As one of the key individuals who brought the United States and North Korea closer than ever before to a deal on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons, former U.S. defense chief William Perry has a lot to say about dealing with the regime of Kim Jong Un and a planned landmark summit with President Donald Trump — and what it might mean for Japan.

Vladimir Putin has spent years trying to divide the West by undermining elections, invading neighbors and aggressively using Russian oil and gas as a ham-handed bargaining tool. These concerted and clever efforts have suddenly, however, revealed the New Putin: Despite his best efforts and plans, he’s become a uniter, not a divider of the West.

After the U.S. and its European allies coordinated to expel more than 100 Russian diplomats in response to the March poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in the UK, some analysts are arguing the punishment may have been the wrong move.

Stephen Kotkin, John P. Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs at Princeton University and a research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, has won for Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941 (Penguin Press), a history of the world during the build-up to its most fateful hour, from the vantage point of Stalin’s seat of power.