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Visiting Israel, as I did last week, is a depressing experience as the war in Gaza nears its ninth month. I’ve been coming to Israel for a quarter-century, and I’ve never seen Israelis as gloomy as they are now — not even during the second intifada in the early 2000s, when Palestinian terrorists were regularly blowing up public buses.

JERUSALEM — The “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty signed on Wednesday by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is only the latest manifestation of one of the most sinister and troubling trends in world affairs today: Russia, Iran, North Korea and China are all working together, to a greater or lesser degree, to challenge the U.S.-led, rules-based international order.

It hasn’t received the attention it deserves, but Ukraine’s unexpected victory in the battle of the Black Sea could be a landmark achievement in the annals of naval warfare. Without a standing navy of its own, Ukraine has disabled at least one-third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, broken the Russian naval blockade and reopened the Black Sea to its grain exports. Ukraine’s export volumes are now approaching prewar levels, providing a huge boon to its wartime economy.

In 2016, Donald Trump promised to a build a wall. This year, he should promise to build a time machine to go back and fix all the world crises he claims would never have happened if only he hadn’t lost the 2020 election.

Americans are conditioned by popular culture to believe from an early age that good inevitably triumphs over evil. For more than a hundred years — from the days of Tom Mix to Tom Cruise — Hollywood has been churning out plotlines in which the villains get their comeuppance before the closing credits.

SEOUL — From Gaza to Ukraine, the world is a pretty bleak place right now. One bright spot is the nascent trilateral relationship among the United States, Japan and South Korea that was heralded less than a year ago at the historic Camp David summit by President Biden, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol. The Seoul-Tokyo relationship had been fraught since the end of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea in 1945. The Camp David meeting was a breakthrough moment when Biden announced a “new era” of partnership that would strengthen deterrence not only against North Korea but also China.

MAGA Republicans often raise the fanciful specter of foreigners voting in U.S. elections. That almost never happens, because only U.S. citizens can legally vote. But foreign countries enjoy considerable leeway to influence U.S. elections. Russia took advantage in 2016 to intervene on behalf of Donald Trump, helping him eke out a narrow victory. The Kremlin appears to be gearing up another pro-Trump campaign this year.

From the start of Israel’s war in Gaza, President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been divided by a clash of counterinsurgency visions. Israel has been determined to destroy Hamas at all costs, while U.S. officials have worried that Israel was inflicting too many civilian casualties, was not doing enough to ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid and lacked a “day after” plan to stabilize Gaza after Hamas’s defeat. As one U.S. official told me, “The Israelis are showing how not to do counterinsurgency.”

In war, you should always expect the unexpected. Ukrainian forces have been bracing for a spring or summer Russian offensive focused on the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, to follow up on Russia’s February success in taking the town of Avdiivka. That attack might still come, but, in the meantime, Russian troops have mounted an unexpected cross-border assault in the Kharkiv region in the country’s northeast.

The current protest movement is minuscule in comparison with the one a half-century ago. There is no military draft to galvanize student activism — this is Israel’s war, not America’s. But there is one glaring similarity between protests then and now: In both cases, the protesters’ ideological and behavioral excesses undermine the very causes for which they fight.

U.S. allies had a collective freakout earlier this year when aid to Ukraine was stalled in Congress and former president Donald Trump threatened to let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO members that did not pay enough for their own defense. A European diplomat told me in March, “It is scary and should be scary.” After all, Europe had not faced the prospect of defending itself without significant help from the United States since 1945.

After a shamefully long delay, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that includes $61 billion for Ukraine on Tuesday, only days after CIA Director Bill Burns warned that Ukraine was in danger of “losing” the war this year without U.S. assistance. This aid should help fill critical ammunition shortfalls and allow the Ukrainians to hold the lines in the face of a looming Russian summer offensive.

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.