, the combination of low voter turnout and ideological extremism has tended to favor very liberal or very conservative candidates in primaries. Thanks to safe districts created by geographic self-sorting and partisan gerrymandering, many of these extremists go on to win the general election. Today, all congressional Republicans fall to the right of the most conservative Democrat, and all congressional Democrats fall to the left of the most liberal Republican. In the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of the lawmakers overlapped ideologically.

The best way of promoting a return to Madisonian principles, however, may be one Madison himself identified: constitutional education. In recent years, calls for more civic education have become something of a national refrain. But the Framers themselves believed that the fate of the republic depended on an educated citizenry. Drawing again on his studies of ancient republics, which taught that broad education of citizens was the best security against “crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty,” Madison insisted that the rich should subsidize the education of the poor.

The civics half of the educational equation is crucial. Recent studies have suggested that higher education can polarize citizens rather than ensuring the rule of reason: Highly educated liberals become more liberal, and highly educated conservatives more conservative

Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.

The question, it seems to me, is one of proportion.

The average aid for high-income countries like Israel, according to USAID, is $79 million a year. Israel gets 48 times more.

In return for giving Israel $3.8 billion a year … the U.S. is expected to consent to anything and everything Israel wants. When you look at this from a distance, it is really quite amazing.

And, of course, Israel won in the end. Under Trump, Israel has achieved almost every goal it aimed for: the scrapping of the Iran deal, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a surge in settlements, and an intensification of the abuse of the Palestinians

Again you might ask: What did the U.S. get in return for all this from Israel? And again the answer is: Nothing.

Actually, worse than nothing. The U.S. suffers internationally from this alliance. Don’t take it from me. Here’s General James Mattis: “I paid a military price every day as the commander at CentCom because the Americans were perceived as biased toward Israel and that moderates all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us.” Or David Petraeus: “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of American favoritism toward Israel.”

Now observe the public discourse in Washington. Here is Nancy Pelosi last year: “If this capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to aid — I won’t even call it aid — our cooperation with Israel.” Chew on that a minute. If the United States were to collapse, its one objective would be to aid a foreign country

The first bill introduced into the Senate in this Congress was one that made it illegal for any American to boycott goods from the West Bank, without suffering real economic consequences from their own government. It’s a federal bill designed to buttress several state bans on Americans’ right to boycott Israeli goods. Now here’s a clear case of conflict between the free speech rights of Americans and Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank. And the Senate voted for Israel’s occupation over the rights of its own citizens by a margin of 77– 23

It seems to me that it is simply a fact that the Israel lobby uses money, passion, and persuasion to warp this country’s foreign policy in favor of another country — out of all proportion to what Israel can do for the U.S.

History matters. But it’s not a rational way for a great power to conduct foreign polic

The one-way street has also corrupted Israel, wrecked its moral standing, and enabled the country to keep ratcheting toward the far right in self-destructive ways.

The reason seems quite simple: Migrants now know that the U.S. border system is overwhelmed. More to the point, they now know that if they bring their children with them, they will not be abruptly sent back, and cannot be detained for longer than 20 days, after which they will be free to go and work anywhere in the country. That incentive is much stronger now than it was a year ago

What has happened in Guatemala to produce such a growing mass of asylum seekers? The truth appears to be some food insecurity after a failed harvest — but mostly the news that the U.S. border is effectively open, and if you bring your kids and show up, you’re home free

The Democrats for their part keep saying that there is no crisis at all, berate the administration for insufficient care or tougher enforcement at ports of entry, and actually attempted to restrict the number of beds assigned for detention in their last negotiation with the president (it didn’t happen). At some point, they’re going to have to grapple with this genuine emergency.

But how do we stop this? Congress has to act to change the law that enables this. Asylum, traditionally understood, was once for those fleeing political or ethnic persecution. It wasn’t a catch-all for any economic migrant, who can be coached to say the right words to the right official. It’s a vast loophole in the immigration system — and if it isn’t fixed legislatively soon, the current massive wave will keep building

If you think that won’t empower more nativist demagogues and help reelect Trump, you’re dreaming.

“among white liberals … 79.2 percent agreed that ‘racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.’ 18.8 percent agreed that ‘blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition. … Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition.”

These white super-liberals are also, according to a fascinating survey featured in The Atlantic, the most blinkered. Money quote: “The most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves

The survey found that the city most intolerant of other people’s views was Boston, specifically around Cambridge

This most tolerant town is in a county that voted for Trump by a 20-point margin. Let’s absorb that fact for a while, shall we?

the results suggest a damning verdict on American higher education. My alma mater Harvard, a university where free speech, ideological differences, and competing arguments should flourish is, in fact, a nest of smug intolerance. Our elite colleges may be the most “diverse” ever. But they have also become machines for closing students’ minds.

As officials in cities such as Oakland have touted the progress in gun violence numbers, they have repeatedly faced the same question: is the drop in gun violence just a result of gentrification?

An academic study of gun violence in Oakland neighborhoods found that the city’s focused deterrence strategy, known as “Ceasefire”, significantly reduced shootings, even when accounting for the level of gentrification in different areas.

the fact that big drops in gun violence are coming at the same time as intense gentrification and displacement has raised troubling questions for some local activists about who will get to benefit from living in a safer Oakland – and whose interests the decreases in shootings may ultimately serve.

As we make the city safer, are we opening up the floodgates more for gentrification? That’s what it feels like,” Clarke said. “Are we cleaning up the city for other people to move in?”

The Bay Area’s drop in gun violence does not reflect a drop in overall “crime”. The rate of property crimes such as theft and burglary have decreased only 16% across the region as gun violence has fallen by nearly a third. San Francisco has seen its property crime rate increase even as the number of people killed in gun homicides has dropped.

Criminal justice reforms have reduced the number of residents spending their lives behind bars. Since 2006, California’s state prison population has fallen by 25

There’s early evidence that local violence prevention strategies – including a refocused, more community-driven “Ceasefire” policing strategy, and intensive support programs that do not involve law enforcement at all – were a “key change” contributing to these huge decreases.

At the same time, Thomas said: “few of the laws enacted in the last 10 years would have been expected to entirely explain the significant reductions in the Bay Area.”

Nor have policies to shield undocumented immigrants led to violence, as Donald Trump and some of his Republican allies often warn. San Francisco saw a 49% drop in its gun homicide rate as it held to its pro-immigrant law enforcement policies

At the heart of the different strategies Bay Area cities are using are the same basic elements: data, dollars, and community leadership, including leadership from formerly incarcerated residents.

“The common context among each of these cities – Richmond, Oakland, and San Francisco – is that they have adopted community-driven, non-law enforcement approaches, and they’ve been robustly funded,

Longtime community outreach workers and violence interrupters, many of whom are formerly incarcerated, are crucial to making these public health strategies effective, experts across the region said

Finally, better analysis of who’s behind the violence has helped law enforcement, social services and community groups intervene more effectively. In Oakland, for example, a 2017 study of every homicide that occurred over 18 months showed that only 0.16% of Oakland’s population, about 700 high-risk men, were responsible for the majority of the homicides

“Gun violence is pretty much a form of disease. Once it starts affecting one person, it starts spreading,” said the former fellow, who asked that his name not be published

The fellowship helped him develop and realize a new vision for his life. He ended up graduating from the historically black college he had visited on one of the trips--a place, he said, where “I didn’t have to watch over my shoulder.” “To have somebody who believes in you, and knows you’ve got the potential to go for it, stuff like that makes you want to keep going right,” he said

The United States already has immense nuclear and conventional capabilities, and experts say there is no evidence these so-called more usable low-yield nuclear weapons will force adversaries to behave better. Enlarging the United States arsenal will certainly lead other countries to seek equivalent arsenals of their own, while also raising the odds that weapons fall into terrorists’ hands and heightening the risk of accidental war. Investing huge sums this way is also unlikely to protect us from tomorrow’s threats.

he proposed nuclear policy says a more aggressive nuclear posture is warranted because the world is more dangerous, with China, North Korea and Iran cited as concerns. Yet blowing up the Iran deal would free Tehran to resume its nuclear activities and make the world less safe. In other words, Mr. Trump’s approach makes no sense.

Until Mr. Trump, no one could imagine the United States ever using a nuclear weapon again. America’s conventional military is more than strong enough to defend against most threats. But Mr. Trump has so shaken this orthodoxy that Congress has begun debating limits on his unilateral authority to launch nuclear weapons. Expanding the instances when America might use nuclear weapons could also make it easier for other nuclear-armed countries to justify using their own arsenals against adversaries.

Trump’s administration has suggested that it sees nuclear weapons as useful against “non-nuclear strategic attacks” on U.S. infrastructure, perhaps including cyber or terrorist attacks.

It proposes two new nuclear-capable systems.

Neither weapon is needed to deter potential adversaries, and would instead raise the risk of the use of a nuclear weapon—whether because an adversary thinks it is being attacked or whether a U.S. president thinks he has to order an attack. As it stands, the Pentagon and the Department of Energy, the institutions that would handle the warhead changes, will struggle to find the funding or the manpower to meet existing modernization requirements. New programs would only compound this uncertainty and endanger core nuclear-modernization priorities. Moreover, developing new warheads creates an unpalatable choice: They will either be deployed without a test or with a test. Both options are bad. Lastly, the draft NPR asserts that its program proposals are affordable, but avoids making fiscal trade-offs between different military priorities. Yet Congress will have to ask whether new nuclear weapons programs are really worth the money, given that there is still no plan to pay the $1.2-trillion bill for nuclear weapons over the next 30 years.

Even as the Trump administration is proposing expanding U.S. nuclear capabilities, it is subverting traditional mechanisms for controlling them.

Today, an astonishing 58 percent of Americans lack confidence in the president’s judgment with the nuclear arsenal. It is difficult to believe that Congress or the American public will quietly acquiesce to a major expansion of U.S. nuclear capabilities and missions. Yet, without concerted pressure, the Trump Nuclear Posture Review will abandon U.S. leadership to reduce nuclear risks and instead follow our adversaries into a world where nuclear competition is commonplace.

A five-time winner of the parliamentary beard of the year, Mr. Corbyn is Britain’s Bernie Sanders, another grizzled firebrand who inspired a generation of young voters to become politicized and, at least this week, turn out to vote. Mr. Corbyn’s fans call themselves Corbynistas.

In 2015, after more than three decades as a lawmaker, he had to be persuaded to stand for the party leadership, agreeing only reluctantly and in order to enable the left to present a candidate. No one, not even Mr. Corbyn himself, expected him to win. If ever there were an accidental leader, he is it. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Labour “bet the farm” on increasing the turnout among young voters by promising to abolish student tuition, at a cost of 11 billion pounds, Mr. Fielding said. “It gave a very tangible retail offer to young voters — the first time young

voters have been given this.”

Mr. Corbyn grew up in a political household (his parents met during the Spanish Civil War) and was himself galvanized into activism by the Vietnam War and environmental issues, particularly his opposition to nuclear power — and Britain’s nuclear deterrent policy.

With his core vote for now still far to the left of Middle England, Mr. Corbyn seems unlikely ever to run Britain. But that may not trouble a man who, almost uniquely among prominent politicians, shows few signs of wanting power, at least in any personal sense.

“I want to be in government so that we can conquer the housing crisis in Britain,” he said. “I want to be in government so that people get a real chance in life.”

“To reject the advice of experts is to assert autonomy, a way for Americans to insulate their increasingly fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong about anything. It is a new Declaration of Independence: No longer do we hold these truths to be self-evident, we hold all truths to be self-evident, even the ones that aren’t true. All things are knowable and every opinion on any subject is as good as any other.”

today’s populism has magnified disdain for elites and experts of all sorts, be they in foreign policy, economics, even science.

the “protective swaddling environment of the modern university infantilizes students,”

“resistance to intellectual authority” naturally took root in a country, dedicated to the principles of liberty and egalitarianism, and how American culture tends to fuel “romantic notions about the wisdom of the common person or the gumption of the self-educated genius.”

Trump won the 2016 election, Nichols writes, because “he connected with a particular kind of voter who believes that knowing about things like America’s nuclear deterrent is just so much pointy-headed claptrap.” Worse, he goes on, some of these voters “not only didn’t care that Trump is ignorant or wrong, they likely were unable to recognize his ignorance or errors,” thanks to their own lack of knowledge.

While the internet has allowed more people more access to more information than ever before, it has also given them the illusion of knowledge when in fact they are drowning in data and cherry-picking what they choose to read

it becomes easy for one to succumb to “confirmation bias” — the tendency, as Nichols puts it, “to look for information that only confirms what we believe, to accept facts that only strengthen our preferred explanations, and to dismiss data that challenge what we accept as truth.”

When confronted with hard evidence that they are wrong, many will simply double down on their original assertions. “This is the ‘backfire effect,’” Nichols writes, “in which people redouble their efforts to keep their own internal narrative consistent, no matter how clear the indications that they’re wrong.” As a result, extreme views are amplified online, just as fake news and propaganda easily go viral.

Today, all these factors have combined to create a maelstrom of unreason that’s not just killing respect for expertise, but also undermining institutions, thwarting rational debate and spreading an epidemic of misinformation. These developments, in turn, threaten to weaken the very foundations of our democracy.

“Laypeople complain about the rule of experts and they demand greater involvement in complicated national questions, but many of them only express their anger and make these demands after abdicating their own important role in the process: namely, to stay informed and politically literate enough to choose representatives who can act on their behalf.”

They killed their trainers and fought their way into Seoul before blowing themselves up

South Korea is again targeting the North’s leadership

the South Korean defense minister, Song Young-moo, told lawmakers in Seoul that a special forces brigade he described as a “decapitation unit” would be established by the end of the year

The unit, officially known as the Spartan 3000, has not been assigned to literally decapitate North Korean leaders. But that is clearly the menacing message South Korea is trying to send.

Rarely does a government announce a strategy to assassinate a head of state, but South Korea wants to keep the North on edge and nervous about the consequences of further developing its nuclear arsenal

meant to help push North Korea into accepting President Moon Jae-in’s offer of talks

How can a country without nuclear weapons deter a dictator who has them?

“The best deterrence we can have, next to having our own nukes, is to make Kim Jong-un fear for his life,”

That danger is especially pronounced in the case of North Korea today, because it does not have any strong historical antecedents but its own. Despite all the attempts to draw assorted comparisons to explain the crisis, the best guide for it is to be found not through the close study of Khrushchev or the Kaiser, but of the Kim family.

By contrast, all evidence suggests North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs are an existential question for Kim Jong Un. Rather than an impulsive move on Pyongyang’s part, the capabilities the regime is now showcasing are the culmination of a patient, decades-long drive to acquire them. For the North, the nuclear and missile combination represents not a clever chess move in a far-off corner of the world by a global power maneuvering for advantage, but the vital guarantee of survival at home by a pygmy, pariah regime surrounded by nuclear-armed great powers.

The First World War ranks as an even less helpful guide to the Korean crisis.

Unlike in 1914, no one involved in policymaking in the relevant capitals—in this case Washington, Beijing, Tokyo, or Seoul—has evinced any illusions about the devastating consequences likely to attend a conflict. On the contrary, everyone anticipates that, should a war come to pass, it will be a bloodbath

Nor is the Kim regime akin to the Nazis. While the government ruling from Pyongyang is uniquely loathsome and evil—perpetrating crimes against humanity of a scope and scale arguably unparalleled anywhere else on earth—it has displayed none of the fanatical urgency of Hitler in his genocidal drive to conquer Europe.

The broader U.S. experience during the Cold War—particularly with respect to theories of nuclear deterrence and alliance management—offers a richer and more promising field for exploration.

In the North Korean case, by contrast, robust missile defenses are a smart and stabilizing investment for the U.S. to make—necessary to disabuse Pyongyang of any hope that it might use its nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which to conduct acts of conventional aggression against its neighbors.

The past several decades suggest that, contrary to conventional characterization of Kim Jong Un as a madman, North Korean leaders are more predictable than not.

Far more than these or other imperfect analogues, the history that ultimately provides the most useful template for thinking about the current crisis with North Korea is that of North Korea itself.

They show a strong survival instinct, and have been savvy and ruthless in remaining in power as communist regimes have crumbled nearly everywhere else. And out of this desire to survive lies the potential foundation for a successful American strategy.

When it comes to drawing analogies, the historian Lawrence Freedman once offered a useful admonishment. “History,” he said, “should alert you to factors of which to be aware, dangers that might be lurking unseen, possibilities that might be worth exploring, or questions to ask. It can provide suggestions but not rules to be followed.”

The truth is that America, and the world, have never faced a situation quite like the one that presently confronts us on the Korean peninsula. Rather than searching for an episode from the past that neatly tells us what to do now, the better approach is to acknowledge the uniqueness of today’s challenge and attempt to understand it on its own terms. In this respect, North Korea illustrates the distinction between analogy and analysis—and that the beginning of wisdom is the ability to tell them apart.

Both India and China maintain medium-size nuclear arsenals, which have traditionally been seen as the ultimate deterrent. But neither side believes that the other would risk a nuclear exchange in response to bloody disputes over the Line of Actual Control, an ill-defined border demarcation where long-running disputes have escalated into deadly conflicts by increasingly nationalistic governments.

Since then, Indian officials have gone silent about the Chinese code, whether it set off the Mumbai blackout and the evidence provided to them by Recorded Future that many elements of the nation’s electric grid were the target of a sophisticated Chinese hacking effort.

authorities found “suspicious activity” that suggested the intervention of a state actor.

But Mr. Yadav declined to elaborate, saying the investigation’s full report would be released in early March. Nitin Raut, a state government minister quoted in local reports in November blaming sabotage for the Mumbai outage, did not respond to questions about the blackout.

“The issue is we still haven’t been able to get rid of our dependence on foreign hardware and foreign software,” General Hooda said.