David E. Sanger

Never mention a web site is coming until it's already there.

When Russia's intelligence agencies obtained some of the National Security Agency's secrets about its own cyberweapons, it appeared to do so by manipulating a virus protection program sold by Kaspersky, a Russian firm.

State oil companies in Saudi Arabia, Africa, Iran, and Mexico have often been intelligence targets for the United States.

Back channels themselves are as old as American diplomacy. Thomas Jefferson was an early enthusiast - he often routed around his secretary of state, once sending a secret letter to the American envoy in France, Robert Livingston, that contained a coded message.

When confronted with a direct threat to American security, Obama has shown he is willing to act unilaterally - in a targeted, get-in-and-get-out fashion, that avoids, at all costs, the kind of messy ground wars and lengthy occupations that have drained America's treasury and spirit for the past decades.

After more than two decades of traveling with American presidents and chief diplomats - on visits to places that have included some of the world's most repressive nations - I am used to watching leaders disappear behind closed doors.

Because our government has been so incompetent at protecting its highly sophisticated cyberweapons, those weapons have been stolen out of the electronic vaults of the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and shot right back at us.

I did think that it'd be truly cool to be a foreign correspondent, and it was. There is a degree of freedom - and the right to roam the earth on somebody else's nickel.

The government does not deny it routinely spies to advance American economic advantage, which is part of its broad definition of how it protects American national security.

Until Japan's economy drove off a cliff, there was a running argument in Asia about whether it would be wiser to follow the 'Japan model' - with its megacorporations, jobs for life, state control of strategic industries - or the 'American model' of largely unfettered markets.

I've been covering North Korea nuclear issues since I was a young reporter in the Tokyo bureau of 'The Times' and wrote some of the first pieces about the existence of the program at Yongbyon.

The Trump vision, in fact, is an America unbound by a half-century of trade deals, free to pursue a nationalistic approach in which success is measured not by the quality of its alliances but the economic return on its transactions.