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When most presidents cite illustrious predecessors, they usually turn to all-time greats such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt or to more recent favorites such as John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan. But in yet another reminder of what an outlier he is, President Donald Trump keeps extolling William McKinley, who held the office from 1897 to 1901 and is generally considered to be average at best: In one recent survey of scholars, he was ranked No. 24 out of 45 presidents.

President Jimmy Carter spent his last hours in office on Jan. 20, 1981, negotiating the release of 52 American hostages held in Iran, but they did not head home until shortly after Ronald Reagan had been inaugurated. In similar fashion, President Joe Biden and his aides have spent their last days in office negotiating the release of Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip — and most of those hostages will not come home until after Biden has left the White House.

Tuesday’s confirmation hearings for defense secretary are sure to focus on all the troubling allegations of misconduct swirling around intended nominee Pete Hegseth (which he has denied). But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. The essential question that senators must ask is whether Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guardsman, has the capacity and experience to prepare the armed forces to fight a major war — and, if so, how he would go about it. Because right now, the U.S. military simply is not ready to defeat an adversary such as China or Russia in a protracted conflict.

There is a great deal of speculation and concern about what Donald Trump will do once back in the Oval Office, but in one area, at least, the country can expect a great deal of continuity with the Biden administration. In 2017, Trump abandoned the post-1945 U.S. policy of championing free trade. You might have expected Joe Biden, a candidate promising a return to normality, to reverse Trump’s lurch toward protectionism. But no. Just as Dwight D. Eisenhower ratified Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal by not trying to overturn it, so Biden ratified Trump’s economically destructive embrace of tariffs and trade barriers in a chimerical quest to make U.S. manufacturing great again.

On Christmas Day, a cable carrying electricity from Finland to Estonia was severed in the Baltic Sea, while four other submarine cables carrying data were damaged. Finnish authorities found an anchor drag mark on the seabed and seized a tanker that is believed to be part of the “shadow fleet” that Russia uses to export oil and gas in violation of Western sanctions.

A decade ago, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, went down over a portion of eastern Ukraine controlled by Russian-backed forces, killing 298 passengers and crew. The Kremlin denied responsibility and spun out various conspiracy theories, blaming the crash on either a Ukrainian fighter jet or some kind of elaborate CIA plot. (A Russian website even bizarrely claimed that the passengers were already dead when the plane took off.) Eventually a Dutch-led investigation proved that the airplane had been brought down by a Russian Buk surface-to-air missile system fired from the Russian-controlled region of Ukraine.

The fall of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has dealt a devastating blow to Iran’s strategy of dominating the Middle East via proxies. The Assad regime was not only Iran’s most important ally but also a vital conduit to Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful proxy militia. It will be hard to rebuild Hezbollah after the mauling it has received from Israel if Syria doesn’t cooperate — and there is every reason to believe that the Sunni regime taking shape in Damascus will be hostile to Shiite rulers in Tehran. Meanwhile, in Gaza, another major Iranian-supported militia — Hamas — also lies in ruins.

A year ago, the online publication Task & Purpose counted at least seven Russian generals killed during the war in Ukraine. In Western countries, their deaths were generally applauded, because Russia is the aggressor in the conflict and the generals were killed in combat. The United States reportedly provided the intelligence that allowed Ukrainian forces to target some of the headquarters where these generals died.

Mass hysteria is a recurring feature of American life. In 1938, it was about an alien invasion — sparked by Orson Welles’s radio drama “The War of the Worlds.” In the 1950s, it was flying saucers. Today, it’s drones — another form of UFO, or unidentified flying object.

The historian’s occupational hazard is giving the impression that what happened must have happened, that the march of events was inevitably leading to a single destination. Recent events in Syria — and I do mean recent — show how unpredictable history actually is when seen in real-time rather than in retrospect.

The United States can’t overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but it shouldn’t prop him up.

The cease-fire agreement between Hezbollah and Israel is being touted by right-wing admirers of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as evidence that Israel can use its superior military power to force its enemies to meet its demands without the kinds of compromises advocated by the supposedly wimpy Biden administration.

Why does President-elect Donald Trump intend to nominate as his defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and former major in the Army National Guard who has no experience running a vast organization like the Defense Department and who is now embroiled in a sexual assault scandal? (He denies wrongdoing in the 2017 incident, and no police charges were filed.)

With little more than two months left in office, President Joe Biden has belatedly heeded Ukraine’s pleas and reportedly allowed the use of American-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) inside Russia. This comes a little more than a week after another post-election decision to allow a small number of U.S. defense contractors to fix U.S.-made weapons systems inside Ukraine, rather than forcing Ukrainians to take their weapons to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries for repair. All of this calls to mind the anonymous quip—often wrongly attributed to former United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill—that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all the other options.

During his first presidential term, Donald Trump appointed a number of generals or retired generals to senior jobs, including Jim Mattis as defense secretary, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, and John F. Kelly, first as homeland security secretary and then White House chief of staff. Trump, who had avoided military service during the Vietnam War, initially seemed to revel in the aura of martial manliness that they conferred on his administration. He loved calling Mattis “Mad Dog,” a nickname that the cerebral retired Marine general disliked.

During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised, as one of his first orders of business, to end the war in Ukraine. “I will get that settled and fast,” he vowed during his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, adding, “If I’m president-elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president.” But Trump never outlined a plan for accomplishing that ambitious objective, and now he faces the challenge of making good on his promise.

A female presidential candidate just defeated a Russian-backed male who threatens democracy and has faced corruption charges. Whether or not the Moldovan election result is an augury for the U.S. election, it is undoubtedly good news for the cause of freedom around the world — and bad news for dictators like Vladimir Putin who seek to impose their will on their neighbors.

Israel-Iran hostilities. North Korean troops getting ready to fight Ukraine. Chinese military exercises around Taiwan. Suspected Russian sabotage in Europe, and Russia providing targeting data to the Houthis.

Having killed two of its leading enemies — Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah — Israel is expanding its military ambitions in the multifront struggle against Iranian proxies. Israel is not only trying to stop Hezbollah from rocketing northern Israel, it is also bombing the group’s financial institutions all over Lebanon to undermine the terrorist organization’s grip on the Lebanese state. Hope is growing, at least in some quarters, that Israel can ultimately defeat Iran and, as a former Mossad chief recently said, “reshape the Middle East.”

A year ago, it was unthinkable for Israel and Iran to be directly attacking each other’s territory. The two countries have carried on a shadow war for years, with Israel targeting Iranian nuclear scientists, Iranian supply convoys in Syria and the like, while Iran sponsored proxy attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah, among other militant groups. But the two countries refrained from directly bombing each other. Now, what was unthinkable has, alas, become routine.