Welcome to the Friday Briefing, a new presentation from The New York Times, featuring quick, unexpected, humorous or urgent issues. Here’s how you can catch it on Fridays:
It’s an event of unusual headline importance: the announcement today by the United States and North Korea that they had “signed a document” establishing “a new US-DPRK relationship” in Pyongyang. How is it going to work? Who’s negotiating? How long will it last? What other countries are involved? Is the signing a reason to celebrate or a sign of a world unraveling? These are questions for a foreign policy community that has tried to make sense of a diplomatic process that became an unintended comedy as the United States stoked North Korea’s paranoia. The North Koreans’ agreement to cease nuclear tests and the United States’ agreement to lift sanctions … were one thing, but what happens to Kim Jong Un, the tyrant? What happened to both sides?
Watch The New York Times’ video package on “This Week in North Korea,” and see The Nation’s reporting on The Washington Post’s story about the upcoming intercontinental ballistic missile test in North Korea.