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If Western allies fail to send Ukraine the weapons it needs, the odds increase of the war dragging on indefinitely, at a terrible cost to both Ukraine and Russia and a growing risk to the wider world.

I fear for America’s future and hence the world’s — more so now than ever. I had relaxed a bit after the last two national elections, which had seemed to signal a return to normalcy. Donald Trump was decisively defeated in 2020 and, in 2022, most of his fellow election deniers also lost in their bids to take over the election machinery of swing states.

The war in Ukraine — Europe’s biggest conflict since 1945 — features a bewildering combination of old and new technologies and tactics. The artillery duels, minefields and trench warfare are straight out of World War I, and yet much of the Ukrainian artillery fire is now being spotted by drones and adjusted on tablet computers linked via satellite to the internet. It sometimes feels like a mash-up of “All Quiet on the Western Front” and “Blade Runner.”

President Biden’s first visit to Vietnam on Sunday will mark another significant advance for U.S. national security interests in the Indo-Pacific region. Already, the administration has signed a deal to help Australia produce nuclear submarines, expanded U.S. military access in the Philippines, deepened U.S. relations with India, and brought South Korea and Japan together in a new trilateral relationship. Now, following his attendance at the Group of 20 summit in New Delhi, Biden is unveiling a “comprehensive strategic partnership” that will expand economic and security cooperation with Hanoi. That’s a remarkable achievement given Vietnam’s long-standing ties to Moscow and Beijing, and one that will help counter China’s worrisome influence in the region.

Some U.S. military officials appear astonished that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has not made a rapid breakthrough — and, through anonymous quotes to the news media, they are laying the blame on the Ukrainian military. Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold, by contrast, isn’t the least bit surprised at the slow pace of the advance — and he’s blaming the Americans, not the Ukrainians.

Ukrainian drone strikes on Moscow, once unthinkable, have now become routine. The Russian capital region was targeted for six straight days recently, and while the drones haven’t caused much damage, they disrupted flight operations at airports and have helped to bring the war home. Also this month, other suspected Ukrainian drones destroyed a Russian bomber at an air base south of St. Petersburg and struck a railway station in the Kursk region of western Russia. The Kremlin’s response appeared to be limited to expressions of outrage.

The most fitting epitaph for Wagner Group founder Yevgeniy Prigozhin was delivered by the shotgun-wielding hit man Omar Little on “The Wire”: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” There’s still much we don’t know for certain (and might never know), but that pearl of wisdom was confirmed by Prigozhin’s apparent death Wednesday after a private plane he was on reportedly crashed north of Moscow.

For the past decade, Americans have been transfixed by the specter of a rising China. We’ve worried that the Chinese economy would destroy American jobs and that the Chinese military would draw the United States into a war over Taiwan. Now comes evidence that China’s economy is stagnating — and those problems are unlikely to go away, because China’s population is rapidly aging and declining. The “Chinese century” might be over before it has begun.

It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Friday’s summit at Camp David among President Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. This represents another major step toward the establishment of a new trilateral alliance that could help all three nations cope with the growing threats from North Korea and China in a world destabilized by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

There is something thrilling about seeing former president Donald Trump arraigned in court: It shows that no one is above the law. There are many countries where such a spectacle would be unthinkable — where heads of state can never be removed from office, much less prosecuted, no matter how many laws they break.

I came of age on stories of hard-working kibbutzim turning desert soil green and heroic Israeli soldiers rescuing hostages at Entebbe....Yet, while I retain affection for Israel, I often feel as if I do not recognize what it has become. This is a familiar feeling for me, since I am similarly befuddled by modern America: How did we turn into a land of book banners and covid deniers? Both Israel and the United States have been disfigured by the rise of populist rabble-rousers who have tapped into ugly and unsavory prejudices.

Even before Donald Trump was elected president, I wrote that he was America’s No. 1 security threat. Today, I am convinced that Israel’s No. 1 security threat comes from its Trump-like prime minister: Benjamin Netanyahu.

If you want to know the differences on national security between Democrats and MAGA Republicans, it all boils down to one word: Helsinki.

If you admit Ukraine to NATO anytime soon, you’re making NATO a direct party to a conflict with a nuclear armed state. The focus right now should be on providing as many weapons as possible to Ukraine for the success of their counteroffensive and to roll back the Russian aggression.

American liberals have generally been more stalwart in support of Ukraine than American conservatives. (In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 44 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said the United States is sending too much aid to Ukraine compared with only 14 percent of Democrats and Democratic leaners.) Yet now progressives are balking at the Biden administration’s decision last week to provide Ukraine with cluster munitions. Liberal hesitancy is understandable but misguided — and inimical to the goal of protecting human rights in Ukraine.

The NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, on Tuesday and Wednesday will focus on the difficult question of whether Ukraine should be given an invitation to join the transatlantic alliance. My heart says yes, but my head says no.

The past few days have been the most tumultuous in Russia’s history since the constitutional crisis in October 1993 when Boris Yeltsin ordered the army to shell the parliament to stop an attempt to oust him. Yeltsin held on to power, but he could never quite claim the same degree of legitimacy again, and within six years, he was gone from office. His handpicked successor, Putin, has now had his own legitimacy undermined by the revolt of Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries. Whether the damage is fatal remains to be determined.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is learning what so many tyrants have learned before him: When you unleash the dogs of war, they can come back to bite you. When the Russian strongman sent his troops marching to take Kyiv, he never imagined that 16 months later, mutinous Wagner mercenary group troops would march on Moscow.

Republicans love to posture as the “strong on defense” party, and many GOP members of Congress can genuinely claim that label. But there is also a substantial minority of MAGA extremists whose devotion to fighting culture wars imperils America’s ability to fight actual wars.

Washington’s badly frayed relations with China were just starting to recover from the Chinese spy balloon that traversed the United States in early February before being shot down over the Atlantic Ocean. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who had been forced to postpone his trip to Beijing because of all the hot air about the balloon flight, had finally rescheduled his visit for June 18. Then, last week, came word of a Chinese spy station in Cuba. In truth, there is nothing particularly scandalous about the latest revelations.