As President Trump prepares to head to Asia next month for his most important overseas trip yet, foreign intelligence services are undoubtedly trying to assemble personality profiles to explain this unconventional, risk-taking, domineering president to the leaders he will meet.

Consider what is, for the moment, an entirely hypothetical question: What might Defense Secretary Jim Mattis do if he received an order from President Trump to launch a nuclear attack on North Korea in retaliation, say, for a hydrogen bomb test that had gone awry?

Top U.S. officials have said repeatedly that America is seeking a diplomatic solution to the nuclear crisis with North Korea. But President Trump’s insulting comments toward North Korean leader Kim Jong Un appear to have made such a negotiated settlement more difficult.

President John F. Kennedy famously solved the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 by thinking outside the box. Similar creative thinking is badly needed now on North Korea.

When you discount the rhetorical overkill, the most surprising thing about President Trump’s address to the United Nations on Tuesday was how conventional it was. He supported human rights and democracy; he opposed rogue regimes; he espoused a global community of strong, sovereign nations. Pretty shocking stuff.

The Trump administration, already struggling with a big nuclear problem in North Korea , is about to raise another one by questioning the implementation of the nuclear agreement with Iran.

How can news organizations avoid the trap that President Trump has laid for them in his attacks on the media as a one-sided “opposition party” that caters to anti-Trump elites and purveys “fake news” to readers and viewers?

A look at North Korea's latest rounds of missile tests with David Ignatius of the Washington Post, David Sanger of The New York Times, Lionel Barber of the Financial Times, and Nicholas Burns of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Intelligence officers sometimes talk about “blowback,” when covert actions go bad and end up damaging the country that initiated them. A year later, that is surely the case with Russia’s secret attempt to meddle in the U.S. presidential election, which has brought a string of adverse unintended consequences for Moscow.

"Here’s a contrarian thought: President Trump had the right instinct to insist that China help resolve the nightmare problem of North Korea. A peaceful solution is impossible without help from the other great power in East Asia."