To be sure, Chinese consumers and Chinese laborers would see higher prices and job-loss as well, hurting the two biggest economies and the world. Moreover, such a trade war could realize the old nightmare of a real alliance between China and Russia. Both are great powers in their own right and are the only other countries besides the United States with nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach anywhere in the world. U.S. foreign policy is foolishly pushing Moscow and Beijing ? which are natural adversaries ? closer together. Washington’s attempt to take them both on at once is doomed to fail and comes with a high risk and cost. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got it right during the Cold War by playing them off of each other but Washington is forgetting that lesson. Finally, there is the danger of a trade war that becomes a real war. In such a scenario, U.S. warships and planes would be sent deep into Chinese-held or dominated areas that are bristling with long-range defensive weaponry. Such a war would be disastrous and the 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission Report warns that America would face heavy losses. It would be better to instead cooperate with America’s allies to improve their own long-range defenses. But, in the meantime, a trade war could cause a real one in one of two ways. First, increasing tensions around tariffs and tough words cause each side’s militaries and civilian leadership to get increasingly jumpy. Units could be put on higher alert and leaders could be afraid of a surprise move by the other side.

America is right to finally push back against China’s long-standing trade and economic abuses. However, what happens if the trade war launched by President Trump fails to convince Chinese President Xi Jinping to change Beijing’s policies? What if Mr. Trump decides to escalate with higher tariffs? There are three dangers America faces: Recession here at home, pushing China and Russia together, and an increased risk of war. Beijing has long practiced intellectual property theft and forced technology transfers from businesses that want to do business in China. The list of Beijing’s actions against free trade is long, and these two practices stand out as among the worst. Mr. Trump campaigned on getting tough on China and put tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese exports to America. Beijing retaliated with tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. exports to China. At the 2018 G20 summit, both Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi agreed to a 90-day ceasefire. Currently, officials are attempting to resolve differences before the truce ends. Meanwhile, Washington is set to cover all Chinese goods with tariffs. America’s interests will not be served well if the trade war resumes at new heights sufficient to cause an American and Chinese recession. Americans would suffer as normally cheap goods from China become increasingly expensive. Imagine if working-class families could no longer find everyday items that fit their budgets. Clothing, computers, phones, nearly everything at Walmart and similar big box stores would cost more. Also, imagine if these families faced layoffs as the factories, energy firms and farms that export U.S. goods to China close due to Beijing’s tariffs.

Brutal governments that scourge their own inevitably face movements that hold out the promise of liberation and peace. The passage of 40 years, time enough to span three generations, tests the ability of the suffering people of Iran to endure the inhumanity of their radical Islamic regime. It was on Jan. 16, 1979, that the shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was driven into exile after a year of protests against his monarchy. A fortnight later Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the mastermind of the revolt, arrived from exile in France and exploited the fighting in the streets to become the “supreme leader” of the revolution. His subsequent anti-Western theocracy has spent the succeeding decades establishing a vile fundamentalism and attempting to export it beyond Iran’s borders. Words with a ring of truth lodge in the human conscience and ignite a passion for freedom not easily extinguished. There is ample evidence that Iranians yearn to live in a kinder, more compassionate society, one that doesn’t massacre demonstrators in the street, beat women not “properly” covered in public, behead dissenters or hang drug offenders from construction cranes. United Nations resolutions, like the one issued Dec. 17 citing Iran’s “ongoing severe limitations and restrictions on the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, restrictions on the establishment of places of worship, attacks against places of worship and burial and other human rights violations,” add to a dismal human rights record. Iran’s mullahcracy may feel besieged by the community of nations for opposing its harsh brand of polity, and if so, that’s a good thing. Iranians who deplore the prospect of their grandchildren inheriting their leaders’ destructive prejudices should say 40 years of hatred is long enough, and work for the liberation of their country.

But the biggest loser of all may have been China. Beijing, irritated by the nuclear-armed regime on its eastern border while it simultaneously works to manage threats on its restive western edge, clearly wanted this summit to succeed. Consider the extraordinary measures it took to foster Mr. Kim’s train journey to Vietnam. For 60 hours, Mr. Kim rode the Chinese rails. This was a significant undertaking, wreaking havoc on China’s extensive railroad network, which millions of people use every day. The security investment on the part of the Chinese must have been tremendous. The investment in internet “security” certainly was. Chinese censors worked overtime deleting any references to Mr. Kim’s magical mystery tour lest anyone figure out where he was at any given time. This shows, if nothing else, that Beijing really, really wanted Mr. Kim to make a deal. It’s also telling that, immediately after the collapse of the talks, members of Mr. Kim’s entourage immediately flew to Beijing. It was as if they had been summoned. But perhaps even more upsetting to Beijing than the collapse of the talks themselves will be what Mr. Trump’s behavior says about his negotiating style. Washington and Beijing are in the midst of heated trade negotiations, after all. And on a recent visit to Beijing, people I met were positively rubbing their hands in anticipation of what they expected to be a forthcoming Trump cave-in on various sticky trade issues, notably forced technology transfers and intellectual property theft. But now, Mr. Trump has shown he’s willing to walk away from a deal that he perceives as bad. This will cause no small amount of heartburn in Beijing. The “potentials” for China suddenly just got a lot worse.

“Potential” is probably the wrong word to use. When President Trump tries to coax North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to trade nuclear arms for investment, he rhapsodizes often about the great “potential” that he sees in North Korea. Ever a real estate guy, the president seems particularly fond of North Korea’s shoreline. But to say someone has great “potential” is to imply they’re not living up to it. That almost certainly is perceived as an insult by the North Korean regime, whose propaganda bangs on incessantly about the inherent superiority of its system. Is the “potential” insult the reason that talks between the president and Mr. Kim collapsed in Hanoi? Certainly not exclusively. But whatever the reasons behind the abrupt end to the Kim-Trump “beautiful friendship,” there will be widespread collateral damage. The most obvious loser is South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Mr. Moon, a thoroughgoing leftist presiding over a stagnating economy that is hammering his poll ratings, has staked his presidency on increased integration between the two Koreas. Indeed, it was his administration that midwifed the first summit between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim. But now Mr. Moon’s plans for further economic cooperation with the Kim regime will be stymied by the international sanctions that look set to stay in place for the foreseeable future. The collapse of the talks also will call into question whether a scheduled visit to Seoul by Kim Jong-un will go forward. That visit was to be a crowning achievement in Mr. Moon’s engagement strategy. The government of Vietnam, the summit’s enthusiastic host, also will be disappointed. So too will Moscow, which would like an end to sanctions on North Korea.

China, newly wealthy and ambitious to be recognized as a world power, is big enough and determined enough to have the weight to throw around in places like the Taiwan Strait and in the sea lanes of southern Asia, where it is building small islands from sand and coral and calling them sovereign Chinese territory. Push has not yet come to shove, but a crisis is bubbling. The USS Stockdale, a guided-missile destroyer, together with a fleet oiler, moved through the Taiwan Strait recently in accordance with what a U.S. spokesman called “a routine Taiwan Strait transit in accordance with international law.” However, the possibility of misunderstood dings and accidents continue at a high level due to the claims and counterclaims of the United States and China about passage in the strait and in other places. The United States claims, and has for a long time, that the Taiwan Strait, the channel between the Mainland and Taiwan, is an international waterway and therefore subject to transit by its ships at any time without permission from either China or Taiwan. China, with its claim ? and a claim is all it is ? on Taiwan sovereignty as part of China, routinely complains that these U.S. passages through the region infringes China’s sovereignty. Along with the 110-mile-wide Taiwan Strait, China claims several reefs converted to artificial islands in the South China Sea as part of its sovereign territory. The United States does not support the claims. Earlier in October two ships from a third nation went through the Taiwan Strait without incident. But shortly afterward Chinese officials hinted they would defend their territory against expected future U.S. transits of the Strait. The dispute about use of the waterways is part of a continuing U.S.-China standoff on a number of issues.

Has ISIS truly been defeated? More and more signs suggest that the answer is “no.” True, the group has unquestionably suffered a catastrophic loss of territory since the height of its power in mid-2014, when its self-declared “caliphate” occupied a territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom and held sway over some 8 million souls. But pockets of ISIS territorial control remain ? including in Syria’s Deir al-Zour province, where ISIS forces have managed to maintain their grip on the town of Hajin and its environs despite months of ongoing fighting with Syrian opposition forces and extensive airstrikes on the part of the U.S.-led “Global Coalition.” The group’s strategic capabilities also remain largely intact. Despite its recent setbacks, the organization now appears to be “reconstituting a capable insurgent force in Iraq and Syria,” and still retains a foreign fighter contingent estimated at nearly 30,000 militants, a recent analysis from the Institute for the Study of War, a top national security think tank, has noted. If this trajectory isn’t reversed, the report’s authors warn, “ISIS could regain sufficient strength to mount a renewed insurgency that once again threatens to overmatch local security forces in both Iraq and Syria.” Such a resurgence isn’t just a local problem, because the group has given every indication that it still seeks to carry out large-scale terrorist attacks against the West. ISIS, moreover, is busy migrating to new strategic arenas, such as Southeast Asia. All of which suggests that triumphalism over the end of ISIS, although tempting, is extremely premature.

Donald Trump was never going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, anyway. He demonstrated “the art of the deal” with his management of the “summit” with Kim Jong-un, which North Korea had skillfully begun to portray as a triumph of its own statecraft. The president pulled the rug out from under Mr. Kim with a triumph of his own. We can all be thankful. All negotiations are “games,” of course, but Mr. Kim had cleverly manipulated the American ally in Seoul, which desperately and understandably is eager to avoid a military solution on its own soil. Mr. Trump would have been in the unenviable position of going to a summit with his ally weakening the bargaining position. This increased the likelihood of enabling the North Koreans to force a bad deal. Pyongyang, observes longtime North Korea watcher Nicholas Eberstadt, is practicing its standard “shakedown techniques.” Writing in The Wall Street Journal, he observes that these techniques have been “honed to perfection by three generations of regime negotiators.” The skeptical view in Washington, from the time that Mr. Kim first proposed a summit, was that whatever he might say, he would never agree to denuclearizing his military, and he would pursue his aims with vague and fluffy statements to get economic relief and reprieve from military pressure. It worked with previous presidents, so why not with this one? Mr. Trump might have made a deal with the North Koreans like the deal Barack Obama made with the mullahs in Tehran, giving up everything for something he could call a success to burnish a reputation for making peace. Nobody wants that again.

If you think feminists everywhere are celebrating the prosecution of the world’s largest online sex market, Backpage.com, as a major blow against the exploitation of women, you would be wrong. The Women’s March is perhaps the most vocal and visible group to self-appropriate the label “feminist,” but others as well have come down decisively on the side of prostitution as sexually empowering because “the real mark of feminism is trusting women to do what they want with their bodies.” According to the Women’s March Twitter feed, “The shutting down of #Backpage is an absolute crisis ” and the crackdown is “motivated by the patriarchal notion that women should not be free to do what we want with our bodies.” Most women (and of course, all children) who sell their bodies have arrived there through poverty, coercion, and a host of societal dysfunctions and failures. Even when not coerced, prostitution is a last resort for desperate women. No matter how vigorously ideologues celebrate the “choice,” renting out one’s body to a stranger comes with many obvious negatives. The truth is that women who work as prostitutes are abused continually by johns and pimps, and are often enslaved. They frequently come from abusive homes and have spent a lifetime marginalized and oppressed. Too often they have no way to escape their situation, no support and no hope. This includes women plying their trade legally in places like Nevada and Holland. Legal or illegal, financial benefits are reaped by the violent and powerful men in their lives ? the brothel owners and pimps, and in the case of the online sex trade, platform CEOs like Carl Ferrer of Backpage.

There are many less well-known global bodies benefiting from American support and/or taxpayer contributions while pushing ever more corrupt or statist agendas. One such organization is the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It was created in 1991, with the United States as the biggest financial sponsor, to assist former Soviet-bloc nations transitioning from communism, with a mission of “furthering progress towards market-oriented economies and the promotion of private and entrepreneurial initiative.” This is a noble ambition, but as economist Daniel Mitchell found in a recent study published by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the EBRD has not only failed to achieve its originating objectives, but no longer exclusively pursues them. Unlike other multilateral development banks, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development primarily finances private sector operations. Since the private sector is the engine of prosperity, that sounds positive. But in practice, it means the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is in the business of picking winners and losers. Frequent charges of corruption and cronyism that have plagued its projects, therefore, come as little surprise. The EBRD’s own research even concluded that its work enables local corruption. Instead of concentrating on its pro-market mission, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has done what so many international organizations have in recent decades and expanded its focus by taking up various fashionable left-wing causes, many of which are at odds with its primary objective. These include calling for taxes on wealth as a means for fiscal redistribution, promoting bigger governments and encouraging relatively poor economies to use more expensive “green” forms of energy.