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https://www.wsj.com/articles/koreas-talks-begin-with-goodwill-if-no-quick-results-1537270274?cx_testId=0&cx_testVariant=cx_1&cx_artPos=0#cxrecs_s

SEOUL—North Korea agreed to allow outside inspectors to visit its missile test site and said it would be open to decommissioning its nuclear-enrichment facility, a bold gambit by Kim Jong Un that is aimed at breaking an impasse in negotiations with the U.S. and keeping engagement with Seoul on track.

On Wednesday, the second of three days of talks in Pyongyang, Mr. Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in emerged from an hourlong private meeting to sign a document and hold a joint news conference where they each reaffirmed their goal of ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.

Under the agreement, outside inspectors and experts will be allowed to witness the dismantling of North Korea’s Sohae satellite launching facility, located in the country’s northwest. In recent months, commercial satellite imagery has showed North Korea taking apparent steps to break down the site.

The two Koreas also said that the North would permanently decommission its Yongbyon nuclear-enrichment facility—provided the U.S. took “corresponding steps” to fulfill the terms of the agreement signed by the U.S. and North Korea in June. The two leaders didn’t mention the involvement of any international inspectors at Yongbyon.

The announcements offer fresh hope of a breakthrough between Mr. Kim and President Trump, who has floated the idea of a second U.S.-North Korean meeting following their Singapore summit three months ago.

Mr. Trump, in a pair of tweets written just after midnight in Washington, signaled optimism in the diplomatic process. “Very exciting!” he wrote.

Stalled talks between the U.S. and North Korea had loomed over this week’s Pyongyang summit. The U.S. has insisted that the North make concrete steps toward dismantling its nuclear and missile program as a precondition for further diplomacy, while Pyongyang says the U.S. has dragged its feet on signing a treaty to end the Korean War. The Korean Peninsula has remained technically in a state of war for more than six decades after the 1950-53 Korean War ended in armistice without a formal peace treaty.

Wednesday’s agreement will also create a joint military commission aimed at reducing tensions between the two sides. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/extremism-advances-in-the-largest-muslim-country-1537225520?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=3

Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, has long stood as a role model for religious pluralism. That’s changing. Political Islam and violent extremism have been taking root in society and may soon do so in the government. President Joko Widodo’s choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a 75-year-old cleric, as his running mate in next year’s election marks an ugly turn for Indonesian politics.

Religious minorities had regarded Mr. Widodo as their defender. His rival, retired general Prabowo Subianto, was expected to play the religion card, questioning the incumbent’s Islamic credentials and building a coalition supported by radical Islamists. By choosing Mr. Amin, the president’s defenders argue, he not only has neutralized the religion factor, but might have prevented it from spilling over into violence against minorities. In office, they believe, Mr. Amin will be contained.

Yet Mr. Subianto is unlikely to be deterred from playing identity politics, and rumors that Mr. Amin is reaching out to radical Islamists for support are troubling. Mr. Amin has a history of intolerance. He signed a fatwa that put a Widodo ally, Jakarta’s former Gov. Basuki Tjahaja “Ahok” Purnama, in jail on blasphemy charges. Ahok, who is Christian and ethnically Chinese, was a symbol of Indonesia’s diversity, and as a popular governor was expected to be re-elected. Instead he lost after rivals told Muslims not to vote for a non-Muslim.

Mr. Amin also signed the anti-Ahmadiyya fatwa in 2005, which led to severe restrictions and violence against the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect some Muslims regard as heretical. I met recently with Ahmadis in Depok, a Jakarta suburb, where their mosque is closed. The previous week they were visited by 15 local officials ordering them to stop all activities.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/imperialism-will-be-dangerous-for-china-1537225875

China’s real problem isn’t the so-called Thucydides trap, which holds that a rising power like China must clash with an established power like the U.S., the way ancient Athens clashed with Sparta. It was Lenin, not Thucydides, who foresaw the challenge the People’s Republic is now facing: He called it imperialism and said it led to economic collapse and war.

Lenin defined imperialism as a capitalist country’s attempt to find markets and investment opportunities abroad when its domestic economy is awash with excess capital and production capacity. Unless capitalist powers can keep finding new markets abroad to soak up the surplus, Lenin theorized, they would face an economic implosion, throwing millions out of work, bankrupting thousands of companies and wrecking their financial systems. This would unleash revolutionary forces threatening their regimes.

Under these circumstances, there was only one choice: expansion. In the “Age of Imperialism” of the 19th and early-20th centuries, European powers sought to acquire colonies or dependencies where they could market surplus goods and invest surplus capital in massive infrastructure projects.

Ironically, this is exactly where “communist” China stands today. Its home market is glutted by excess manufacturing and construction capacity created through decades of subsidies and runaway lending. Increasingly, neither North America, Europe nor Japan is willing or able to purchase the steel, aluminum and concrete China creates. Nor can China’s massively oversized infrastructure industry find enough projects to keep it busy. Its rulers have responded by attempting to create a “soft” empire in Asia and Africa through the Belt and Road Initiative.

Many analysts hoped that when China’s economy matured, the country would come to look more like the U.S., Europe and Japan. A large, affluent middle class would buy enough goods and services to keep industry humming. A government welfare state would ease the transition to a middle-class society.

That future is now out of reach, key Chinese officials seem to believe. Too many powerful interest groups have too much of a stake in the status quo for Beijing’s policy makers to force wrenching changes on the Chinese economy. But absent major reforms, the danger of a serious economic shock is growing.

The Belt and Road Initiative was designed to sustain continued expansion in the absence of serious economic reform. Chinese merchants, bankers and diplomats combed the developing world for markets and infrastructure projects to keep China Inc. solvent. In a 2014 article in the South China Morning Post, a Chinese official said one objective of the BRI is the “transfer of overcapacity overseas.” Call it “imperialism with Chinese characteristics.”

But as Lenin observed a century ago, the attempt to export overcapacity to avoid chaos at home can lead to conflict abroad. He predicted rival empires would clash over markets, but other dynamics also make this strategy hazardous. Nationalist politicians resist “development” projects that saddle their countries with huge debts to the imperialist power. As a result, imperialism is a road to ruin.

China’s problems today are following this pattern. Pakistan, the largest recipient of BRI financing, thinks the terms are unfair and wants to renegotiate. Malaysia, the second largest BRI target, wants to scale back its participation since pro-China politicians were swept out of office. Myanmar and Nepal have canceled BRI projects. After Sri Lanka was forced to grant China a 99-year lease on the Hambantota Port to repay Chinese loans, countries across Asia and Africa started rereading the fine print of their contracts, muttering about unequal treaties. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-anti-semitism-crisis/

Corbyn is leading Labour toward anti-Semitism, and British Jews are right to be worried.

London — Brits just had their hottest recorded summer since 1976, and the political temperature is also turned up to full blast. Throughout the summer, civil wars have consumed both of Britain’s main political parties. While the Tories are now preoccupied with a looming Brexit decision and a potential leadership challenge, Jeremy Corbyn has become the focus of Labour’s all-consuming anti-Semitism row.

The Labour leader has for years now been dogged by a seemingly endless stream of scandals involving anti-Jewish bigotry. In 2009, he invited Islamist “friends from Hamas” to the House of Commons and said that the idea that the group “should be labelled as a terrorist organisation by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.” In 2010, he hosted an event (also at the House of Commons) on Holocaust Memorial Day in which a Jewish Auschwitz survivor compared the Israeli government to the Nazi regime. In 2014, he attended a ceremony in Tunisia and reportedly laid a wreath on the grave of one the Black September terrorists who murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Before the Iranian state broadcaster, Press TV, was banned in January 2012, he reportedly accepted up to £20,000 for his appearances on the channel.

In 2016, amid mounting pressure from inside and outside Labour, Corbyn announced an independent inquiry into anti-Semitism and racism in the party. The report concluded that there was a toxic environment within the party. He later apologized for the “concerns and anxiety” caused by his past appearances “on platforms with people whose views I completely reject.” But these vague gestures struck many as empty, and a war for Labour’s very soul is now being fought between the party’s moderate old guard and its Corbynite radicals.