Editorials of The Times

North Korea’s apparent agreement to talk to the United States about abandoning its nuclear weapons is a relief after the world faced months of tension over Pyongyang’s testing of those devices and Washington’s bellicose response.

For once, President Donald Trump’s tweeted reaction made sense. “Possible progress being made in talks with North Korea,” Trump wrote. “For the first time in many years, a serious effort is being made by all parties concerned. The World is watching and waiting! May be false hope, but the U.S. is ready to go hard in either direction!”

As he indicated, optimism needs to be tempered with caution, since the hard work needed for a peaceful solution would have to overcome years of distrust and the bitterness of failed negotiations. But there finally seems to be an opening for talks, so the Trump administration needs to seize it.

The news that North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, had agreed to discuss ending his nuclear program in exchange for security guarantees and that he would suspend tests of weapons and missiles during negotiations came from senior South Korean diplomats after discussions in Pyongyang with Kim. They were the first representatives of the South to meet with Kim since he came to power six years ago. While the North has not yet made its own statement on the talks, the fact that the South Korean delegation met directly with Kim was significant.

It seems that the Olympics charm offensive of South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, got a commitment from North Korea that the Trump administration had sought.

North Korea’s position seems to be the same as it has been — that it would have no need for nuclear weapons if it faced no threat from the United States, including the U.S. military presence in the South. North Korea “made it clear that it would have no reason to keep nuclear weapons if the military threat to the North was eliminated and its security guaranteed,” the South Koreans said in a statement.

Such formulations have often been the subject of past discussions with the United States. President Bill Clinton gave such security guarantees as part of a 1994 nuclear deal under which North Korea froze its plutonium program in return for food and other assistance. But the North cheated by establishing a separate uranium enrichment program, and under the George W. Bush administration the deal fell apart.

The Trump administration has been loath to enter into negotiations that would have a similar fate and moved to tighten the already strict sanctions. Washington says it will settle for nothing less than a “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization” of the nuclear program.

But the administration’s message has often been shifting and confusing, while getting North Korea to abandon its nuclear program has become much harder. The North has at least 20 nuclear weapons and an array of missiles in its arsenal, including one that could reach the United States.

One question is what the North Koreans might demand in return for halting the testing and entering into talks. Kim apparently has not objected to next month’s U.S.-South Korea military exercises or insisted on immediately easing sanctions. Experts say this is because he wants a North-South summit set for next month to go smoothly. But those and other issues will be on the table in the future.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence of the United States having any mechanism to implement a strategy for talks. There is no U.S. ambassador in Seoul, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has so eviscerated the State Department that he may not be capable of effectively moving forward. Joseph Yun, the chief U.S. envoy to North Korea and the one senior person who actually knows the portfolio and has met with North Koreans, retired last week, a decision that can only be interpreted as a further sign of the administration’s inept handing of the issue.

Many things helped bring about this opening , including both South Korea’s determination to avoid war and Trump’s willingness to consider it, as well as the crushing sanctions. It is an opportunity that cannot be squandered.

That will require creative and sustained diplomacy, toughness, patience and a president who can be disciplined enough to keep his thoughts about the situation off Twitter. It should be obvious that a hope for peace, no matter how tenuous, is more welcome than the threat of war.

Some actions by political leaders are capricious. Some can be shortsighted. And some are sheer lunkheaded-ness. President Donald Trump hit the trifecta last week when he encouraged the House speaker, Paul Ryan, to scrap startup money for an additional rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey, a project essential to the economic health not only of those two states but of the entire country.

Worse yet, the president’s action bore no relation to objective analysis of the region’s infrastructure needs. Accounts in The Times and The Washington Post said he did it to spite the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, whose sin is failure to fall in lockstep with Trump on a variety of issues.

This is foolishness. Republicans and Democrats alike broadly agree on the essentiality of the so-called Gateway tunnel, described by many officials as the most urgently needed infrastructure project anywhere in the United States. It will not come cheap, with $11 billion required for the first phase and an estimated $19 billion more needed to finish the job. “People get frightened by the cost,” said John Banks, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. “But the alternative is worse.”

Existing tunnels under the Hudson River are more than a century old and stressed by damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Losing one of those tubes would greatly reduce train capacity, to devastating effect. With the metro region said to account for about 10 percent of the national economy, it doesn’t take a seer to appreciate that such a blow would be, to borrow from Trump when he’s in high dudgeon, a disaster.

It was bad enough that in 2010 then-Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey killed a predecessor to the Gateway, a project known as ARC, or Access to the Region’s Core. That decision hit the same trifecta. The Obama administration, graced with the good sense to make a top priority of a new tunnel across the Hudson, agreed informally to have Washington split the initial costs with New Jersey and New York. When officials from both states met with Trump in September, they were led to believe he was fully on board with a similar funding plan.

That commitment grew shaky in December, when an administration official expressed grave doubts. Now Trump seems intent on plunging a dagger through the project’s heart by pressing Ryan to eliminate $900 million for Gateway in a House spending bill expected to be voted on this month.

It is but one instance among many of the president showing zero concern for the region and the city that created his wealth and his reputation. More than most states, New York and New Jersey are adversely affected by his 2017 tax legislation, by his anti-immigrant rhetoric and by his lack of interest in lifting a finger to help rescue his hometown’s ailing mass transit system.

Assuming Trump doesn’t change his mind — he can be as constant as a reed in a stiff wind — the best hope may be that Ryan shows backbone, for a change, and supports money for Gateway as benefiting the nation. It may be worth noting that Trump urged the speaker to eliminate the funding when they were together at the Capitol for a memorial ceremony for the Rev. Billy Graham. It would have been a fitting time for both men to recall words from Luke 6:48, about the importance of building well and laying a foundation on rock so that “when a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it.”

In the catalog of horrors afflicting the world’s most hellish places, South Sudan can check about every bloodied box. More than four years of civil warfare have left tens of thousands dead, 2 million displaced, half the population at threat of starvation without aid and a trail of atrocities — genocide, child warriors, rape, castration, burned villages. And now, warns the United Nations, famine stalks the tortured land.

A recent report by the United Nations and the South Sudan government said 150,000 people could slip into famine this year. A formal famine declaration means people have already started to starve to death. But even with food aid, humanitarian workers warn that much of South Sudan could face severe hunger by May. And the U.N. response plan has received less than 4 percent of its 2018 funding.

A year ago, South Sudan declared famine in two regions, but international responses checked it. Even if that were repeated this year, famine will be a threat in the future unless the land’s predatory soldiers are driven out. This is caused by the struggle for power and loot, not by nature.

With so many conflicts around the globe, it is not surprising that those like South Sudan’s attract attention only when they rise to horrific levels. But South Sudan has the dubious distinction in being the world’s youngest state and the one most likely to fail. The latter status is bestowed by the Fund for Peace, a nongovernmental organization that compiles an annual Fragile States Index listing countries most vulnerable to collapse.

Even more salient is that the United States bears a special responsibility. During the long civil war between northern and southern Sudan, which Christian groups in the United States came to perceive as a struggle of Christians in the south against Muslim oppression from the north, Washington brokered an agreement that led to independence for South Sudan in 2011 — along with billions in U.S. aid.

It all unraveled into ethnic warfare less than two years later, when President Salva Kiir, a member of the majority Dinka group, turned on his former vice president, Riek Machar, a Nuer. Other tribes joined in, setting off a senseless war that has defied numerous agreements and cease-fires. Its illusions shattered, the United States recently called for a U.N. Security Council arms embargo, while the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, declared that Washington had “given up” on Kiir.

An arms embargo is a must, and the United States must continue to press for one in the Security Council. Washington should also continue to lead the way in providing emergency assistance. Beyond that, it would be good if European donors and the African Union joined Haley in letting Kiir, and Machar, know that they are far too big a part of the problem to ever become part of the solution.

In an administration filled with people with dubious ideas, limited experience and loads of ethical baggage, Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive who became the top economics official in the Trump White House, was supposed to be among the sensible adults in the room. Now, he is leaving after failing repeatedly to be the stabilizing influence that the Trump administration sorely needed.

Many critics of President Donald Trump are already cheering Cohn’s departure. Indeed, he has done an awful job. His chief accomplishment was helping pass a tax cut that will benefit wealthy people like himself while adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt for future generations to pay off. Cohn’s other pet project — to develop a plan to rebuild U.S. infrastructure — produced a shambolic proposal that is going nowhere in Congress. Last summer, Cohn, displayed moral poverty by refusing to quit the administration while simultaneously alerting friends and the media that he was very upset when Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” after neo-Nazis and white supremacists clashed with protesters, leaving a young woman dead, in Charlottesville, Virginia.

And then there is the proximate cause for his actual departure: his failure to keep Trump from imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which will hurt U.S. allies and domestic industries that use those metals.

Yet, for all his flaws, Cohn most likely represents the high-water mark for economic thinking in this administration. The Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, another former Goldman banker, sent currency markets reeling recently when he talked flippantly about weakening the dollar. Kevin Hassett, who is the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has peddled nonsense about how the corporate tax cut will increase wages for working families when in fact most credible experts rightly predicted that it would principally benefit investors. In another corner, Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, and Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser, are goading the president to start a destructive trade war with the rest of the world.

With the cranks and nationalists ascendant in Trump World, whoever replaces Cohn is unlikely to be any better than he is and possibly will be quite a bit worse. No sound economist would risk his or her reputation by working in this administration. Since before even taking office, Trump has reeled from one scandal to the next. Recent weeks have brought a parade of senior officials departing, most under a cloud of suspicion. The first-year turnover among senior staff members in the Trump administration is significantly higher than for the past five presidents and is double the rate for the first year of the Reagan administration, the previous record-holder, according to the Brookings Institution.

Of course, Trump is adamant that there is no chaos in his administration. He just has “some people that I want to change” in the interest of “seeking perfection” — that will surely stop the hemorrhaging.

Yet the disarray in the administration has, thankfully, not infected many of the core functions of the government carried out by dedicated and professional civil servants. The Social Security Administration is still sending out checks, service members are still defending the country, Medicare claims are being paid, and courthouse doors are open to those seeking justice. There’s no better testament to the strength of U.S. institutions that are under assault every day by this administration.