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Last week, a Blue Angels jet buzzed a crowded beach in Pensacola, Florida. Typically the Navy’s elite flight-demonstration squadron does not fly lower than 500 feet over people on the ground. In this case, the jet was probably less than 100 feet from the beachgoers.

Of the leaders in the world’s nearly 200 countries, there is none that I admire as much as Volodymyr Zelensky. He has been a profile in courage with few equals since the days of Winston Churchill. His country might not still exist if he had heeded the urging of allies to flee when Russian troops were just outside Kyiv in February 2022. He reportedly turned down a U.S. evacuation offer by saying, famously, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

President Donald Trump is not exactly known as a model of consistency, but, even by his standards, he executed two head-spinning U-turns at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, last week — one on Iran, the other on Ukraine.

After Iran’s attacks on merchant shipping killed the ceasefire, Trump said he would reimpose the U.S. blockade and resume air strikes. But with no military path to regime change and the war already deeply unpopular at home, the president faces the same strategic dilemmas that have defined the conflict from the start.

America’s 250th anniversary arrived just after I marked a more personal milestone: my 50th year as an American. I left the Soviet Union with my divorced mother and widowed grandmother in December 1975. After a few months in Vienna and Rome, we arrived in Los Angeles on April 28, 1976, shortly before the bicentennial celebrations. I was 6 years old. Now I have lived to witness fully 20 percent of America’s history.

To hear those who know Army Gen. Christopher “CD” Donahue tell it, he is one of the military’s superstars, or “water walkers.”

As the commander of Delta Force, the Army’s top Special Operations unit, Donahue was on the front lines of fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As commander of the fabled 82nd Airborne Division, he was the last U.S. service member to leave Afghanistan in 2021. And as commander of the 18th Airborne Corps from 2022 to 2024, he played a key role in supporting Ukraine’s efforts to roll back the Russian invasion.

President Donald Trump has long complained that “we don’t win wars anymore,” a problem he has blamed on “wokeness” and “political correctness.” Last year, he set out to do something about it by rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War. His secretary, Pete Hegseth, eagerly supported the change, contending that the department would “fight to win” and wage war with “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

The war ended with a deal that gives Iran sanctions relief, reconstruction funds, and the ability to charge tolls on the world’s most critical waterway. While the White House may call it a victory, the costs suggest otherwise.

NEW YORK — Normally it’s painful to admit you were wrong, but I am practically giddy with joy as I admit that I was wrong — oh, so wrong! — to protest the firing of Tom Thibodeau as coach of the New York Knicks slightly more than a year ago.

President Trump announced at 9:03 p.m. on Friday night: “At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua.”

On May 23, President Donald Trump said a deal to end the war with Iran was almost finalized and would be “announced shortly.” Yet more than two weeks later no deal has been unveiled, and U.S. and Iranian forces continue to exchange fire regularly. Last week, an Iranian drone attack heavily damaged Kuwait’s international airport. On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed for all but a trickle of traffic.

Almost every day, Pete Hegseth offers fresh proof of why he should never have been appointed secretary of defense (or, as he prefers to call it, secretary of war). The latest example came on what should have been a solemn and sacred occasion: the commemoration of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

The “secret sauce” of American power in the post-1945 era has been the country’s network of alliances. The Soviet Union had satrapies in Eastern Europe, but few real friends. Russia doesn’t even have satellite states anymore, aside from Belarus. It does have an increasingly warm but still wary relationship with China. Beijing, in turn, is close to just a handful of other countries; North Korea is its only treaty ally.

“First of all let us rid ourselves of the foolish error that with the Army alone we can maintain the security of the State,” warned Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1951. “Security rests on a foreign policy of peace: a sincere intention to be at peace with our neighbors, and with all the nations.”

There are few sensations more pleasurable than having one’s prior assumptions confirmed with new evidence. It has always seemed to me that a prime imperative behind revolutionary regimes is the desire of marginalized individuals who were not succeeding in the ancien regime to find better career prospects by defenestrating the old elites (sometimes literally so).

The war with Iran has revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. defense establishment and suggests how the U.S. armed forces can be reshaped to fight the wars of the future. Specifically, the war has laid bare a number of vulnerabilities that urgently need to be addressed in order to prepare for conflicts against adversaries even more dangerous than Iran.

President Donald Trump predictably returned from his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping without having secured help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Now Trump must figure out how to exit a war he touted as lasting “four to five weeks” that is in its third month. Lots of armchair generals are telling him to “finish the job” by returning to bombing Iran. But the hawks overestimate what U.S. airpower can accomplish and underestimate what Iran can do in response.

John Culver is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military, a subject he began studying as a CIA analyst in 1985. From 2015 to 2018, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia. Since retiring from the CIA in 2020, he has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In advance of the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, I spoke with Culver about China’s military capabilities and what lessons the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing from the U.S. conflict with Iran. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

When the U.S. armed forces began blowing up suspected “drug boats” on Sept. 2, 2025, it was widely seen as a way not just to fight the war on drugs but also to put pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was in league with drug traffickers. Many expected that the lawless strikes — which amount to killing suspected criminals without trial — would end after U.S. forces captured Maduro at the beginning of the year.

Trump has tried bombings, a blockade, and now a vaguely defined escort operation—and Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Only diplomacy can lead to a true resolution.