Bruce Klingner

I'm excited to announce that I have joined the Mansfield Foundation as a senior fellow (non-resident). As I have for 30+ years, I will remain dedicated to assessing North/South Korean and Japanese issues and providing U.S. policy recommendations. mansfieldfdn.org/about/mansfiel…

He did it politely and diplomatically but King Charles just reminded Congress: • NATO was there for USA after 9/11 • British Troops did fight in Afghanistan • Ukraine needs our help now • executive power must be subject to checks & balances • ice-caps are melting • America’s natural wonders need protecting

Enjoyed having @junghpak1 @JChengWSJ at @BrookingsFP this morning to discuss, power, religion, and ideology in North Korea as well as U.S.-North Korea relations and what might come out of a Trump-Kim meeting. ICYMI, link is here! youtube.com/watch?v=miO-ud…

Thanks to @economicsnoah for including my thoughts in this piece in @thewirechina. For now, Congress is setting the hawkish agenda. Last month, @HouseForeignGOP unanimously advanced Republican-led legislation aimed at reeling in chip smuggling to China. The House voted on Wednesday to advance more than a dozen other export control bills. “This is the biggest push from Congress on export controls since 2018,” says Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the @HudsonInstitute who worked as a staffer for Republican @SenTedCruz for five years. The flurry of bills signals congressional frustration with the Trump administration’s approach to tech exports. The White House approved sales to China of Nvidia’s previously restricted H200 chip last December, around five weeks after Trump met Xi at a summit in South Korea. “China is notorious for importing and stealing American and allied civilian technologies and maliciously using them in support of its military,” @RepJimBaird said in a statement on Wednesday. “We cannot allow our advanced technologies to give China the upper hand.”

James Comer wanted to impeach Joe Biden because Hunter was on the board of a gas company and sold paintings....where is comer now???

🚨 NBC News confirms for the first time: the Iranian Air Force bombed US military bases in the opening phase of the war. This was not just missiles and drones. This was the Iranian Air Force. Conducting airstrikes on American bases. And we’re only finding out now. What else haven’t they told us?

New photos from the USS Abraham Lincoln show service members receiving minimal food portions as reports grow that some troops have lost significant weight and aren’t receiving care packages—while the Pentagon denies any shortages. (Newsweek)

If weapons were on that ship, then President Trump should follow through on his threat and impose a 50% tariff on China immediately.

A superb follow-on article to update a masterful book. A must read.

The BBC says it has found a 'consistent pattern of spikes just hours, or sometimes minutes' in financial markets before a 'social media post or media interview' by President Trump.

This is a remarkable shift. People in *every single one* of the top US-allied countries now believe it’s better to depend on China than on the US. The global balance of power is clearly tilting away from the US and toward China.

Wednesday afternoon, Bessent said Treasury would not extend its waiver of sanctions on Russian oil. Friday night, Treasury issued a new one: ofac.treasury.gov/recent-actions… "It’s hard for me to see a world where the Trump administration cracks down on Russian oil again, at least between now and the midterm elections," @EdwardFishman told me earlier this month: semafor.com/article/04/08/…

Last week, I celebrated 42 wonderful years of marriage to my amazing wife DeeAnn. Since we met skydiving in college, it’s been one adventure after another, including 3 kids, 4 grandkids, and most recently, driving a dog sled team north of the Arctic Circle.

I have lived in Hong Kong and worked on China matters for more than 20 years, and I can confidently say that appeasement like this never, ever works. Xi will interpret it as weakness & take full advantage. wsj.com/world/china/tr…

Trump has repeatedly gone soft on China (and Russia). NSS and NDS backtrack from first Trump term. Also weaker position on North Korea.

NEW: The “Busan Freeze” How Trump scraped his own playbook on China, and the cost of playing nice with Beijing ⁦@WSJ⁩ wsj.com/world/china/tr…

There is a fog in diplomacy as of war, but a few things stand out after the ceasefire announcement: 1. This may not be the end but it’s at least the beginning of the end. Trump’s bluster might have opened the Strait of Hormuz and ultimately avoided catastrophic attacks on Iran’s civilian infrastructure. Two weeks give the sides a chance to lock in a peace deal. But it may not be a good agreement. 2. Already, Iran says that ships can pass the Strait “via coordination with Iran’s Armed Forces.” That means that Tehran controls access, which was not the case before the war. It’s hard to see how the United States – or the world – can accept indefinite Iranian control of such a key energy chokepoint. 3. Trump says Iran’s 10 point plan is a workable basis for negotiation. But that plan includes Iranian control of the Strait, accepting Iran’s right to enrich uranium, lifting all sanctions, no attacks on proxies like Hezbollah, paying reparations, and the withdrawal of US combat forces from the Middle East. It's a regime wishlist. 4. Iran remains in possession of its stock of highly enriched uranium, which the President says can be monitored effectively by satellite. If that was sufficient to prevent its misuse, however, it’s not clear why attacking Iran was necessary in the first place. 5. The real threat was Iran’s growing stockpile of missiles and drones, which it would eventually have in such quantities as to overwhelm any reasonable regional defenses. Behind that umbrella, Tehran could pursued its malign aims, including on the nuclear front. So if there was a casus belli, it was to degrade those programs. 6. But the administration’s war aims were broader: no nuclear Iran, no missiles or drones, no navy, no blocking the Strait of Hormuz, no support to proxies, decapitating the leadership and, depending on the day, overthrowing the regime. 7. Instead the regime remains in place, with nuclear material, and with degraded forces that still allow it to menace neighbors and block the Strait. If Tehran gets a decent proportion of its desired 10 points, we may face a materially worse situation than when this all started. 8. That's not inevitable, and hopefully that outcome can be avoided. But the negotiators now have tremendous work before them.

MAGA calls Europe freeloaders. Here’s what they’re not telling you. ​1. Ramstein Air Base, the most important US military hub outside America, is built on German land provided rent-free, with Germany contributing hundreds of millions to its upkeep. The US couldn’t replace it anywhere in the world. 2. Every US military operation in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia flows through Ramstein. Lose it and US power projection in the Eastern Hemisphere is crippled. 3. The UK provides and maintains RAF Lakenheath used almost entirely by the US Air Force. Italy provides Aviano. Greece provides Souda Bay. Turkey provides Incirlik. European land. European infrastructure. American operations. 4. The US Sixth Fleet depends entirely on European ports for fuel and supplies. Souda Bay, Naples, 11 Greek ports. Without them the Sixth Fleet cannot operate in the Mediterranean or project power into the Middle East. 5. The majority of NATO’s intelligence and surveillance capacity is hosted on European soil and fed directly to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon. 6. Early warning radar at Fylingdales, UK. Missile tracking in Greenland. Norwegian monitoring stations near Russia. All dependent on European goodwill. 7. It would cost America MORE to bring the troops home than keep them here. European hosts subsidise roughly a third of all basing costs. 8. Europe is America’s largest arms customer. Stop buying American and part of their defence industry goes bankrupt. 9. The bases aren’t charity. They’re America using European soil, European money and European goodwill to project power across the world. 10. We’re not the freeloaders.

The U.S. acceptance of the Iranian proposal as a basis for negotiation is a *huge* concession. There is nothing about Iran’s nuclear program in there and it includes a toll for the Strait. (1/2)