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Nikki Haley is at war with Donald Trump. She may be his ambassador to the United Nations, but she wants to set a foreign policy all her own, closer to the global interventionism of George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton than to the muscular but restrained foreign policy that Trump campaigned on in 2016. Her differences with the president were on stark display this week, as she first announced sanctions against Russia that Trump had not approved, then shot back at the new director of the national economic council, Larry Kudlow, when he offered a diplomatic interpretation of her mistake. Kudlow ascribed her off-message remarks to “some momentary confusion,” to which Haley responded, “With all due respect, I don’t get confused.

Uh-oh. President Trump is wading into diplomatic waters in North Korea that he may have trouble navigating. Yesterday, he proudly revealed that talks with North Korea have been taking place at the “highest levels.” He also gave his blessing to the prospect of a peace treaty between the two Koreas, which currently only enjoy an armistice. But Trump also indicated that he wants to try and keep his options open: “It'll be taking place probably in early June, or a little before that, assuming things go well. It's possible things won't go well, and we won't have the meetings and we'll just continue to go along this very strong path that we've taken. But we'll see.

Angus King said today that he hasn’t made up his mind about President Donald Trump’s new pick for secretary of state, current CIA director Mike Pompeo. “I am legitimately undecided,” the Maine senator, who sits as an independent but caucuses with the Democrats, told CNN this morning. Kentucky Republican senator Rand Paul has declared he won’t vote for Pompeo. And since Republicans have a slim 51-49 majority -- with Senator John McCain being treated back in Arizona for brain cancer -- the administration has been looking for Democratic votes to secure Pompeo’s confirmation. King seemed like a natural choice, as he voted to confirm Pompeo as CIA director at the beginning of the Trump administration. “That is a very different job.

It’s shrinking. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll indicates that the Democrats’ edge over the Republicans in the forthcoming midterm election has dwindled among registered voters, from a 12-percent lead to 4-points. Donald Trump’s own approval ratings have edged up slightly to 40 percent, but his disapproval rating remains at a daunting 56 percent. So is it time to start waving goodbye to the Democratic wave predicted for the fall? Actually, the poll may have a salutary effect upon Democrats, reminding them that Trump and the GOP remain a potent foe.  Republicans hold a staggering 60 to 31 percent lead over Democrats among white voters who have not attended college. At the same time, far more Republican than Democratic seats are competitive races.

Donald Trump finally had something positive to say on Twitter. After nearly a week of dithering, the president made a decision and announced it, to a fair amount of surprise, on national television on Friday night: The United States, in concert with the United Kingdom and France, would launch targeted strikes on Syrian chemical weapons facilities, in response to a heartbreaking attack a week earlier in a Damascus suburb that killed dozens of civilians, including children. “A perfectly executed strike last night. Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!” Trump tweeted on Saturday morning. Those last two words gave many pause.

President Donald Trump must have a lot on his mind as an eventful week—even by the new standard he’s created in Washington—comes to an end. He has now met the deadline he set himself on Monday, when he promised to make “major decisions” within 24 to 48 hours on Syria, after “Animal Assad,” as he calls that country’s dictator, unleashed a chemical weapon attack on civilians including children. A trade war between the United States and China is still brewing, with American farmers worried their livelihoods are at risk after China vowed to stamp tariffs on their products in retaliation for Trump’s tariffs on aluminium and steel—and Trump reconsidering his rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership to help them.

So Britain is responsible for staging the Syrian gas attack? According to Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov: “We have evidence that proves Britain was directly involved in organizing this provocation.” Evidence, shmevidence. Next thing you know Moscow will be offering to assist Yulia Skripal. Oh, wait. It already did.Vladimir Putin cannot conceal that his regime is complicit in some very odious deeds—and that it’s feeling increasingly confident about taunting the West. The Russian claim is deliberately preposterous.

Almost from the moment Donald Trump was inaugurated the 45th president of the United States, his supporters have complained about the existence of a “deep state” within the bureaucracy that’s out to get him. There might be something to this, but not in the way its theorisers imagine. Civil servants have a lot more to do with the making and implementation of foreign policy, for example, than most outsiders appreciate. But a personal, targeted, organised campaign aimed at destroying the president? Those who believe such a conspiracy exists pointed, as further evidence, to the bombshell news this week that the FBI raided the offices and temporary home of Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. But if this is the deep state at work, it goes very deep indeed.

Mark Zuckerberg came to Washington this week. Just an ordinary, common-sense guy, with matching hoodies in his roll-on, and a company that was worth well over half a trillion dollars before it emerged that it had shared its subscribers’ personal information, instead of sticking to its real business of selling that information to advertisers. The future president wore a suit for his perp walk before the media and his Congressional cross-examination by some random old people. He could not help but look contemptuous—like the uncool grandchild of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Busted for drugs in 1967, Jagger and Richards knew that time was on their side.

Good gracious! David Brooks, a charter member of the Never Trump movement, suddenly raises the white flag in his column today. Brooks is despondent. His efforts to expose Trump’s perfidy have failed. Instead, a very bad man, we are told, reigns supreme.The catalogue of woe is extensive. According to Brooks: “We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along. We have not hindered him. Trump has more power than he did a year ago, not less.  …We have not dislodged him. For all the hype, the Mueller investigation looks less and less likely to fundamentally alter the course of the administration.” Really?

The Syrian civil war is in its endgame, and the ‘political solution’ that the leaders of the Western democracy talk about is in sight. That is one meaning of the appalling images from the chemical weapons attack on Eastern Ghouta. In 2011, Western intelligence agencies unanimously declared that Bashar al-Assad was finished, and that it was only a matter of time before he fell. Today, Assad, with massive Russian and Iranian support, has regained control over most of Syria.After the chemical attack on Eastern Ghouta, Arab news sites claimed that the Jaish-el-Islam militia had announced that it was willing to negotiate a ceasefire. This is another meaning to be found in the images of children gasping for air in a bombed-out hospital.

A new era of chemical warfare is upon us—an era of chemical warfare as psychological warfare. The poisoning of Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, England, has dominated the headlines. But another development, from around the same time as the Salisbury attack first became known, is revealing for the attention it hasn’t received. Have you heard about the chemical weapons in Syria that don’t belong to Bashar Assad? On March 22, the State Department officially declared one Joe Asperman a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” and subject to sanctions. “French national Joe Asperman is a senior chemical weapons expert for Isis,” the State Department announced.

Edward Luce warns today in the Financial Times that Donald Trump’s fusillades at Amazon and its proprietor Jeff Bezos are more than simply addled bluster. They represent, we are told, a coherent strategy to undermine independent media. “Trump,” Luce writes, “has already tilted the playing field towards his media allies.” Pshaw! Trump isn’t hurting Bezos. He’s helping him. Trump, of all people, should know the value of free publicity. No one has done more to rehabilitate the media than Trump.  As Jack Shafer astutely observes in Politico, “Every denunciation of the Post, the New York Times, NBC News, CBS News, CNN and other outlets serves to boost those outlets’ audiences and their corresponding revenues.

She was the angry one from Sex in the City, and now Cynthia Nixon is venting her spleen on behalf of the voters of New York. Last month, Nixon launched her pitch to challenge incumbent Andrew Cuomo as the Democratic candidate for the governorship of New York, invoking the wrath of many New Yorkers over the state’s crumbling transport links and cash-starved schools. And why not? In an era when a real estate mogul turned reality TV star occupies the White House and a chat show queen is the great black hope to replace him, why shouldn’t Nixon segue from sipping martinis with Carrie and the gang to juggling New York’s $168 billion budget?

It’s all relative with Saudi Arabia. Everyone who matters is related to everyone else. Even relative to the degraded standards of Afro-kleptocracy and Arab dictatorship, the Saudi state is nothing more than the al-Saud family business, plus its clerical and military appendages. And relatively speaking, the Saudis are hypocrites even by the low standards of Arab governance. They have always divided the world into those with whom they are prepared admit economic relations, and those with whom they claim not to have relations of any kind, but secretly do. The former include Saudi Arabia’s slave class of imported servants and construction workers, oil-hungry governments.