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Russians don’t run on their banks, because they believe that in a real crunch, the Russian central bank would provide the needed cash. After all, the Russian central bank holds enormous quantities of reserves: $630 billion at the last tally

To finance its war on Ukraine, Russia might have hoped to draw down its foreign-currency reserves with Western central banks.

Not so fast, argues Bernstam. What does it mean that Russia “has” X or Y in foreign reserves? Where do these reserves exist? The dollars, euros, and pounds owned by the Russian central bank—Russia may own them, but Russia does not control them. Almost all those hundreds of billions of Russian-owned assets are controlled by foreign central banks.

We, the people of the Western world collectively owe the Russian state hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s not our problem. That’s Russia’s problem, an enormous one. Because one thing any debtor can do is … not pay when asked.

With $630 billion in reserves, there is no way Russia would ever run out of foreign currency. You’ve probably read that assertion many times in the past few days

if Russia’s foreign income slows at the same time as it is waging a hugely costly war against Ukraine, it will need its reserves badly. And suddenly, it will be as if the money disappeared. Every Russian person, individual, or state entity with any kind of obligation denominated in foreign currency would be shoved toward default.

All of this requires the cooperation of the Fed or ECB in the first place. The Fed or ECB could say: “Nope. Sorry. The Russian central bank’s money is frozen. No transfers of dollars or euros from the Russian central bank to commercial banks. No transfers from commercial banks to businesses or individuals. For all practical purposes, you’re broke.”

Of course, long before any of that happened, everybody involved in the transactions would have panicked.

The ruble would cease to be a convertible currency. It would revert to being the pseudo-currency of Soviet times: something used for record-keeping purposes inside Russia, but without the ability to buy goods or services on international markets. The Russian economy would close upon itself, collapsing into as much self-sufficiency as possible for a country that produces only basic commodities.

Russia imports almost everything its citizens eat, wear, and use. And in the modern digitized world, that money cannot be used without the agreement of somebody’s central bank. You could call it Bernstam’s law: “Do not fight with countries whose currencies you use as a reserve currency to maintain your own.”

There is one exception to the rule about reserves as notations: About $132 billion of Russia’s reserves takes the form of physical gold in vaults inside Russia

Only one customer is rich enough to take significant gold from a sanctioned nation like Russia: China.

that does not solve the real problem, which is not to buy specific items from specific places, but to sustain the ruble as a currency that commands confidence from Russia’s own people. China cannot do that for Russians. Only the Western central banks can.

Putin launched his war against Ukraine in part to assert Russia’s great-power status—a war to make Russia great again. Putin seemingly did not understand that violence is only one form of power, and not ultimately the most decisive

The power Putin is about to feel is the power of producers against gangsters, of governments that inspire trust against governments that rule by fear.

Russia depends on the dollar, the euro, the pound, and other currencies in ways that few around Putin could comprehend. The liberal democracies that created those trusted currencies are about to make Putin’s cronies feel what they never troubled to learn. Squeeze them.

allow Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to acquire nuclear weapons

temporarily bar Muslims from entering the United States

she supported President Obama’s decision to send Navy SEALs on a raid in Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden

While Mrs. Clinton must be cautious not to alienate liberal Democrats who oppose some of her hawkish foreign policy stances

21 percent of independent voters and 32 percent of Republican voters said the most important issue this election was terrorism and national security

effort to reach out to prominent moderate Republicans who could endorse Mrs. Clinton

Those calls have included to an aide of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and to Nicholas F. Brady, who served as secretary of the Treasury under Mr. Reagan and the elder Mr. Bush

Mrs. Clinton has defended her foreign policy decisions, including urging the Obama administration to join a NATO-led coalition to oust Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and her 2002 vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq, which she later said was a mistake.

As each candidate argues the other is unfit to occupy the Oval Office, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers are preparing to make a case against Mr. Trump

will remind voters that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean government of Kim Jong-un have expressed support for Mr. Trump, who has suggested a willingness to talk directly with Mr. Kim, a pariah worldwide.

Mr. Trump said Mrs. Clinton was “fraudulent” in her misrepresentation of his foreign policy positions, explaining that he supported global alliances,

“Our country can’t afford to protect the world anymore,

begun to lay the groundwork against what she called Mr. Trump’s “reckless actions” on foreign policy.

There’s not a lot of room left in terms of new proposals,

For more than five years, the right has claimed the major problem with American foreign policy is that it’s not sufficiently grounded in the belief that America is an exceptional nation fated to lift up humanity by spreading its power, as it did in generations past. Now, bizarrely, Hillary Clinton is leveling the same critique. Which still doesn’t make it right.

The problem isn’t that Bush didn’t tell foreigners about all the good America was doing. It’s that in their eyes, Bush’s behavior massively contradicted his rhetoric

Researchers have found that World Cup goalkeepers, for example, are more likely to dive during a penalty kick, though they’d have a better chance of catching the ball by remaining in the center of the goal.

political scientists have also applied this concept to explain the decisions of leaders like George W. Bush, whose impetuous choices have been attributed by scholars to his “impatience for unnecessary delay.

Political pressure and criticism from opponents, combined with the news media’s habit of disparaging inaction, can render even the most cautious leaders vulnerable to pressure.

The American policymaking system reinforces this tendency.

America’s overwhelming military strength and the low cost of airstrikes only add to the notion that action is less costly than inaction.

Acting too quickly means that policymakers don’t have full information when making key decisions, and it prevents them from carefully considering the long-term consequences

it can be disastrous. Just look at the Obama administration’s 2011 decision to intervene in Libya.

Mr. Obama’s own reflections on Libya (as well as Iraq) and his criticisms of the bias for action in American foreign policymaking were ultimately behind his decision to resist pressure to strike Syria in 2013. Mr. Obama came to understand that poorly thought-out military interventions can be even costlier.

If Mr. Obama found it challenging to resist the bias for action in foreign policy, imagine how difficult it is for a president with questionable impulse control, a military-centric foreign policy and a fixation on media praise.

It takes a determined leader to resist the overwhelming pressure to “do something” in a crisis. Mr. Trump is not that leader.

Abdication is not isolationism. Donald Trump’s United States is not isolationist. He has authorized the use of limited military force against the Syrian government in a manner his predecessor rejected

But abdication describes U.S. foreign policy all the same, as the United States is no longer taking the lead in maintaining alliances, or in building regional and global institutions that set the rules for how international relations are conducted. It is abdication from what has been a position of leadership in developing the rules and arrangements at the heart of any world order.

Under Donald Trump, however, U.S. foreign policy shows clear signs of significant departure. Support for alliances, embrace of free trade, concern over climate change, championing of democracy and human rights, American leadership per se—these and other fundamentals of American foreign policy have been questioned and, more than once, rejected. Trump is the first post–World War II American president to view the burdens of world leadership as outweighing the benefits. As a result, the United States has changed from the principal preserver of order to a principal disrupter.

The process of pulling back began in the opening minutes of Donald Trump’s presidency, in his inaugural address. The new president espoused a doctrine of “America First,” suggesting that for decades what the United States had spent and done abroad had been to America’s domestic detriment, and that the United States would no longer put the interests of others ahead of its own. The focus was on sovereign rights, not obligations, and on promoting national recovery rather than international order.Not surprisingly, this message was not well received by American allies, who have made the strategic decision to place the lion’s share of their security and well-being in American hands and were taken aback by the notion that their interests would be relegated to second place. It is important to keep in mind that alliances are important both for what they do—they pool resources on behalf of shared goals and defense—and what they discourage, including proliferation and deferring to adversaries.

U.S. standing in the world also suffered for other reasons.

It is impossible to know whether what we have witnessed to date is something of an aberration or a new normal. In principle, Mr. Trump could evolve or, even if not, his successor could embrace a more familiar foreign policy. But it is also possible that Mr. Trump will be a two-term president and that his successor will embrace at least some of his approach to foreign policy. Regardless, the world that either a reformed President Trump or a successor would inherit is already one of increasing disarray. It is also far from assured that other governments would ever again see the United States the same way in that, if such a radical departure could happen once, it could happen a second time.

An optimist would also hope that other countries would pick up where the United States left off in promoting international order. The fact is, though, that there is no alternative great power willing and able to step in and assume what has been the U.S. role. China is often suggested, but its leadership is focused mostly on consolidating domestic order and maintaining artificially high rates of economic growth, lest there be popular unrest. China’s interest in regional and global institutions (including both its regional trade mechanism and its “One Belt, One Road” infrastructure initiative) seems more designed to bolster its economy and influence than to help set rules and arrangements that would be broadly beneficial.

True, it is important not to overlook those positive developments and trends that do exist. The world economy is growing at 4 percent.

The good news is that the costs of promoting global order tend to be less than the costs of not; the bad news is that this truth does not seem to be recognized by many Americans, including the 45th president. Abdication is as unwarranted as it is unwise. It is a basic fact of living in a global world that no country can insulate itself from much of what happens elsewhere. A foreign policy based on sovereignty alone will not provide security in a global, interconnected world. Or, to paraphrase the jargon of the day, America cannot be great at home in a world of disarray.

Japan's nationalism was aggressive and expansionist, allowing Japan itself to become one of the imperial powers in an astonishingly short amount of time. China's nationalism, in contrast, was reactive and disorganized, leaving the country in chaos and at the mercy of foreign powers until 1949.

The foreign powers wanted access to China's other ports and to its interior.The First and Second Opium Wars (1839-42 and 1856-60) between China and Britain ended in humiliating defeat for China, which had to agree to give foreign traders, diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries access rights.

As a result, China fell under economic imperialism, with different western powers carving out "spheres of influence" in Chinese territory along the coast.

In 1853, however, this peace was shattered when a squadron of American steam-powered warships under Commodore Matthew Perry showed up in Edo Bay (now Tokyo Bay) and demanded the right to refuel in Japan.

In 1894-95, the people of China suffered another shocking blow to their sense of national pride. Japan, which had at times been a tributary state of China's in the past, defeated the Middle Kingdom in the First Sino-Japanese War and took control of Korea. Now China was being humiliated not only by the Europeans and Americans but also by one of their nearest neighbors, traditionally a subordinate power.

As a result, the people of China rose up in anti-foreigner fury once more in 1899-1900. The Boxer Rebellion began as equally anti-European and anti-Qing, but soon the people and the Chinese government joined forces to oppose the imperial powers. An eight-nation coalition of the British, French, Germans, Austrians, Russians, Americans, Italians, and Japanese defeated both the Boxer Rebels and the Qing Army, driving Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu out of Beijing.

Foreign Christian missionaries fanned out in the countryside, converting some Chinese to Catholicism or Protestantism, and threatening traditional Buddhist and Confucian beliefs.

For 250 years, Japan existed in quiet and peace under the Tokugawa Shoguns (1603-1853). The famed samurai warriors were reduced to working as bureaucrats and writing wistful poetry because there were no wars to fight. The only foreigners allowed in Japan were a handful of Chinese and Dutch traders, who were confined to an island in Nagasaki Bay.

China slipped into a decades-long civil war between the nationalists and the communists that only ended in 1949​ when Mao Zedong and the Communist Party prevailed.

this development sparked anti-foreign and nationalist feelings in the Japanese people and caused the government to fall. However, unlike China, the leaders of Japan took this opportunity to thoroughly reform their country. They quickly turned it from an imperial victim to an aggressive imperial power in its own right.

With China's recent Opium War humiliation as a warning, the Japanese started with a complete overhaul of their government and social system. Paradoxically, this modernization drive centered around the Meiji Emperor, from an imperial family that had ruled the country for 2,500 years. For centuries, however, the emperors had been figureheads, while the shoguns wielded actual power.

Japan's new constitution also did away with the feudal social classes, made all of the samurai and daimyo into commoners, established a modern conscript military, required basic elementary education for all boys and girls, and encouraged the development of heavy industry.

Japan refused to bow to the Europeans, they would prove that Japan was a great, modern power, and Japan would rise to be the "Big Brother" of all of the colonized and down-trodden peoples of Asia.

In the space of a single generation, Japan became a major industrial power with a well-disciplined modern army and navy. This new Japan shocked the world in 1895 when it defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. That was nothing, however, compared to the complete panic that erupted in Europe when Japan beat Russia (a European power!) in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05.

While nationalism helped to fuel Japan's incredibly quick development into a major industrialized nation and an imperial power and helped it fend off the western powers, it certainly had a dark side as well. For some Japanese intellectuals and military leaders, nationalism developed into fascism, similar to what was happening in the newly-unified European powers of Germany and Italy. This hateful and genocidal ultra-nationalism led Japan down the road to military overreach, war crimes, and eventual defeat in World War II

“It seems that a whole-of-government and whole-of-society campaign is being waged to bring China down,” Mr. Xie told Ms. Sherman, according to the summaries of his comments, which were also issued on the Chinese foreign ministry website. “Do bad things and get good results. How is that ever possible?”

Chinese people “feel that the real emphasis is on the adversarial aspect; the collaborative aspect is just an expediency,” Mr. Xie told Ms. Sherman, according to the summary.

The acrimony echoed the opening of high-level talks between senior Chinese and Biden administration officials in March, when Beijing’s top foreign policy official, Yang Jiechi, delivered a 16-minute lecture, accusing them of arrogance and hypocrisy.

Last week, Chinese officials said they were “extremely shocked” by a W.H.O. proposal to take a fresh look at the lab leak theory. A report in March from an initial W.H.O. inquiry stated that it was “extremely unlikely” that the coronavirus had jumped into the wider population through a lab leak.

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese government has expressed impatience with criticism and demands from Washington, especially over what Beijing deems internal issues like Hong Kong, Xinjiang and human rights.“We’ll never accept insufferably arrogant lecturing from those ‘master teachers!’” Mr. Xi said in a speech on July 1 marking 100 years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. He also warned that foes would “crack their heads and spill blood” against a wall of Chinese resolve.

China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, who was also scheduled to meet Ms. Sherman in Tianjin, said over the weekend that the United States needed to be taught some humility.“If the United States still hasn’t learned how to get along with other countries in an equal manner, then we have a responsibility to work with the international community to give it a good catch-up lesson,” Mr. Wang said in talks on Saturday with his Pakistani counterpart, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.

open to abuse and has been used to stifle dissent and harass civil society groups.

Rights groups and other organisations designated by the justice ministry as foreign agents can be subjected to spot checks and face bureaucratic scrutiny.

he was surprised that he, as a non-journalist, had been named

The fiscal response to Covid-19 reinforced this point: Money is a tool of social decision-making, not an objective thing that you get through abstract merit.

the value of cryptocurrency is so clearly socially constructed: A Bitcoin was worth roughly nothing a decade ago, and roughly $41,000 today, solely because people collectively decided to ascribe value to Bitcoin.

money gets its value from people agreeing that it’s valuable.

As of Friday Russia had about $630 billion of foreign currency reserves, a large cushion designed to allow it to withstand economic sanctions and prop up the value of the ruble

But “foreign currency reserves” are not an objective fact; they are mostly a series of entries on lists maintained by foreign-currency issuers and intermediaries (central banks, correspondent banks, sovereign bond issuers, brokerages). 1  If those people cross you off the list, or put an asterisk next to your entry freezing your funds, then you can’t use those funds anymore.

Russia’s foreign reserves consist, in the first instance, of a set of accounting entries. But in a crisis the accounting entries don’t matter at all. All that matters are relationships, and if your relationships get bad enough then the money is as good as gone.

Now you want something for yourself? OK, but that is going to be subtracted from the running total of how much you’ve done for the rest for us.

There is a lot to dislike, or at least to be uncomfortable with, in this situation.

This is arguably bad for the dollar’s long-run dominance: Russia will develop its own ways around SWIFT, China will push other countries to adopt its digital yuan, everyone will use Bitcoin, etc

it is also arguably bad for global prosperity: Trustworthy rules-based trade works better and produces more value than arbitrary uncertain trade.

But what I want to suggest is that this weekend’s actions are evidence that the basic structure is good. What I want to suggest is that society is good, that it is good for people (and countries) to exist in a web of relationships in which their counterparties can judge their actions and punish bad actions.

If money is socially constructed and property is contingent then money is a continuing, dynamic, ever-at-risk reward for prosocial behavior.

one of the ways I suggest students think about money is as a kind of social scorecard.

You did something good — made something somebody wanted, let somebody else use something you own, went to work and did everything the boss told you? Good for you, you get a cookie. Or more precisely, you get a credit, in both senses, in the personal record kept for you at a bank.

But the response to the 2008 global financial crisis, and to its later European aftershocks, made it clear that something else was going on. Who has money and what they can do with it can be adjusted by the actions of central banks and national treasuries; banks can be bailed out; costs can be socialized.

we have exactly this system already. The number is called a bank account. The difference is simply that we have so naturalized the system that “how much money you have” seems like simply a fact about you, rather than a judgment imposed by society.

Pervasive social credit systems seem dystopian, and you would not really want the U.S. government making day-to-day decisions about who deserves to keep their bank accounts.

But another idea is that money can insulate you from  the obligations of society, and that is also bad.

You get a claim on goods and services by being part of society, and having a big number next to your name on a list does not relieve you of your obligations. If you do something so outrageous that society as a whole decides you are a pariah, then money is a way for society to express that.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was adopted in 1978 and amended in 2008, with the addition of new surveillance authority and procedures, which are continued by the bill approved on Friday. The 2008 law was passed after the disclosure that President George W. Bush had authorized eavesdropping inside the United States, to search for evidence of terrorist activity, without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.

By a vote of 52 to 43, the Senate on Friday rejected a proposal by Mr. Wyden to require the national intelligence director to tell Congress if the government had collected any domestic e-mail or telephone conversations under the surveillance law. The Senate also rejected, 54 to 37, an amendment that would have required disclosure of information about significant decisions by a special federal court that reviews applications for electronic surveillance in foreign intelligence cases.

The No. 2 Senate Democrat, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, said the surveillance law “does not have adequate checks and balances to protect the constitutional rights of innocent American citizens.” “It is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence,” Mr. Durbin said, “but the reality is that this legislation permits targeting an innocent American in the United States as long as an additional purpose of the surveillance is targeting a person outside the United States.”

Mr. Merkley said the administration should provide at least unclassified summaries of major decisions by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “An open and democratic society such as ours should not be governed by secret laws,” Mr. Merkley said, “and judicial interpretations are as much a part of the law as the words that make up our statute.”

Mr. Wyden said these writs reminded him of the “general warrants that so upset the colonists” more than 200 years ago. “The founding fathers could never have envisioned tweeting and Twitter and the Internet,” Mr. Wyden said. “Advances in technology gave government officials the power to invade individual privacy in a host of new ways.”

Taken literally, Tillerson’s proposed approach would violate international law and require a naval blockade, which would be an act of war, experts said.

After the hearing, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee gave Tillerson a chance to clarify what they assumed was an ill-informed gaffe, but neither he nor the White House took up the offer, aides told Foreign Policy.

The bellicose words on the South China Sea follow a host of other provocative statements and actions by Trump since his election. H

The idea behind Trump’s approach seems to be that the United States has been weak in its dealings with Beijing, and that a strong hand is needed. Experts said the Trump administration is testing the hypothesis that if the Washington simply gets tougher with China, Beijing will back down.

“They have been signaling subtly but clearly that they have cards to play as well and that they’re not going to back down,” one congressional aide said.

Washington and Beijing could be headed on a collision course, as both countries could be overestimating their own power and misjudging how the other side will respond, former officials and policy analysts said.

military leaders are not keen on provoking tensions with China or threatening a naval blockade that Washington won’t be ready to enforce.

Even as it seeks to squeeze China, the Trump administration has lost crucial economic and diplomatic leverage in the region by abandoning the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed 12-nation trade pact with strong support among Asian allies and partners. It offered a counterbalance to Beijing’s economic heft, particularly among countries with rival claims in the South China Sea.

China is trying to fill the void, eagerly expanding its own trade grouping to attract countries like Japan and Malaysia. For Asian states gauging U.S. power, “their measuring stick isn’t just one or two aircraft carriers, it’s trade flows,” the congressional staffer said.

Allies are dismayed by the administration’s embrace of protectionism, its aggressive and improvised rhetoric toward China, and the wide gap between the president’s views and those of his Cabinet, said diplomats and former official

long-established allies are looking at exploring other trade and diplomatic options if the U.S. loses its status as a reliable partner.

While Tokyo and other foreign capitals have been reassured somewhat by officials named or expected to serve in the Trump administration on Asia policy, the president’s unpredictable tweets and impulsive policy making are a source of anxiety.

athological.

But it remains unclear whether voters want a candidate, like Clinton, who can deploy careful, nuanced national-security arguments, or if they prefer a candidate, like Trump, whose approach to foreign policy frequently appears to be grounded in gut instinct.

divisive

alienates

It is unclear if Clinton’s arguments will resonate with Republican voters who have rallied around Trump’s brash promises to protect America, seemingly at any cost.

56 percent of voters think Clinton would handle foreign policy better than Trum

It is impossible to predict exactly how Clinton or Trump would engage in diplomacy, or retreat from it, if elected president.

For his part, Trump can turn Clinton’s credentials to his advantage

In a general election that pits Clinton against Trump, voters may have to decide what they find more appealing: an established track record or a relatively unknown quantity who brings with him the promise of brute force.

Obama has been like a foreign policy version of Warren Buffett, a proudly pragmatic value investor less concerned with appearances and the whims of the moment, focused instead on making solid investments with an eye to long-term success

think back to 2008, with the U.S. economy shedding as many as 500,000 jobs a month and on the cusp of a second Great Depression, the U.S. military was stretched to the breaking point through fighting two wars, and many parts of the world associated the United States with militarism, Guantanamo Bay and torture. The picture looks very different today.

Considering the extent of today’s global disorder, it is tempting to succumb to a narrative of grievance and fear — sharpening the divisions between “us” and “them,” building walls longer and higher, and lashing out at enemies with force. Or to think it better that, to reduce exposure to such geopolitical risk, the United States should divest from its alliances. Despite all the talk of “strength,” what these impulses reflect is a core lack of confidence.

As Obama’s presidency nears its end, the state of the world is indeed tumultuous and ever changing, but we have good reason to be confident. The United States’ global position is sound. The United States has restored a sense of strategic solvency. Countries look to it for guidance, ideas, support and protection. It is again admired and inspiring, not just for what it can do abroad but also for its economic vitality and strong society at home.

Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, share a perspective of “skeptical restraint.” They worry about the unintended consequences of regime change. They are more aware of the limits and costs of military force. They don’t believe the United States can or should police the world. They understand that without restraint abroad, we will never be able to focus on rebuilding our country at home.

In the spring of 2013, Obama spoke at the National Defense University on the war on terrorism. He argued that “we must define the nature and scope of this struggle or else it will define us,” invoking James Madison’s warning that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” He called for new limits on our use of force. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue. But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Clinton would not have delivered those remarks. Sanders would.

After she left office, Clinton criticized Obama’s quip that a central principle of his foreign policy was “don’t do stupid s---,” saying that “Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle.” Maybe so, but it reflects a common sense that Sanders and Obama exhibit, and Clinton consistently does not.

That decline is on track to continue this fall, after the nation’s business programs received 13% fewer GMAT score reports from foreign applicants for the coming academic years

Meanwhile, the data show business schools in Europe and Canada, such as Insead in France and the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, have seen an uptick in applications from international students.

At Texas A&M University’s Mays Business School, international enrollment fell 40% last year, to just 24 students in the Class of 2019, the school said. At Columbia University and University of Georgia business schools, officials said international enrollment was down 14% and 32%, respectively.

There are two obvious things Corker could be talking about (and one hopes no less-obvious ones): North Korea and Iran.

Trump keeps telegraphing a desire to start a war with North Korea.  Having first drawn blood with his missile-strike on Syria, and been pleased with the reaction from the public and press, Trump seems to want more.

Although the official U.S. position, as outlined by other officials, is that all options are on the table, the president keeps suggesting that really only one is on the table. Why else would he so publicly slam the door shut on Tillerson’s open channel to Pyongyang? What else might he mean when he promised that the U.S. will “do what has to be done”?

There are other indications, too. In August, after a North Korean missile test, he said, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal statement, and as I said they will be met with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before.” (Aides said the language was improvised, and could not explain what he meant by it.)

In mid-September, at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump said that if Pyongyang’s aggression continued, the U.S. “will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” also saying, “The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary.”

Of course, Trump could be just talking trash, trying to do the geopolitical dozens with Kim Jong Un, but there’s no way for Kim, or diplomats from other foreign countries, or the American people to know the difference. (North Korea itself claimed Trump’s UN remarks constituted a declaration of war, though the regime has a long history of similar comments.)

The impression of a slouch toward war is sharpened by other evidence. Mattis, for example, on Monday told Army generals to be ready to fight a war in Korea. Some of that is standard readiness, but given his own bleak view of a military solution—Mattis said earlier this year that a war against North Korea would be “catastrophic” and “probably the worst kind of fighting in most people's lifetimes”—it could also be an indication of growing probability of a shooting war.

Yet the road to a major war is usually a long one. The Bush administration spent months laying the groundwork, both publicly and privately, for the war in Iraq. At this point, the president has demonstrated a pattern of comments that indicate a preference for a military response to North Korea, although it’s not clear that his preference will prevail. That pattern is enough that Trump’s feuds with Tillerson and Corker deserve to be seen not merely as wacky, somewhat disconcerting antics, but as part of a potential move toward a war—whether that’s World War III or not.

spheres within Qing China that were taken by eight different foreign nations late in the nineteenth century.

The eight nations' spheres in Qing China were designated primarily for trade purposes.

Great Britain, France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, and Japan each had exclusive special trading rights, including low tariffs and free trade, within Chinese territory.

In addition, each of the foreign powers had the right to establish a legation in Peking (now Beijing), and the citizens of these powers had extraterritorial rights while on Chinese soil.

Many ordinary Chinese did not approve of these arrangements, and in 1900 the Boxer Rebellion broke out.  The Boxers aimed to rid Chinese soil of all foreign devils.  At first, their targets included the ethnic-Manchu Qing rulers, but the Boxers and the Qing soon joined forces against the agents of the foreign powers.

  They laid siege to the foreign legations in Peking, but a joint Eight Power naval invasion force rescued the legation staff after almost two months of fighting.

Britain wanted to protect its "crown jewel" colony, British India, from Russian expansion.

To keep the peace between themselves, the British and Russians agreed that Britain would have a sphere of influence including most of eastern Persia, while Russia would have a sphere of influence over northern Persia.

Today, the phrase "sphere of influence" has lost some of its punch. Real estate agents and retail malls use the term to designate the neighborhoods from which they draw most of their customers or in which they do most of their business.

"in view of the rapid spread of Covid-19 across the world, China has decided to temporarily suspend the entry into China by foreign nationals holding visas or residence permits" as of March 28.

country is returning to normal.

At a Beijing gym popular with expats, managers posted a sign saying "foreign friends" would no longer be allowed to enter, "because of (the) overseas epidemic threshold." CNN also saw doormen at a bar in Sanlitun, a popular Beijing nightlife area, refusing entry to non-Chinese-looking patrons.

Jim Boyce, a Beijing resident who posted on Twitter about restrictions on foreigners, said that one barber shop which put up a sign barring non-Chinese still allowed at least one expat to get his hair cut there.

Mulvaney said the Trump administration will release its budget proposal on 16 March. Reuters has reported the administration plans significant proposed cuts in many other domestic programs.