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The last U.S. aid bill for Ukraine was approved in December 2022 when Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. The Biden administration has been requesting another aid package, with growing urgency, since last August. Now, nearly four months after almost all U.S. aid shipments ran out, the Republican-controlled House finally approved on Saturday a $61 billion aid bill for Ukraine as part of a larger foreign-assistance package. This would seem to vindicate the aphorism (often wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill) that America can always be counted on to do the right thing after having exhausted all the alternatives.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has become notorious for ignoring President Biden’s advice on dealing with the Palestinians. Israel was so slow to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, the United States felt compelled to deliver its own assistance by air and sea. And Netanyahu has made it clear that, despite White House importuning, he will not allow the Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza after Hamas is gone. As for the West Bank, Netanyahu’s government gave the Biden administration the back of its hand in March by announcing the largest annexation of Palestinian land in decades while Secretary of State Antony Blinken was visiting Israel.

When I read a recent news article by my Post colleagues headlined “Inside Donald Trump’s secret, long-shot plan to end the war in Ukraine,” my thoughts naturally turned to another election in which another Republican presidential candidate was widely reported to have a “secret plan” to end another war. Richard M. Nixon did not actually make that claim himself about the Vietnam War during the 1968 campaign. Instead, he made a vague promise to “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific” and let voters imagine he knew how do that.

Disaster was narrowly averted on Saturday night in the long-standing conflict between Israel and Iran. Israel, aided by the United States and other allies, successfully repelled a massive Iranian drone and missile strike. But the reprieve might be short-lived.

Iran and its proxy groups did not launch an all-out assault against Israel and its allies, as Hamas leaders might have hoped, following Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 incursion into Israel. But Hezbollah, which is trained and armed in Lebanon by Iran, did intensify its rocket attacks on northern Israel; the Houthis in Yemen did begin attacking shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with drones and missiles; and other Iranian-backed proxy groups targeted U.S. military outposts in Iraq and Syria with a barrage of missile and drone strikes.

Spending a recent week in Egypt made me realize what is desperately missing from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a peacemaker in the mold of Anwar Sadat.

The Egyptian president became a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and one of the greatest leaders of modern times by risking everything — including, as it turned out, his life — for peace. Even those of us too young to remember the events at the time can still thrill to Sadat’s dramatic visit to Israel in 1977 following four major wars between the two countries. This prepared the way for the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. It was the first time an Arab state recognized the Jewish state.

There is some cruel irony in the fact that Russia, which has been the perpetrator of so many terror attacks in recent years from Syria to Ukraine, was itself struck by terrorists on Friday night. Heavily armed marauders attacked Crocus City Hall, a concert venue in Moscow, killing at least 133 people and injuring more than 100.

Like a lot of other people, I don’t use my X account much anymore. I prefer to post on Threads, because X (formerly Twitter) has become such a cesspool of hate speech and conspiracy-mongering. The problem became especially acute following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel when the platform was flooded with antisemitic and anti-Muslim misinformation. It’s like watching a once-nice neighborhood go to seed, with well-maintained houses turning into ramshackle drug dens.

Ukraine’s ammunition is running low, and its front-line positions are in danger of crumbling before a looming Russian offensive. The Senate passed a bill that included $60 billion in desperately needed aidfor Ukraine, but House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) still won’t give it a floor vote in the House. Why not? The explanation can be summarized in two words: Donald Trump. Johnson knows that the former (and possibly future) president’s most fervent followers stand ready to oust him if he dares to advance aid to Ukraine. If Nikki Haley were the presumptive Republican nominee, the aid package would have passed long ago.

In 1940 and 1941, America First isolationists argued that the United States should not help Britain resist the Nazi onslaught because it had no chance to prevail. “I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend,” Charles Lindbergh said on April 23, 1941.

Public opinion surveys suggest that, while nearly 60 percent of Americans have a favorable view of the United Nations, they are less supportive than the citizens of many other countries. Forty percent of Americans have an unfavorable impression of the global body compared with 25 percent of Britons and Germans.

Friday has been was a dark day for freedom. In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces are on the verge of taking the city of Avdiivka after a months-long fight, thereby bringing closer Vladimir Putin’s goal of fully annexing yet another Ukrainian province — Donetsk. And in a Russian penal colony north of the Arctic Circle, Russia’s foremost dissident, Alexei Navalny, was pronounced dead at age 47.

A failure by the United States to continue military aid to Ukraine would spell disaster for Ukraine and its Western allies while emboldening Russia and other potential aggressors.

KYIV — I wish House Speaker Mike Johnson and other MAGA Republicans who have been holding up desperately needed aid to Ukraine could see what I just saw there. In particular, I wish they had been with me on Wednesday morning in Dnipro, a bustling city of about 1 million people in eastern Ukraine. If they had been, they might be less willing to betray the people of Ukraine in their desperate struggle for survival against a barbaric invader.

It’s been nearly four months since Israel launched Operation Swords of Iron in response to the horrific Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Yet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still has failed to articulate a viable “day after” strategy for what happens if and when the guns fall silent. His latest dereliction may consign the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip to failure despite the bravery and dedication of ordinary Israeli soldiers.

It has become a cliché to say that every election is the most important of our lifetimes, but the looming contest between President Biden and former president Donald Trump really is. This will be a referendum not only on the future of American democracy but also on the future of America’s role in the world.

Sooner or later, it had to happen: Iran was going to cross a U.S. red line.

Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Iranian-backed militias have escalated their attacks against U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria who are assisting with continuing operations against the Islamic State. There were at least 160 such attacks in less than four months involving drones and rockets. About 70 U.S. personnel had been wounded — including in a Jan. 20 missile attack on a giant air base in Iraq’s Anbar province — but none killed.

Whichever genius in the congressional Republican caucus decided to condition aid to Ukraine on the passage of a comprehensive immigration overhaul deserves a medal … from the Kremlin. House Republicans are giving every indication that they will torpedo any immigration deal that gets done in the Senate because it won’t meet their maximalist, close-the-border demands. That will then give them the perfect excuse not to pass any further funding for Ukraine.

As Israel’s war against Hamas passed the 100-day mark, Israelis struggled to understand how their country could be accused of carrying out genocide in a war they did not start. If any party to the conflict is guilty of attempted genocide, it is Hamas. This terrorist organization, which is explicitly dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state, has carried out terrible war crimes, including the murder of Israeli civilians, the kidnapping of more than 200 Israelis (including old people and young children), and the widespread use of rape and sexual violence against Israeli girls and women. Yet last week it was Israel, not Hamas, that found itself in the dock at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

One of the most lamentable — and, to an outsider, inexplicable — features of Washington life is the political and press pile-on when some public figure has made a mistake, however minor. Before long, the Beltway cognoscenti are acting as if some soon-to-be-forgotten incident is a combination of Teapot Dome, Watergate, Iran-contra and Jan. 6, 2021, all wrapped into one.