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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.

David Petraeus has had his share of setbacks as well as successes, but he remains one of the most respected generals of modern times. He is also no Pollyanna. Even while the 101st Airborne Division was rapidly advancing on Baghdad under his command in 2003, he wondered: “Tell me how this ends.”

Last week, the U.S. military released a video of a Chinese jet fighter flying dangerously close to a U.S. Air Force RC-135 surveillance aircraft over the South China Sea. On Saturday, a Chinese warship maneuvered perilously close to a U.S. destroyer in the Taiwan Strait. Imagine the crisis that would have resulted if either incident had resulted in a collision. These near misses demonstrate why it is so important to establish lines of communication between the U.S. Department of Defense and the Chinese Ministry of National Defense to prevent a dangerous escalation.

Every Memorial Day, we honor the valor and sacrifice of American troops. But many of them lost their lives unnecessarily because the military was poorly prepared for the wars it had to wage. From the First Battle of Bull Run (1861) to Kasserine Pass (1943) to Task Force Smith in South Korea (1950) to the insurgency in Iraq (2003), U.S. armed forces have often lost the early battles of their wars. In the years to come, such failures could have even more catastrophic consequences than in the past. The job of the Army Futures Command (AFC) is to ensure that doesn’t happen.

From afar, the war in Ukraine can look like a bloody stalemate with no winners and no choice but a negotiated solution. The Ukrainians’ confidence that they can expel the Russian invaders from all of their soil, even Crimea (occupied by the Russians since 2014), can seem delusional. The same Washington eminences who expected last year that Kyiv would fall within 72 hours now warn that Ukrainians might have to settle for a “frozen” conflict that will leave Moscow’s war criminals in control of one-fifth of their land.

A historic event occurred at the end of April: According to estimates from the United Nations, India, with more than 1.4 billion people, surpassed China in population. Many news stories noted this shift but actually undersold its significance by cautiously claiming that China has had the world’s largest population only for a few centuries. In fact, Jack Goldstone, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, tells me that evidence suggests China has been the world’s most-populous polity throughout recorded history — with records dating back more than 2,000 years.

In 2020, President Donald Trump hailed the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Israel and two Arab states (the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain) as the “dawn of a new Middle East.” He was right, but not in the way he meant. Future historians are likely to see the accords as one of the first signs of an emerging post-American order in the Middle East.

The fate of Ukraine’s coming counteroffensive will hinge on the capabilities of its armed forces, but another factor will also be of great importance: the Ukrainians working diligently behind the scenes to supply the front-line fighters with the weapons and equipment they need to overcome the more numerous Russian invaders.

In early January, President Yoon Suk Yeol made news by suggesting that, with the North Korean nuclear threat rising, South Korea might want to build its own nuclear arsenal. After a domestic and foreign backlash, Yoon, who arrives in Washington this week, walked back that suggestion. But in March, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon — a prominent member of Yoon’s own party who is seen as a leading presidential candidate in 2027 — also raised the possibility of South Korea going nuclear. That option was backed, in a recent poll, by 77 percent of South Koreans.

I keep thinking about the comment that Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) made at the first hearing, back on Feb. 28, of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): “This is an existential struggle over what life will look like in the 21st century, and the most fundamental freedoms are at stake.” The committee chairman was right, but not in the way that he meant.

There hasn’t been much movement on the front lines of Ukraine since Ukrainian forces liberated the city of Kherson in early November. It’s easy to conclude that the war is at a stalemate pending the outcome of Ukraine’s widely expected spring offensive — which would benefit from even more Western support than it has been getting. While there might be an element of truth to that assumption, it also masks a lot of developments in the past five months that have been positive for Ukraine and negative for Russia.

Last week, facing massive strikes and protests, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put on hold his ill-advised plans for reform of the courts (which would effectively end judicial review of legislation). But the aftershocks of his so-far unsuccessful power grab continue to reverberate in Israel’s relations with its most important ally — the United States.