After months of attempted dialogue, Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un have announced that they will be meeting on June 12 in Singapore. Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran Deal seems to be affecting peace in the Middle East already. Meanwhile, in a shocking turnout, Malaysia’s prime minister Najib Razak was defeated in the country’s general election, paving the way for a new future.
Save the date
The American and North Korean leaders will meet in Singapore on June 12, in a historic summit. Trump even tweeted “We will both try to make it a very special moment for World Peace!” This is the first time that the North Korean leader and a sitting US President are meeting.
“Trump made the announcement hours after the arrival in Washington of three U.S. citizens who had been imprisoned in North Korea. The president and his wife Melania greeted the three when their plane arrived at Joint Base Andrews shortly before 3 a.m. Thursday, and he praised their release as a conciliatory gesture by Kim,” reports Jennifer Epstein in Bloomberg.
Singapore, she writes, is “neutral turf” for the two countries. “The government there also has a history of putting together high-profile diplomatic events at short notice, hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s historic 2015 meeting with his then-counterpart from Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou. Still, Kim’s agreement to travel so far from the safety of Pyongyang — farther than he’s ever been as leader — could be seen as a concession by North Korea.”
“Trump heads into the summit hoping to gain an agreement from Kim to give up his nuclear weapons and end North Korea’s ballistic missile program. U.S. intelligence agencies have warned that the regime is on the verge of being able to mount a nuclear strike against the U.S. mainland.”
“The U.S. has alternated for decades between threats and conciliatory approaches to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests that have vexed a string of U.S. presidents. The confrontation grew heated last year, with Trump deriding Kim as “Little Rocket Man” and Kim calling the president a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.””
A new leaf
The United Malays National Organisation (UNMO) has been in power in Malaysia in some form since 1955. “Over the years UMNO has resorted to every conceivable trick to remain in power: stirring communal tensions among Malaysia’s ethnic groups, locking up critics, rigging the electoral system in its favour, bribing voters with populist handouts and threatening chaos if it lost. In the run-up to the election on May 9th it did all of that,” writes the Economist. And still, it lost.
“For a country where politics has always been run along communal lines, the shocking upset holds out the prospect of a more meritocratic form of government. For the region, where rulers with authoritarian instincts have been steadily curbing political freedoms, it is a heartening victory for democracy. And for Mr Najib, who was accused by America’s Department of Justice of personally pocketing $681m looted from a Malaysian government agency, it is a welcome comeuppance.”
Razak’s 92-year-old replacement is Mahathir Mohamed, “a former five-term UMNO prime minister who pioneered many of the underhand tactics to which Mr Najib resorted in his failed bid to remain in power. Dr Mahathir was also a champion of Malaysia’s odious system of racial preferences, which he expanded to keep Malay voters loyal to UMNO. What is more, Pakatan Harapan, as the victorious coalition is known, resorted to populism to counter UMNO’s election-rigging, promising to roll back an unpopular but necessary goods-and-services tax and to reinstate subsidies on petrol that Mr Najib had scaled back.”
“Nonetheless, it is hard to imagine that UMNO’s loss will not change Malaysia for the better. For one thing, it is in the new lot’s interest to make the electoral system fairer and to promote a freer press. Better yet, the results suggest that centrism has more electoral appeal than both UMNO’s Malay chauvinism and the Islamic zealotry of PAS, an opposition party that declined to join Pakatan Harapan. Many of the new MPs, having experienced various forms of official bias when UMNO was in power, will have a natural desire to make the bureaucracy more impartial. Doing away with preferences for Malays was always going to be a tall order, given the clout of Malay voters. But at the very least Pakatan Harapan is likely to reform some of the handouts, to make them less of a gravy train for UMNO cronies. Its pledge to investigate Mr Najib’s alleged corruption should also help clean up politics.”
Israel and Iran are facing off
“The tense shadow war between Iran and Israel burst into the open early Thursday as Israeli warplanes struck dozens of Iranian military targets inside Syria. It was a furious response to what Israel called an Iranian rocket attack launched from Syrian territory just hours earlier.”
“The cross-border exchanges — the most serious assaults from each side in their face-off over Iran’s presence in Syria — took place a little more than a day after the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement,” write Isabel Kershner and David M. Halbfinger in the New York Times.
“Iran struck shortly after President Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement, raising speculation that it no longer felt constrained by the possibility that the Americans might scrap the deal if Iran attacked Israel.”
“Israel has conducted scores of strikes on Iran and its allies inside Syria, rarely acknowledging them publicly. But before Thursday, Iran had not retaliated, seemingly handcuffed while it awaited Mr. Trump’s decision on the nuclear accord.”