North Korean leader Kim Jong-un‘s appetite to make a major diplomatic deal with the U.S. seems all but dead — but could it suddenly spring back to life in January 2025?

Robert Manning, a former high-level U.S. intelligence official, believes a second Donald Trump presidency could deliver a spark to the moribund relationship, although he says it’s highly unclear whether such a course would lead to the best long-term policy outcome. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim held meetings in Singapore, Hanoi and at the border between North and South Korea in 2018 and 2019, but failed to reach a major deal for North Korean denuclearization. Biden administration efforts to revive denuclearization talks with the North have since gone nowhere.

Mr. Manning, now a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center’s Reimagining Grand Strategy program, tells “The Washington Brief” that, “in a sense, Kim may be waiting for Trump.” The comments come as Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports from Seoul that South Korea and the United States have initiated joint military drills this week, which customarily inflame North Korea and inspire a wave of bellicose rhetorical missiles from Pyongyang.

The Treasury Department has slapped sanctions on two individuals and a Greece-based commercial spyware company headed by a former Israeli military officer that developed, operated and distributed technology known as “Predator” to conduct surveillance on U.S. government officials, journalists and policy experts.

The sanctions specifically target Intellexa Consortium. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) says the consortium sold and distributed spyware and surveillance tools for targeted and mass surveillance campaigns. The range of other entities named in the sanctions is far reaching and includes North Macedonia-based Cytrox AD, Hungary-based Cytrox Holdings ZRT and Ireland-based Thalestris Limited.

With high-stakes talks over a potential cease-fire in Gaza at an impasse, Mr. Blinken held a summit in Washington on Tuesday with Qatari Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, a key player in the regional tensions spiraling around the Israel-Hamas war. A State Department readout said Mr. Blinken and Mr. Al Thani “discussed the conflict in Gaza and efforts to secure the release of hostages held by Hamas.”

However, there was no breakthrough announced at the meeting, which represented the “sixth U.S.-Qatar Strategic Dialogue” and underscored the depths of coordination between Washington and the wealthy Gulf Arab nation that straddles a geopolitical fault line between Iran and the rest of the Middle East. A State Department fact sheet highlighted that Qatar hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest U.S. Air Force installation outside the United States, and pays for a “significant amount” of the base’s annual operating costs. It also noted that “Qatar is the third-largest customer of U.S. defense systems around the world” and that President Biden has designated Qatar a Major Non-NATO Ally.

The Department of Homeland Security is collecting DNA from less than 40% of illegal immigrants encountered trying to enter the U.S., a whistleblower has told Congress. The department is required under federal law to collect the DNA, but Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley says it’s usually not happening. Between Oct. 1, 2022, and June 30, 2023, the department’s Customs and Border Protection agency encountered 2.3 million unauthorized migrants. It provided only roughly 843,000 DNA samples to the FBI, which runs the national database, Mr. Grassley said, citing information provided by the whistleblower.

The State Department’s effort to educate Americans about what the agency does and why it is important is focused too heavily on “liberal coastal elites” and is failing to reach conservative audiences, according to former Foreign Service Officer and Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Simon Hankinson and Justin Henle, an intern at the think tank. 

In addition to arguing that the department’s “foreign programs are increasingly spreading only the leftmost side” of the U.S. ideological spectrum, the two home in on a recently released State Department Report on Engaging at Home, asserting that it highlights “visits to regions and institutions that lean to the left” in a manner that “could be perceived by aspiring diplomats as an inherent bias that is not ‘inclusive’” of conservative Americans. “Congress should address this by mandating via the appropriations process that domestic outreach be done with political neutrality or not at all,” argue Mr. Hankinson and Mr. Henle.

Jordan’s Queen Rania Al Abdullah has long been the “first Palestinian queen in history, according to regular columnist Clifford D. May, who argues that the queen has missed an opportunity to take a crucial stand against Hamas and the terror group’s October attack against Israel. Mr. May takes issue with a recent speech Queen Rania made in Qatar, asserting that she “acknowledged that there was a ‘brutal Oct. 7 attack’ but didn’t say who perpetrated it nor who its victims were.” During the speech, she “never mentioned Hamas, some of whose top leaders live in luxury in Doha, honored guests of Qatar’s rulers,” laments Mr. May.