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Readers of this column may be surprised to learn that I don’t spend all of my time thinking about drones or diplomatic démarches. I’m also a huge — fanatical may not be inappropriate — sports fan. I devote a ridiculous amount of time to following my two favorite teams: the New York Knicks and the San Francisco 49ers. (Why New York and San Francisco? The former is my current home, and the latter is close to where I went to college.) I also follow, with lesser degrees of devotion, tennis (I never miss a U.S. Open), baseball, soccer, and college football and basketball (particularly the Cal Golden Bears).

Is President Donald Trump a peacemaker or a warmonger? An interventionist or an isolationist? The answer is: yes. He contains multitudes, and it’s nearly impossible to sort out or explain the disparate strands of his foreign policy.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who died on November 3 at age 84, enjoyed some unexpected respect in his last years from Democrats who once viewed him as a Machiavellian warmonger. This was because, following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Cheney became an outspoken critic of Donald Trump.

There are too many scandals to count in the Trump administration, but one of the most significant isn’t getting the attention it deserves. I refer to efforts by President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to politicize the armed forces and to turn them into instruments of their MAGA agenda.

The United States has a long record of fomenting regime change in Latin America, whether under the rubric of the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th and early 20th centuries or the fight against communism during the Cold War. This strategy has seldom worked out well, even when successful, and it has led to deep-rooted resentment of “The Colossus of the North.” Yet, for some reason, President Donald Trump seems eager to reprise this ignominious history in Venezuela.

Only that eminent student of human psychology, Charles Schulz, could possibly do justice to the strange relationship between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

One of the tropes of Schulz’s long-running comic strip, “Peanuts,” was the tale of Lucy and the football. Every autumn, for decades, Lucy van Pelt would encourage Charlie Brown to kick the football — and every time she would yank it away just before his foot connected, sending him sprawling. Charlie Brown would remonstrate with Lucy, and the next year insist that he wasn’t going to fall for her tricks again. But he always did.

Monday was a historic day in the Middle East: Hamas released its 20 living Israeli hostages only days after Israel stopped its offensive in the Gaza Strip. By brokering this agreement, President Donald Trump earned the rapturous reception he received in Israel’s parliament, with lawmakers chanting his name. Even prominent Democrats are giving Trump his due, and rightly so.

With less publicity and less pushback than the high-profile deployments of the National Guard to U.S. cities, the Trump administration has undertaken another legally dubious, and strategically problematic, use of military force: against narco-cartels in the Caribbean.

There are a lot of things to worry about in the world today. Acclaimed director Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Hurt Locker”) has made a new film — “A House of Dynamite” — warning of a danger that most of us would sooner forget.

President Donald Trump has a long history as a NATO skeptic. In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, he would not commit to defending NATO allies if they were attacked by Russia, complaining, “We have many NATO members that aren’t paying their bills.” During his first trip to Europe as president in 2017, he shocked his own aides and European allies by refusing to affirm NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense guarantee. Little wonder that last year, Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, said the odds were “very high” that Trump would pull out of NATO if he won another term.

Last year, Congress overwhelmingly passed, and President Joe Biden signed, legislation that would require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to either sell or shut down the popular social media site in the United States. Congress took this extraordinary step because of widespread concern that the Chinese Communist regime could use the app to gather data on — and spread propaganda to — 170 million American users.

NATO chased away the jets a week after shooting down Russian drones in Poland. These incidents add to a troubling trend.

President Donald Trump’s outreach to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, culminating in their Alaska summit, predictably made for front-page news. Less well known is his courtship of Putin’s ally — “lackey” is more like it — Alexander Lukashenko, the long-entrenched president of Belarus. (He has been the only leader the country has known since its independence from the Soviet Union.)

An accident or an attack?

That is the question being asked after Russian and Belarusian drones breached Polish airspace 19 times between 11:30 p.m. Tuesday and 6:30 a.m. Wednesday. The Russian government denied, preposterously, that some of the drones were even Russian, and the Belarusian regime, which is closely allied with the Kremlin, blamed Ukraine for driving the drones off course. But Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said, “Our assessment is that they did not veer off course but were deliberately targeted.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War is a perfect encapsulation of how he employs the military. It’s gimmicky and newsworthy, it prioritizes style over substance — and pushes the legal limits of presidential power.

Speaking to a U.S.-Saudi investment conference in Riyadh on May 13, President Donald Trump enunciated what might be called the Trump doctrine of noninterference in other nations’ internal affairs. He denounced “Western interventionalists” who give foreign leaders “lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.” By contrast, he said, “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment; my job, to defend America.”

Bad things happen when intelligence agencies don’t do their jobs well. The United States saw that with the Pearl Harbor and 9/11 attacks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. More recently, Russia has paid a heavy price for the willingness of its intelligence chiefs to confirm President Vladimir Putin’s misapprehension in 2022 that his troops could march into Kyiv in a matter of days. When intelligence is wrong, lives are lost — often many, many lives.

A flurry of diplomatic activity in the past two weeks was designed to end the war in Ukraine: U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff went to Moscow on Aug. 6 to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin went to Alaska on Friday to meet President Donald Trump. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and various European leaders went to the White House on Monday to meet Trump.

U.S. leaders and their Soviet or Russian counterparts have met many times in the more than eight decades since Franklin D. Roosevelt journeyed to Tehran in 1943 for a summit with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. The Friday meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska was far from the worst. But it wasn’t good, either, except from the Kremlin’s vantage point.

“BRICS is dead,” President Donald Trump proclaimed in February. He was referring to the loose grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, which has been expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, along with various “partner countries” from the Global South.