By Matt Vasilogambros and Amanda Hernández, Stateline.org

NOTE : If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental health crisis, contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by dialing or texting “988.”

Adriana Pentz’s brother could be alive today.

In 2017, Luc-John Pentz was 30 years old and starting to struggle, burdened by life’s stressors and trying to cope by leaning heavily on alcohol. Adriana soon found out he had purchased a gun months earlier.

Of her three siblings, she had the most in common with Luc growing up — they were both academically driven and competitive swimmers. They remained close into adulthood, with Luc supporting her when she became a mother. So, when she noticed his behavior starting to shift, she was immediately troubled.

“I was scared when I found out that he had a gun,” she said. “I know that it offered him a sense of security, a sense of protection, which he felt like he needed at that particular point. But my siblings and my mom didn’t feel comfortable that he was not in a good place, and we knew he had something at home that was dangerous.”

Her brother died by suicide May 23, 2017, in the woods near his home in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Related Articles

Trump has ordered airstrikes against rebels in Yemen. Here’s why

Trump invokes 18th century law to speed deportations, judge stalls it hours later

Governors to laid-off federal workers: We’ll hire you

Rubio says South Africa’s ambassador to the US ‘is no longer welcome’ in the country

Federal judge considers blocking DOGE from accessing Social Security data of millions of Americans

What Adriana Pentz didn’t know at the time was that Connecticut had a law that would have allowed her, her family or police officers to petition a civil court to seize his gun when it was clear he was a potential harm to himself or others.

In 1999, Connecticut became the first state in the country to pass what is commonly known as a red flag law, which allows family members, law enforcement and sometimes health care workers, friends and co-workers to file what is often called an extreme risk protection order.

After considering evidence and hearing from both the petitioner and the gun owner, a judge may temporarily take a person’s weapon if they deem the gun owner to be a potential danger to themselves or the community. Orders usually last one year.

Now, 21 states and the District of Columbia have such laws. Voters in Maine will decide in November whether to join that list. The use of extreme risk protection orders has surged in recent years, with petitions filed across states that have such laws jumping by 59% in 2023 over the previous year, according to data collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control research and advocacy group.

But the laws’ effectiveness relies on their implementation, supporters say: Law enforcement and judges must be trained properly and the public needs to be aware that the law exists.

“The challenge in this is that too many people, too many law enforcement people, too many families, are not aware that there is an extreme risk law in their state,” Sarah Burd-Sharps, the senior director of research at Everytown, told Stateline.

A Stateline analysis shows the usage rates rose from six petitions filed per 100,000 residents in 2022, to 10 per 100,000 in 2023. The analysis used Everytown’s petition data and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for the District of Columbia and the 19 states with active red flag laws in 2023.

In 2023, there were 46,728 gun-related deaths in the United States, including suicides, murders and accidents, with a national rate of 14 gun deaths per 100,000 people, according to the latest data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Suicides accounted for nearly 6 in 10 of the gun deaths. Recent research on the protection orders’ impact estimates that one suicide is prevented for every 17 to 23 petitions filed. Based on this estimate, nearly 990 lives could have been saved in 2023 for every 17 petitions filed.

Pentz feels her brother’s death every day. “It was a horrible, horrible, horrible moment in our lives to have lost him,” she said.

“I know for sure that if it was something that I was aware of in 2017, I would have petitioned to have my brother’s gun taken from him in that moment of crisis. I do believe it could have saved his life.”

Training the police

As retired detective Christopher Carita travels around the country to meet with law enforcement agencies on how to better use their state’s red flag laws, he consistently hears one concern: Is this a gun grab?

“Law enforcement, we’re gun folks,” said Carita, who worked for the Fort Lauderdale Police Department in Florida. “There’s always this hesitancy when it comes to risk protection orders and removing firearms that needs to be overcome.”

So, when he designed his training, he emphasized due process protections embedded in these laws: Gun owners get ample notice about the petition, and they have the right to defend themselves in court through multiple hearings. The laws are based off long-held domestic violence and other civil orders and are backed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“More often than not, the respondent understands,” said Carita, who works with 97Percent, a gun safety organization focused on including gun owners and non-gun owners in the conversation around policy solutions for gun violence.

“Even if they’re hesitant at first,” he said, “ultimately they’re appreciative that their family member cared enough to intervene, and that that intervention is something that is temporary and affords them some time and space away from the most lethal means to get the help they need.”

Carita encourages officers to build better relationships with their local Department of Veterans Affairs agency and area nonprofits, so they have someone they can refer the gunowner to when they’re removing a firearm for suicide risk.

Even before New Mexico imposed a red flag law in 2020, some law enforcement officials opposed it, citing concerns over Second Amendment rights and potential government overreach. In its first two years, police in the state filed only 23 petitions. Then in 2022, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham established a task force to raise awareness and improve enforcement of the law.

The number of petitions has increased significantly, rising from 47 in 2023 to 96 in 2024, according to court data. More than half of last year’s petitions were in Bernalillo County, the state’s most populous jurisdiction and home to Albuquerque, the capital.

In February, the New Mexico House passed a bill to streamline the process. The bill would clarify more clearly that police officers can directly file petitions and would remove the 48-hour waiting period for firearm relinquishment, addressing concerns that the delay could pose unnecessary risks. The legislation is now in the Senate.

Gun violence experts say the goal of red flag laws isn’t necessarily to increase their use for the sake of numbers, but to ensure they are applied in the most dangerous situations.

“We have to be realistic about expectations that [extreme risk protection orders] aren’t going to prevent all forms of firearm violence and lead to huge decreases in gun violence,” said Stephen Oliphant, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Firearm Injury Prevention at the University of Michigan.

After Maryland adopted its red flag law in 2018, Darrin Popkin, the executive director of both the Maryland Chiefs of Police Association and the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association, traveled the state to educate 17,000 law enforcement officers from 160 agencies on what he calls “another tool in the belt” for officers to save lives.

In the first six months of having the law, Popkin said, law enforcement prevented several potential school shootings. He’s received phone calls from people who said that if they didn’t have the gun-removal order, their family member would no longer be alive.

In recent years, the state police academies took over that training, teaching officers how to apply for a petition, testify in court and carry out the gun-removal order. The state also is investing in media and advertising outreach for the public, along with training health care workers.

According to data from Everytown, Maryland is a national leader in issuing extreme risk protection orders. In 2023, there were approximately 11 petitions filed per 100,000 Maryland residents.

Popkin, who until 2022 served as Montgomery County sheriff across the border from Washington, D.C., attributes the high numbers to how the legislation was crafted, a process that included perspectives from law enforcement officers, health care workers and gun rights advocates. He also points to how the people granting the orders, Maryland District Court commissioners, are available 24 hours a day.

“There will always be people in crisis,” Popkin said. “There will always be a need for people to get help.”

The next step, he said, is to increase the law’s usage among health care providers.

The ‘treatment and care’ approach

Whenever The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore treats someone who might be a danger to themselves or others and may own or be about to buy a weapon, the hospital contacts Quinita Garrett.

Garrett, the director of call center and system coordination for Baltimore Crisis Response Inc., a nonprofit crisis center known as BCRI, is leading a pilot program to test a partnership between a local hospital and social workers.

She’ll go to the hospital and visit the patient at their bed, asking about their mental health, whether they have access to a gun at home or through others, their intent on purchasing a weapon, and their history of aggression, violence, homicidal thoughts, suicidal thoughts or any attempts. She’ll also ask questions about their impulse control, if they want to hurt anyone and if they have a support system.

Sometimes, a person is just having a bad day, and they have support in their life and don’t own a weapon or plan on buying one. But other times, a person might have a history of aggressive or abusive behavior and may own a weapon, and she’ll quickly petition the Eastside District Court. She’ll see the process through until the end, testifying before a judge shortly after filing the petition.

It doesn’t happen often; over the past year and a half, she’s gone to the hospital around 15 times. But the number has been increasing recently to one or two requests a week, which she attributes to the hospital educating its staff.

Garrett also might be referred to cases through calls coming into BCRI’s local suicide prevention hotline.

She recalled talking with one mother in 2023 who was scared to live in her own house, worried that her son was going to kill himself or someone else. Garrett walked her through the process, and the mother eventually petitioned the court. Although her son was mad at her, at least she knew he and those around him were safe, Garrett remembers her saying.

“It can really save lives,” Garrett said. “I definitely think that is good as a temporary option, so people can actually be linked to treatment and care.”

Combining a law enforcement response with one centered on behavioral specialists, social service workers and medical professionals has led to a paradigm shift in Maryland and New York, the only two states that allow health care workers to file extreme risk protection orders, said Shannon Frattaroli, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy. She’s led the nationwide effort for better implementation of red flag laws, training law enforcement or other government agencies that seek to further use extreme risk protection orders.

“When we think about how to make this accessible and less threatening, more therapeutic, starting the process with clinicians just makes a whole lot of sense,” she said.

In surveys that reached thousands of physicians, psychologists and clinicians, Frattaroli found that there is broad support for the idea of extreme risk protection orders. However, many think it is challenging to complete the paperwork and to get to court to see the process through on top of their full-time work.

That’s where partnerships with people like Garrett come in, she said. Court data that Frattaroli has collected shows that less than 1% of petitions are filed by clinicians; there’s vast room for improvement, she said.

Tightening judicial procedures

Indiana’s red flag law — passed in 2005 — came under scrutiny in 2021 following the mass shooting at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis, where a gunman killed eight people and wounded several others.

Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears declined to file a red flag case against the shooter, even after Indianapolis police had seized a shotgun from him a year earlier. Police criticized that choice, but at the time, Mears said loopholes in the law could have led to the shotgun being returned to the shooter.

Without a court ruling barring the shooter from future gun purchases, he legally bought the Ruger AR-556 and the HM Defense HM15F rifles used in the attack.

Marion County Superior Judge Amy Jones then issued new guidance requiring all red flag cases filed by law enforcement agencies in the county to go directly to the court rather than the prosecutor’s office.

Under the revised process, police must file a case within 48 hours of seizing a firearm, and a judge then determines within 14 days whether a hearing should be held.

Cases are now being filed and resolved much more quickly, Jones told Stateline, and respondents are ensured due process. Lawmakers are considering a bill that would allow some red flag records to be sealed and expunged, while still ensuring that people later found to pose a danger can still have their firearms seized.

“Maybe it’ll be seized or taken away for a period of time, but following these proceedings, it may not be all that long in the grand scheme of things,” Jones said. “You do have that protection to the public and the people that this individual is around.”

Adriana Pentz, who lost her brother, knows family members often see troubling signs before anyone else. But whether they know extreme risk protection orders are available is another story.

Average people need to know how to create a petition, she said, and states and communities must do a better job of promoting red flag laws.

“Love and support just isn’t enough,” she said. “You absolutely need something that can help keep an individual and their surrounding community safe in a moment of crisis.”

Stateline reporter Matt Vasilogambros can be reached at mvasilogambros@stateline.org. Stateline reporter Amanda Hernández can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Michael Merschel, American Heart Association News

In the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was full of questions.

Dr. Jeffrey Hsu recalls the fear of the unknown as he and other health professionals confronted a virus they didn’t understand, much less know how to treat.

“It was quite scary,” said Hsu, a cardiologist and an assistant professor-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We were bracing ourselves for the worst.”

Related Articles

‘Stronger than ever’: An update on couples married five years ago, during quarantine

Millions in US live in places where doctors don’t practice and telehealth doesn’t reach

How much sleep do you really need? Experts say it depends

FDA warns of misuse of laughing gas sold in colorful, flavored canisters

5 years later: How COVID changed health care

Five years after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the questions have waned, at least among patients, said Dr. Won Lee, medical director of Boston Medical Center’s Home Care Program.

“I think a lot of people are fatigued by the news and the headlines that they have been receiving for many years,” said Lee, who is part of a medical team that helps homebound older adults.

COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, might not be as headline-grabbing as they once were. But even though deaths from the virus are far below their early 2021 peak of more than 25,000 a week in the United States, COVID-19, which is directly blamed for more than 1.2 million U.S. deaths since 2020, hasn’t gone away.

“We’re still seeing waves of infection with SARS-CoV-2 pop up, and we’re still seeing patients who do get severely ill,” Hsu said. “So that’s still happening. Definitely at a much smaller scale than it was before, but it’s still there.” So far this year, COVID-19 has been listed as the cause of death for 5,694 people in the United States, according to the latest numbers through Feb. 22 from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Here are answers to what doctors say are some of the most common questions they still get about COVID-19 – and a few questions they wish they were hearing more often.

Do I really need another vaccination?

It’s the most common question Lee gets from patients and families, and one Dr. Susan Fuchs, an attending physician in the emergency department at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, hears variations of.

Some people ask her, “Is a vaccine worth it?” The answer is yes, said Fuchs, who also is a professor of pediatrics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Fuchs acknowledged that the vaccines don’t stop every case – she’s been vaccinated and had COVID-19 twice herself. But vaccines protect against severe illness, hospitalization and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends vaccination for everybody 6 months or older.

Are COVID-19 vaccines safe?

Fuchs wishes more people would come to her with their worries about vaccine safety and side effects. Most people, she said, endure little more than a sore arm or a low-grade fever. Other common side effects include muscle pain, joint pain, fatigue, headache or chills.

“There are minor side effects with most vaccines,” Fuchs said. “But it’s better than getting the actual illness.”

The approved vaccines are still being monitored, she said. And “right now, we’re saying it’s a safe vaccine – no matter which one you get from whichever company.”

Who has the answers about boosters or other concerns?

Fuchs said that while people don’t ask about the emergence of different COVID-19 variants the way they once did, people can easily become confused about how often they need their vaccination updated.

Her advice: “Go to your family doctor.”

Lee said it’s easy for people to feel overwhelmed when there are “so many different sources coming at you all at once.” She regularly hears from patients or family members who have a concern they’ve heard from friends or at church or read online that they want to check with her. “I absolutely love and welcome those conversations,” she said.

Will I ever get better?

Most of the patients Hsu interacts with have long COVID, an assortment of symptoms that continue four weeks or more after the initial infection. People who have it ask him, “Is this going to shorten my life? Do people get better?”

Researchers don’t have all the answers to that, Hsu said. But large numbers of people – many of them previously young, active and healthy – “are now effectively disabled because of long COVID.”

Some people with long COVID – maybe a third – have gotten better, he said, but “I think the majority of people are still dealing with ongoing symptoms and are nowhere near back toward their baseline.”

Researchers are learning how the virus can persist in the body for years, Hsu said, and they’ve seen hints that abnormal blood clotting may be at the root of some problems.

He’s hopeful that treatments will be found, but at the moment, the answers about long COVID remind him of how doctors felt at the start of the pandemic. “We want to help, but we don’t have effective therapies to help just yet.”

He wishes more people were asking questions about how to limit the spread of the virus. People who have had a mild case of COVID-19 might not be as afraid of getting reinfected, Hsu said.

But risks of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and other conditions increase after an infection, he said. And each infection could become severe or lead to long COVID.

He emphasized how serious long COVID can be. Some of his patients are formerly high-energy, highly accomplished people who now are so drained that they can’t get out of bed to come to his clinic. “I can only see them virtually, and it’s just devastating.”

How can I protect myself and the people around me?

Like Hsu, Lee said she wished she heard this question more often.

“Even before COVID, this would come up with the flu shot,” Lee said. “Young, healthy people would say, ‘Well, you know, I don’t really get too sick from the flu. I don’t really have to worry about it.’ And my plea was always, ‘Well, think about your grandmother or your neighbor, or the person who you work with,’” or someone who cares for a child with a disability at home.

According to the CDC, age is the strongest risk factor for severe COVID-19, and the risk grows higher the older someone gets. Other high-risk groups include people with underlying conditions such as heart disease, people on dialysis and those with suppressed immune systems.

Staying up to date with vaccinations is one important way to protect them, Hsu said.

“I’m not one who just blindly says everyone should get a vaccine,” he said. “I do understand everyone has their own approach to weighing the risks and benefits of the vaccine. My concern is that the risks of the vaccine are real but have been overstated by influential voices on social media.”

Beyond vaccines, Lee said that advice from the pandemic’s peak on limiting the spread of the virus holds up. “If you’re sick, stay home. If somebody is sick, don’t let them come visit you.”

She acknowledged the importance of staying socially connected, especially for older people. “I do want people to visit their older adults in their lives and spend time with them and pick up the phone and talk with them, because I think the flip side to people being too cautious or too scared about getting someone sick is the social isolation.”

But, she added, “I want them to do it safely, when everyone’s feeling good.”

COVID-19 and the flu are similar in that some people might dismiss them if they’ve had only mild cases in the past, Lee said. But both can be deadly. And even when they aren’t fatal, a case of either that requires hospitalization can have many unintended consequences, especially for older adults, sometimes leading to lasting disability.

“That’s something a lot of people don’t consider,” Lee said, “and it’s not something most people want to face.”

Fuchs said parents should not send their children back to school until they have been fever-free for 24 hours without medication. And she still wears a mask at work because she doesn’t want to spread COVID-19 from patient to patient.

Hsu’s recommendation is “if it’s clear that cases are rising, then it may be a good time to be more mindful about wearing a mask in public” and to make sure large gatherings are held either outdoors or in a well-ventilated area.

“I also think it’s really important to take care of ourselves and our bodies better,” Hsu said, with a healthy diet, regular exercise and medical checkups. “I do think that these measures can make us more resilient to an infection.”

Lee seconded Hsu’s advice for getting up to date with any routine health screenings that might have been delayed during the pandemic. That can be a good time to raise whatever COVID-19 concerns someone might have, she said.

“It’s stressful to try to make sense of all the things that you hear or read,” Lee said, but there’s an easy way to avoid that stress over health concerns. “Pick up the phone and make an appointment.”

American Heart Association News covers heart and brain health. Not all views expressed in this story reflect the official position of the American Heart Association. Copyright is owned or held by the American Heart Association, Inc., and all rights are reserved.

©2025 American Heart Association, Inc., distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

(Courtesy of the author)

Read Brave, the free annual citywide book club that brings communities together, hosts two events centered on Nnedi Okorafor’s young adult novel “Akata Witch,” which explores communities through Africanfuturism, a genre of African culture, story, and mythology.

Nnedi Okorafor (Courtesy of the author)

“Read Brave: The African Art of Healing — Past, Present and Future” is an immersive “Akata Witch”-inspired event that will transform the George Latimer Central Library into a celebration of Black and African Diaspora empowerment, in partnership with Oshun Center for Intercultural Healing. 2 p.m. Saturday, 90 W. Fourth St., St. Paul.

“Akata Witch” follows the story of an albino Nigerian-American teen struggling to find her place between her Nigerian roots and her American upbringing. When she discovers she belongs to a secret world of magic where your worst fault becomes your biggest strength, everything changes. She goes deep into Nigerian folklore, where she must master her hidden powers and join forces with other young magicians and shapeshifters to defeat a killer.

On March 26, Mayor Melvin Carter, author Okorafor and youth panelists present an evening of conversation plus music by musician, vocalist, composer and teaching artist Kashimana and artwork inspired by the book. 5:30 p.m., Rondo Community Library, 461 N. Dale St., St. Paul.

Related Articles

Readers and writers: Sandford’s latest ‘Prey’ thriller, plus two worthy mysteries

Literary calendar for week of March 16

St. Paul students cut the ribbon for the world’s 200,000th Little Free Library

Book Review: ‘The Dream Hotel’ is a dystopian world in which people are detained for dreams

St. Croix Valley Big Read is ‘Nothing to See Here’

It’s no secret that Donald Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which is one reason why he’s pushing Ukraine and Russia so hard toward cease-fire negotiations.

The way the U.S. president is going about it won’t earn him any favor in Oslo, though, because so far he mainly seems to be coercing Ukraine to capitulate.

But Trump has another path to the Nobel, and the whole world, including his haters, should root for him: He could win it by lowering the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

In his first term, Trump tried and failed to launch trilateral talks among the U.S., Russia and China about capping or even reducing nuclear weapons. (The U.S. and Russia each have more than 5,000 nukes, while China, in third place, has about 600 and is racing to pull even with the other two.)

Trump had already withdrawn from one arms-control treaty with Russia and then refused to renew the only remaining one, leaving the extension to his successor, Joe Biden. But even that agreement, called New START, expires next February.

At that point, and for the first time since the early Cold War, nothing will be in place to restrain the world’s major nuclear powers from a new arms race. In fact, several such races are already underway: China and North Korea are adding to their arsenals as fast as they can, and all nine countries with nukes are “modernizing” their weapons.

In the U.S. that means upgrading warheads as well as the bombers, submarines and missiles to deliver them — at a cost of $1.7 trillion over 30 years, or $75 billion a year this decade, although the costs and the timelines keep expanding with every estimate.

The risk of nuclear war is rising even faster than these numbers suggest, because countries are also tweaking the types of nukes they have and the strategies for using them. Russia in particular is building more “tactical” or “theater” weapons; it has an edge of about 10-to-1 over the U.S. in that category, which is not covered by New START. The U.S. is also considering giving these limited nukes a greater role again.

Tactical nukes are loosely defined as weapons that are meant as a last resort to prevent defeat in battle. (By contrast, strategic nukes are built to destroy an enemy’s homeland in retaliation for an incoming nuclear strike.) Tactical weapons can still pack several Hiroshimas in explosive power. But because they have lower “yields” than the strategic kind, they’re considered more usable. Even so, war games suggest that any use, no matter how limited, would immediately lead to uncontrollable escalation, and possibly Armageddon.

Add to these trends a recent pattern of reckless taboo-breaking. The leaders of Russia and North Korea keep rattling their atomic sabers. And members of Trump’s first administration want to resume testing live nuclear bombs. Once you factor in the risk of miscalculation by someone somewhere under pressure, or the imponderable role of artificial intelligence in nuclear decision-making, it becomes clear that the world is entering the greatest danger since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump, despite all the chaos he’s causing in international affairs, understands that peril. Moreover, his worldview, which is anathema to international law and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, happens to be well-suited to nuclear realities.

When it comes to the geopolitics of warfare by fission, multilateralism and law (as embodied in the Non-Proliferation Treaty) are all but irrelevant. What matters is the strategic interplay of the great powers. In the nuclear domain, it really does make sense to think in “spheres of influence” — as the American, British and Soviet leaders did in Yalta near the end of World War II, when they carved up Europe for the sake of stability.

The problem, of course, is that each nuclear superpower has different and conflicting interests. Russia knows that it’s economically and militarily weaker than the U.S. and would lose a conventional war. So it values tactical nukes as a psychological deterrent and a last-ditch means to “escalate to deescalate” in its own favor.

China is the only nation that has an official policy of “no first use,” but it still wants parity with the U.S. to avoid being coerced, especially if it ever comes to blows over Taiwan. The U.S., meanwhile, is wondering whether it should keep matching only its strongest nuclear opponent, Russia, or needs numerical balance against Russia and China combined, lest these two gang up in a crisis.

And yet they all have one interest in common: preventing nuclear war, which, as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev memorably put it, “cannot be won and must never be fought.” Moreover, they can all accept the logic of their mutual “security dilemma,” in which anything one of them does forces the others to respond, in what threatens to become a spiral toward war.

Trump could start small, by suggesting that the U.S. and Russia informally stick to the caps in New START whether it lapses or not, pending a new arrangement. He could also press for resuming mutual inspections to build confidence.

Meanwhile, Trump and his counterparts, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, need to agree on a format. Trump wants Yalta-like talks among this trio. Russia prefers talks among all five nations designated by the Non-Proliferation Treaty as legitimate nuclear powers, including France and the UK. Some day, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which has never officially declared its arsenal) must be brought in as well.

Either way, talks there must be, and Trump claims that Putin and Xi, whose autocratic style he admires, are open to the idea. “We’d like to see denuclearization,” he said, because that would be “an unbelievable thing for the planet.” The planet is not what usually takes priority in his America First worldview, but he would be right. If Trump succeeds, he deserves that Nobel Peace Prize, even if he might have to share it.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

Related Articles

Richard Lorenc: Economics is destiny. Teach it

Kurt Bardella: Democrats, do not ignore Stephen A. Smith

Bruce Yandle: Is Musk’s brutal DOGE a tragedy, or caused by one?

Noah Feldman: Why the Columbia student’s deportation arrest should scare all Americans

Rob Richie: One party worked harder to build a bigger tent in 2024