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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.

President Donald Trump’s unhealthy obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize has driven him to make a series of rash decisions in pursuit of ending the war in Ukraine. The latest example is the scheduling of a premature summit with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in Alaska — an object lesson in how not to do diplomacy.

For lifelong supporters of Israel like me, its war in Gaza is a gut-check moment.

Like many American Jews, I was brought up believing that Israel was a light onto the nations, that the United States should always support Israel, and that, indeed, support for Israel was inseparable from the Jewish faith. As I grew older, I lost my religious faith but maintained my love of the Jewish state, a vibrant, Western-style democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

In January, President Donald Trump declared trade war on China. It gives me no pleasure to report that China — a ruthless anti-American dictatorship — is winning. But the evidence is inescapable.

You can see it in the economic numbers: China’s economy grew by an average of 5.3 percent in the first half of the year, America’s by only 1.25 percent. You can see it, too, in Trump’s failure to wring significant concessions from Beijing. While most countries have acquiesced to U.S. trade bullying, China has not. In April, Trump hiked U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 percent. China retaliated with 125 percent tariffs on U.S. goods. Then President Xi Jinping ramped up the pressure by restricting exports of rare earth metals to the United States, threatening to halt production of everything from cars to fighter jets.

Back in February — before he belatedly realized that Russia, rather than Ukraine, was to blame for the failure of peace talks — President Donald Trump denounced President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “Dictator without Elections.”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in late May that President Donald Trump exceeded his authority with the “reciprocal tariffs” he imposed on dozens of countries in April. The court’s temporary injunction was lifted, however, by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which will hear oral arguments in the case on July 31. That has allowed the president to continue imposing tariffs on any country for seemingly any reason.

President Donald Trump’s announcement on Monday about aid to Ukraine proves once again that he is nothing if not unpredictable.

If Trump has been consistent about one thing throughout his tumultuous, decade-long political career, it is support for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and skepticism of Ukraine. In 2014, Trump praised Putin’s illegal seizure of Crimea — a prelude to Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine — as “so smart.” Trump’s anti-Ukraine animus reached its nadir in February when he engaged in an Oval Office shouting match with President Volodymyr Zelensky. That led to a temporary pause on U.S. aid to Kyiv and could easily have signaled that the United States was abandoning Ukraine altogether.