Foreign desk: The World Is Adjusting to President Trump

President Trump’s unorthodox approach to world affairs is bearing fruit, reports Anne Gearan at The Washington Post. The peace conference between North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s Moon Jae-in was just “the capstone to a week that crystallized the ways Trump has established his foreign policy approach as one that rests largely on the pride he takes in busting the old conventions of diplomatic negotiations and remaking them in his image.” French and German leaders hoped to persuade Trump to remain in the Iran nuclear deal, but have admitted they failed and “instead focused on how to work around their differences.” And British Prime Minister Theresa May has finally decided to “invite him to visit what is often called America’s closest ally.”

From the right: Comey’s Slippery Defense of ‘Leaking’

Is James Comey a “leaker” for giving his friend his FBI memos, one of which the friend was instructed to describe to The New York Times? Comey says no. “I think of a leak as an unauthorized disclosure of classified information,” the former FBI director told CNN. But, says the Washington Examiner’s Byron York, “that is clearly at odds with the general understanding . . . For example, the Health and Human Services secretary might be preparing a controversial proposal on hospital funding, and an adversary inside the agency might secretly give a draft copy to the Washington Post. That’s a leak.” Comey also told Fox’s Bret Baier that he didn’t think of the memos as FBI work product but more “like a diary.” Comey, says York, “insists he did nothing wrong, no matter how it looks.”

Media watch: Press Freedom Still Flourishes in the US

President Trump’s “appetite for flattery and his intolerance for criticism are among his least appealing characteristics,” notes Jonathan Tobin at National Review. Yet despite all the clamoring about the president’s supposed threats to the First Amendment, “Freedom of the press is alive and well.” Reporters Without Borders disagrees, and dropped the United States a few spots on its press-freedom list — but there’s nothing to support such overdramatic action, Tobin says: “For all of Trump’s anger at the press, neither RWB nor the roundups of usual suspects on cable-news panels can point to a single instance of the administration’s actually doing anything to interfere with freedom of the press.” Reporters may not like being criticized, but that does not make them oppressed.

Culture file: Still Paying for the Sexual Revolution

One obstacle facing the #MeToo moment is that the sexual revolution left more than simple freedom behind, notes Kay Hymowitz at the Los Angeles Times: “The sexual revolution also helped midwife the soaring number of single-parent families and the related ills of inequality, poverty, achievement gaps, and men MIA from family life.” And the costs of that revolution were borne by all: “By proclaiming sexual self-expression as the primo value for all enlightened people, it weakened social support for those women who weren’t in the mood.” What’s more, long-established cultural norms took a while to fade. Now they have, leaving in their wake a generation of men stuck on immature notions of courtship: “Most of us of a certain age weren’t limited to a dating pool heavily populated by males in the throes of porn- and hookup-infected post-adolescence.”

Conservative take: Medical World’s ‘Post-Familialism’

Ross Douthat sees parallels in the cases of Alfie Evans — the UK toddler who died five days after being denied treatment — and elderly Americans taken advantage of by court-appointed medical guardians. It’s occasioned by the “coming world of post-familialism,” Douthat writes at The New York Times. “Just as more and more children are growing up without the active fathers who fought for Charlie Gard and Alfie Evans or the extended kinship network that saved Jahi McMath, more and more people will face old age without sons and daughters to care for them or to challenge the medical-judicial complex’s will.” People will keep falling through these cracks, he notes, but we must “ensure that where the family still has the capacity to choose for an aging parent or a dying child, the family rather than the system gets to make the choice.”

— Compiled by Seth Mandel