South Korea knows that the U.S. position on North Korea’s retaining nuclear weapons ― complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula ― has not changed. Now is the time for Mr. Trump to personally reach out to Kim Jong-un and arrange for senior officials from both countries to meet to arrange for a third summit. No one wants a repeat of the failed Hanoi summit, so preliminary arrangements must be thorough. North Korea can and should halt all nuclear tests, fissile material production, ballistic missile launches, cyber and other illicit activities directed at the U.S. and end its military support to Russia for its war of aggression with Ukraine. Moves by the U.S. should include easing and lifting sanctions imposed during and after 2016, economic development assistance, security assurances, a path to ending the Korean War with a peace treaty, and the eventual establishment of liaison offices in our respective capitals. The issue of denuclearization would initially encompass a statement from both sides as to their ultimate goals. For North Korea, that would be acceptance as a nuclear power; for the U.S., it would be complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. This will be a subject further discussed once we move to the lifting/removal of sanctions and North Korea halts nuclear tests and fissile material production and suspends missile launches. It will likely be a protracted process, requiring considerable time for negotiations. Mr. Trump has the personal relationship with Mr. Kim to resume talks with a North Korea that is building more nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them while embracing a revanchist Russian Federation.

The weapons were a deterrent to prevent war, and North Korea would be a good friend of the U.S., no longer tethered to China. North Korea cited Pakistan as a model to emulate (i.e., You did it with Pakistan; you can do it with us). A few days ago, Kim Yo-jong, the powerful sister of Mr. Kim, said Kim Jong-un’s relationship with Mr. Trump wasn’t bad, implying that dialogue with the U.S. was possible. Ms. Kim conditioned such dialogue on the U.S. “accepting North Korea as a nuclear power.” Ms. Kim spoke of the changed reality since the Trump-Kim summits in Singapore (2018) and Hanoi (2019) and the symbolic Demilitarized Zone meeting in 2019. That changed reality is North Korea’s mutual defense treaty with Russia and its military assistance to Russia for its war in Ukraine. It’s also the nuclear and missile support Russia is providing to North Korea. This new relationship with Russia has emboldened Mr. Kim and could incite the North Korean leader to be overly aggressive and optimistic in his relationship with South Korea. While saying dialogue with the U.S. was possible, Ms. Kim was clear in stating that South Korea was the enemy and North Korea was not interested in a dialogue with South Korea. Despite Ms. Kim’s harsh words for South Korea and the new government of President Lee Jae-myung, the North recently stopped its harassing broadcasts to the South. This was apparently in response to the new Lee government’s halting all its broadcasts to North Korea, including the National Intelligence Service’s daily broadcast of news, dramas and K-pop music.

It’s time to resume talks with North Korea. During the past five years, when we didn’t talk to North Korea, the country built more nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to deliver these nuclear bombs as far as the U.S. During this time, North Korea also established a close allied relationship with Russia, with a mutual defense treaty that resulted in its sending more than 12,000 combat troops to Russia’s Kursk region to join Russian forces in its war of aggression in Ukraine. In short, North Korea is now Russia’s principal ally and supplier of weaponry for Russia’s war with Ukraine. Logically, this should not have happened. North Korea’s pivot to Russia in 2024 was a smart tactical move. It put North Korea on center stage with the introduction of its troops and weaponry to aid Russia in its war with Ukraine. It also sent a message to the U.S. and China that North Korea is an independent actor, not solely dependent on China and not fixated on a normal relationship with the U.S. North Korea’s message was and is: We can go it alone, and we now have Russia, a nuclear superpower that accepts our status as a nuclear weapons state and provides us with the nuclear, missile and satellite technical support necessary to exponentially increase our nuclear and missile capabilities. Certainly, since 1994, North Korea has focused on having a normal relationship with the U.S. For 13 years, ending in October 2016, I was repeatedly told that North Korea aspired to normal relations with the U.S., asking to be accepted as a nuclear weapons state and promising never to use those weapons offensively.

They exhibit fabricated photos and false narratives, airbrushing out the true partnership between the U.S. and Chiang’s Nationalists. The party viewed U.S. personnel as threats and even targeted them for assassination. The entire upcoming parade is a political theater, a state-forged spectacle masquerading as remembrance. A regime responsible for more Chinese deaths than any foreign power has no moral standing to speak of peace or sacrifice. There will be no banners for the dead of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution or the Tiananmen Square Massacre. No tribute will be paid to the countless intellectuals, farmers or workers crushed by Maoist campaigns or imprisoned for dissent. This parade will honor ghosts, but only the ones the party deems politically useful. If China wishes to truly honor those who resisted Japan, it should salute the Nationalist soldiers who fought and died, the American airmen of the Flying Tigers, the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces and OSS and the millions of unarmed civilians who endured occupation. A truthful commemoration would also acknowledge the victims of communist tyranny, the real cost of the CCP’s rise to power. To attend this spectacle is to legitimize a fraud. No foreign leader, especially from a democratic nation, should grace this falsified history with their presence. To do so is to betray the memory of those who fought fascism and to reward a regime built on the bones of its own people. What will unfold on Sept. 3 is not remembrance but propaganda ? an insult draped in flags and uniforms, parading not history but deception. Like all lies, it demands to be exposed.

As such, the Soviets and their CCP clients were effectively bound to a policy of nonconfrontation against the Japanese in China during most of the war. Any military action by the CCP would have jeopardized the USSR’s neutrality pact with Tokyo, and thus Mao Zedong and the CCP carefully avoided real conflict with the Japanese. As a result, the Japanese military and the CCP forces virtually coexisted in the same large swaths of Japanese-occupied North China, where there was little to no communist resistance. Mao focused not on liberation or resistance but on quietly building his army from a few thousand to more than 1 million troops by war’s end, all without serious engagement but with the goal of defeating the legitimate, U.S.-supported Chinese Nationalist government in the postwar era. Even when American efforts, sought to arm and train guerrilla resistance in communist-held zones, the CCP obstructed operations. The CCP showed hostility toward genuine anti-Japanese resistance that threatened its ambitions. The party’s rare foray into combat, i.e., the much-touted “Hundred Regiments Offensive” of 1940, was neither decisive nor heroic. To fake its anti-Japanese feat, the CCP claimed massive Japanese casualties because of this campaign, as many as 46,000, but Japan’s casualty records suggest the real number was less than 500. Mao later even denounced the operation as a strategic blunder, and its commander, Peng Dehuai, was purged. Today’s CCP regime continues to weaponize historical memory. Museums in China have been redesigned to promote the illusion of a CCP-American wartime alliance.

On Sept. 3, the Chinese Communist Party will orchestrate a grand military parade in Tiananmen Square to commemorate victory over Japan in World War II. This display is, in truth, a monumental distortion of history, a calculated fiction meant to glorify the party, vilify its contemporary adversaries and mislead its people. At the heart of this charade lies the falsehood that the CCP was the principal fighting force against Japanese aggression during the war. This claim is a brazen lie. From 1937 to 1945, it was the Nationalist government, under Chiang Kai-shek, that bore the brunt of Japan’s military assault. Nationalist forces, not the Chinese communists, fought nearly every major battle and sustained more than 3.5 million military casualties. In stark contrast, the CCP, holed up in its Yan’an stronghold, sustained minuscule losses. Japanese casualty data confirms the truth: Of the estimated over 1 million Japanese casualties in China, virtually all fell to Nationalist or Allied hands, not the communists. The main cause of the CCP’s inaction against the Japanese invading forces is its ideological symbiosis with the Soviet Union, which prohibited the CCP from actively fighting Japan during World War II. In late August 1939, Josef Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, whose ally in Asia was Japan, and despite the Nazis’ subsequent betrayal of the pact, the Soviets remained vigilant against any Allied efforts using their territory, resources or affiliated forces to fight Japan in Asia. This was because of the notorious April 1941 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, which Moscow strictly enforced until the very last days of the war.

The court must decide whether subjecting a minor child to dangerous drugs, hormones or mutilation is the prerogative of the state, or doctors, or parents. What if this were about mentally ill youngsters who for some reason believe they should lose a limb so they can be “themselves”? Why then is it OK to treat puberty like an illness, and to cut off a girl’s healthy breasts or to castrate a boy? Some things are beyond even a parent’s prerogative, such as committing child abuse. Profound biological differences between the sexes are obvious, well documented, consequential and essential to human thriving. Females have two X chromosomes; males have one X and one Ychromosome. “I often say, ‘No Y, no guy,’” says Georgia Purdom, a molecular geneticist specializing in cellular and molecular biology who warns against messing with the original design. “When we introduce hormones that contradict the body’s natural production we’re essentially conducting a large-scale experiment,” she told The Stand, a publication of the American Family Association. “Hormones play a crucial role in gene expression. … For example, estrogen and testosterone have significant effects on bone density, muscle mass, fat distribution, and even cognitive functions.” The downsides of “transitioning” to the opposite gender are becoming more and more widely known, including increased ? not decreased ? risk of suicide. “Britain, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have concluded that transition puts youth at a greater risk of physical and mental harm while benefits remain uncertain,” Dr. Patrick Hunter, a pediatrician and bioethicist, wrote recently.

The same birth dearth now threatens our nation’s already-teetering educational system. Last week, a new study done by the nonprofit Western Institute for Higher Education projects that the number of public and private high school graduates will fall by more than 500,000 - or 13% - by 2041. This will be especially true in states - particularly in the Far West and Northeast - where birthrates have been in serious decline. The result will be the closing of hundreds of high schools and colleges and the elimination of thousands, if not millions, of jobs. As Jay Greene of The Heritage Foundation recently wrote: “We are about to experience a baby bust on steroids.” “In twenty states, public school enrollments are projected to fall by more than 10 percent by 2031. As school enrollments start to plummet, so will their funding.” But the problems do not stop at the three E’s: entitlements, economics and education. Other studies have found that 1 in 3 millennials and Generation Z members either do not have or do not want to have children. This is an alarming statistic, but it is based on the view, promoted by Mr. Ehrlich and others, that human beings are a burden on rather than a benefit to societal well-being. It is also a shortsighted view because as these generations age, they will become increasingly isolated, lonely and lacking the caregiving that children provide their parents. Thus, we are heading down the road to a demographic cliff with little fuel and no brakes to stop the societal, familial and economical consequences that await.

For those of us old enough to remember Paul Ehrlich and his book “The Population Bomb,” we recall his rantings and ravings about how overpopulation was going to destroy our world. His writings became the justification for all sorts of draconian measures to reduce birthrates worldwide. And like so many other speculations accepted as fact by the intelligentsia and the media, the exact opposite is happening as the lack of children threatens all aspects of our culture and our society must grapple with the coming crisis of underpopulation. For instance, our nation’s current fertility rate stands at 54.5 births per 1.000 women, well below replacement level, a factor that will lead to ever-increasing pressure on programs such as Social Security, Medicare and pensions, with not enough people paying into the system to cover the expenditures going out. It is estimated that the Social Security trust fund, which relies on having enough younger workers paying into it in order to pay for the benefits of those retiring will run dry by 2034, resulting in retirees having their benefits cut by at least 20%. The Social Security Administration saw this coming in 2010 when it noted in its financial report that there was trouble ahead because “birth rates dropped from three to two children per woman.” Previously, there had been a 4-to-1 or 5-to-1 ratio between workers paying into the system and retirees taking money out. That ratio has dropped to almost 2-to-1. Meanwhile, labor shortages and inflation will continue to be exacerbated as retirees leave the workforce and then are not enough young workers to replace them.

There is a broader context about Xi’s “red lines,” particularly about Taiwan. They are not merely about China’s internal affairs but represent a dangerous global dominance vision. Taiwan is not an isolated target; it is the first domino in a broader campaign of territorial aggression, akin to Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland. Mr. Xi’s alignment with Russia, Iran and North Korea underscores a chilling pattern: The Chinese government is part of a coalition seeking to dismantle the world order. If the world permits China to conquer Taiwan, it sets a precedent for unchecked aggression. The stakes are Taiwan’s future and preserving a global system based on sovereignty, democracy and human rights. The world cannot afford to ignore the implications of Mr. Xi’s ambitions. His “red lines” are not the dictates of a strong leader; they are the desperate pleas of a regime afraid of its own people and the global tide of freedom. The U.S. and its allies must reject Mr. Xi’s narrative and stand firm against Chinese aggression. This is not merely about opposing China’s overreach but about safeguarding the principles underpinning peace and prosperity worldwide. With a new American administration poised to take a tougher stance, Mr. Xi will face his greatest challenge yet. The free world must seize this moment to expose the phoniness of Mr. Xi’s red lines and recommit to defending democracy, human rights and the sovereignty of nations. The stakes could not be higher, and failure is not an option.