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Jimmy Carter did more damage to American foreign policy in one weekend than most diplomats manage in a career.In June 1994, President Bill Clinton sent Carter (no relation) to Pyongyang as a private citizen, with no authority to negotiate or speak for the U.S. government. Two days later, Carter cut a deal anyway. Then he called CNN before he called the White House. Clinton learned that his own North Korea policy had changed by watching television.Fleitz has written the best kind of policy book: one grounded in the record, animated by firsthand knowledge, and confident enough to let readers reach the obvious conclusion.That episode, recounted on page 34 of Frederick H. Fleitz’s new book, "North Korea, Nuclear Brinkmanship, and the Oval Office," makes up the best two pages in the book. It also contains the clearest explanation of why the book deserves attention.Fleitz spent more than two decades inside the machinery of American national security policy — at the CIA, State Department, House Intelligence Committee, and National Security Council. He was in the room, or close enough to it, for much of what he describes. This is not a book assembled from newspaper clippings. Fleitz names names, places officials on opposing sides of consequential fights, and lets the record judge them.The Carter episode establishes the pattern Fleitz traces across three decades. North Korea manufactures a crisis. Washington sends someone to talk. Pyongyang extracts a concession. The concession is celebrated as a “breakthrough.” North Korea breaks the agreement once the cameras leave. Then the cycle begins again.Why did it continue under presidents of both parties? Because it worked.Fleitz does not spare the Clinton administration. He describes the 1994 Agreed Framework — the deal Carter set in motion — as a bad bargain from the start. The administration called it a “framework” rather than an “agreement,” he argues, to avoid the Senate ratification a treaty would have required. Pyongyang received two light-water reactors and years of fuel oil. Washington received a promise to surrender spent fuel rods that never arrived.The Bush years receive the same treatment. Fleitz recounts envoy Chris Hill dismissing intelligence about North Korea’s secret uranium-enrichment program. Dick Cheney later told journalist James Rosen that Hill was “deceitful, perfectly prepared to lie to the president.” Hill’s reply — "I’m not Richard Nixon" — is the kind of detail that makes an insider’s account worth reading.RELATED: Nukes by the numbers: A problem we can’t wish away Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty ImagesFleitz is writing about policy, but he understands that policy is made by people with ambitions, loyalties, grudges, and blind spots. His book is not a dry institutional history. It is a fight among real officials over real consequences.The 2007 destruction of Syria’s North Korean-built reactor at al-Kibar receives similarly careful treatment. Fleitz reports that the Bush administration tried to keep Israel’s strike hidden from Congress — a detail that reveals as much about Washington’s instinct for secrecy as it does about North Korea’s proliferation network.The Trump chapters give the book its greatest energy because Fleitz supports his case with numbers rather than adjectives. North Korea tested no missiles in 2018, only a handful of short-range missiles in 2019, and no intercontinental ballistic missiles until 2022. That year, under President Joe Biden, North Korea set a single-year record of roughly 165 missile launches.Fleitz also details the February 2018 sanctions package, the toughest imposed on Pyongyang to that point, and Trump’s warning that "phase two" could become "very, very rough" if sanctions failed. Whatever one thinks of the rhetoric, it reads as the voice of a president wielding leverage rather than asking politely for cooperation.Fleitz states his central conclusion plainly: North Korea respects strength and exploits weakness.In his telling, every bad deal in the book was struck when an American president negotiated from a position of distraction, exhaustion, or political vulnerability: the 1994 Agreed Framework under Clinton, the near-deal at the end of George W. Bush’s second term, the Iran nuclear agreement under Barack Obama, and a reported secret arrangement with Iran under Biden.The one moment Pyongyang backed off and came to the table, Fleitz argues, came in 2018, when the regime confronted a president threatening its destruction rather than pleading for another agreement.RELATED: The future of warfare is not what you think STR/KCNA/KNS/AFP/Getty ImagesThat thesis will invite argument, as it should. Trump did not eliminate North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, and the regime remains dangerous. But Fleitz makes a persuasive case that pressure created negotiating space while accommodation repeatedly rewarded bad behavior.The lesson extends beyond North Korea. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are drawing closer. Washington still faces the temptation to mistake talks for progress, signatures for compliance, and diplomatic activity for strategic success.For that reason, "North Korea, Nuclear Brinkmanship, and the Oval Office" is not merely a history of failed negotiations. It is a warning about a pattern that American policymakers keep repeating.Fleitz has written the best kind of policy book: one grounded in the record, animated by firsthand knowledge, and confident enough to let readers examine the evidence and reach the obvious conclusion. Weakness does not moderate regimes such as North Korea. It teaches them what they can take next.

Fox News political analyst Guy Benson is receiving congratulations from across conservative media after announcing the birth of his daughter, Madison Halsey.“She’s here, and she’s perfect,” Benson wrote in a post that quickly racked up more than 10,000 likes.“We are blessed and overjoyed to welcome Madison Halsey into the world and into our family. Our hearts are filled to the brim. A baby girl. We are just so thankful.”However, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey doesn’t share his excitement.“You’ve heard my spiel on surrogacy a lot, but when we create these children, especially in this situation where you are buying the eggs from one woman, you are renting the womb from another woman," she says.“So you’re taking a child away from their biological mother, you are placing them in an unrelated woman whose smell and touch and heartbeat and body they get to know, they call home for nine months," she continues.“And then you immediately take that child after birth away from the only home, the only smell, the only regulator, the only woman they have ever known and away from the biological mom with whom they share half of their DNA. We are treating that child worse than we treat kittens and puppies,” she adds.For kittens and puppies, the natural bond between a mother and her litter is respected.“But for some reason, when it comes to human babies who are much more fragile, who are much less resilient, and of course as Christians, we believe are made in God’s image and so matter infinitely more than a cat or a dog, we say, ‘Eh, it’s probably fine,’” Stuckey says.“It is the prioritization of adult wants over children’s needs,” she adds.But it’s not just purposely taking children away from their biological mother that bothers Stuckey, noting that the entire process has “physical consequences for the child.”“It’s much more risky for the embryo. It’s much more risky, or riskier, for the baby as well during conception, during transfer and implantation, during gestation,” she explains.“But then of course, you’re creating this emotional and psychological, physiological risk too,” she continues, before playing a TikTok video of a man in a homosexual relationship claiming his son cries for his “mommy” despite never knowing his mother.“This is very common. This is natural. This is instinctive. Somewhere deep inside, we want to know where we came from. We want our mom. That does not mean that two men who are raising a child don’t love their child,” she says.“It means that they’re not a mom. You can be a really good dad, but you will never be a mom,” she adds.Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Generative AI has gained all kinds of new skills over the years, one of which is permanence, or the ability to remember details from past conversations. These days, your favorite AI platform may know a lot about you, such as your occupation, hobbies, and likes/dislikes. But what would happen if your AI chatbot had its memory hijacked to steal your data? That’s exactly what can happen with this latest fatal flaw that was discovered in some AI platforms. This concerning trick was first uncovered by a research team at New Mexico State University. Dubbed GhostWriter, it has the ability to use hidden prompts to carry out tasks without the user’s knowledge. These can be innocuous, like capturing information currently saved in the clipboard on your device, or they can be malicious, like logging into your bank account and routing funds to an external bank, as well as stealing files, passwords, and other personal information. It lies dormant for weeks, months, or even years.According to the researchers, GhostWriter works in two stages: First, it requires a prompt injection, where the attacker leaves a command for the AI to carry out a specific task when the user writes an unrelated prompt. In this case, the attacker could tell the AI to look for its user to type a certain keyword or phrase to trigger the hidden command. The second stage is activation. In this phase, the user unknowingly initiates the GhostWriter command, prompting the AI agent to carry out the intentional task the user requested, as well as the hidden task the attacker requested. At this point, the AI completes both tasks as instructed. From the AI agent’s point of view, the tasks were both valid commands, and it will complete them to the best of its ability. From the user’s point of view, he often won’t know that a secondary task was carried out on his device, leaving him unaware of any malicious activity connected to his account. And for the attacker, he receives the stolen data with little fanfare. RELATED: Protect yourself now from Apple's latest privacy fail itsarasak thithuekthak/Getty Images What makes GhostWriter especially dangerous is that it’s not a virus or a hack in itself. It's simply a tweak to the AI’s memory — a simple hidden command to do something its original user didn’t intend for it to do, nor could the user know to issue his own command to stop the act. GhostWriter is also persistent, meaning that it can’t be overridden or erased as long as the potential victim is unaware it exists. Instead, it lies dormant for weeks, months, or even years until the right user prompt triggers the command that causes the malicious activity to be carried out. Now, the good newsIf there’s any silver lining, it’s the fact that GhostWriter largely affects agentic AI, or agents. Most AI platforms on the market today — including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok — are all simple chatbots that require human input to carry out tasks. That means for most casual users, GhostWriter shouldn’t pose a threat to their personal information. That said, while AI agents are still quite rare, many of the top AI companies in the world are scrambling to build functional versions to carry out work projects, complete personal tasks, and more. NVIDIA, a hardware leader in the space, wishes to outfit companies with enterprise AI that can work alongside (and even replace) human employees. Then there’s Google, which wants to load an agentic version of Gemini into Android devices called Gemini Intelligence. Although agents are scarce today, all the major AI platforms are working hard to make agents ubiquitous in the next five years or less. As for those who do rely on agentic AI today, the New Mexico State University researchers believe that Agentic Memory Sentry, a defense system that uses refined memory saving and retrieval mechanisms to lower the likelihood of a successful GhostWriter attack, is the best way to thwart potential attacks, though even this method isn’t perfect yet. Ultimately, users will either have to trust agentic AI with these built-in risks, or avoid it altogether. I know which option I’ll pick.

As anti-Jewish rhetoric gains traction in some corners of the political right, BlazeTV host Allie Beth Stuckey says the church can no longer afford to stay silent about what she calls “Israel derangement syndrome.”“The Israel derangement syndrome, the Jewish derangement syndrome that has infected the minds of so many people, that they see Jewish people behind every closed door, that they’re behind every conspiracy, that they’re pulling the strings of power in every single direction, and that everything, somehow every tragedy, every injustice comes back to Israel, that is just beyond the pale,” Stuckey says.“That is beyond logic. That is beyond reason. I think that there is something spiritual there because we see that same pattern over and over again in so many cultures throughout history and that is anti-Christian,” she continues.This “Jewish derangement syndrome,” Stuckey says, has “blinded them to reality.”“Scripture gives us no reason whatsoever to sever Christianity from its Jewish roots. Jesus came as Israel’s Messiah, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. And the gospel came, according to Romans 1:16, to the Jew first and also to the Greek,” she explains.“Christianity, it is absolutely true and inarguable, is rooted in God’s covenant with Israel, which Christ fulfilled,” she continues.“Jesus was born under the Jewish law given to Moses in the Old Testament and came to those who were under the law, to Jews. That was His primary mission field. That’s what He reiterated over and over again,” she adds.What those with “Israel derangement syndrome” are attempting to do is separate Christianity from Judaism when the Bible makes clear that it’s impossible.“You cannot when you serve a Jewish savior and a God who does not go back on His promises,” Stuckey says.“One plan of salvation through Jesus Christ for Jews and Gentiles and every single person. That does not negate the very real Jewish context, Jewish history, Jewish principles that are shared because of the biblical canon, because of the history of who God actually is,” she explains.Stuckey also points out that many detractors claim that we don’t have Judeo-Christian roots because our founding fathers were not Jewish.“A lot of the people I see saying that are what you call ‘trad Cath.’ A lot of the people I see pushing back against this Judeo-Christian terminology moniker are Catholic themselves. So if we are going to say we can’t call it Judeo-Christian because the founders weren’t Jewish ... we’re also not going to call it Catholic Christian because the founders weren’t Catholic,” she says.“When people are saying Judeo-Christian, they’re not saying that some of the founders were Jewish. They were saying, ‘We have these shared principles of people being made by a God whose power and knowledge transcends ours,’” she adds.Want more from Allie Beth Stuckey?To enjoy more of Allie’s upbeat and in-depth coverage of culture, news, and theology from a Christian, conservative perspective, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.