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To hear those who know Army Gen. Christopher “CD” Donahue tell it, he is one of the military’s superstars, or “water walkers.”

As the commander of Delta Force, the Army’s top Special Operations unit, Donahue was on the front lines of fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. As commander of the fabled 82nd Airborne Division, he was the last U.S. service member to leave Afghanistan in 2021. And as commander of the 18th Airborne Corps from 2022 to 2024, he played a key role in supporting Ukraine’s efforts to roll back the Russian invasion.

President Donald Trump has long complained that “we don’t win wars anymore,” a problem he has blamed on “wokeness” and “political correctness.” Last year, he set out to do something about it by rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War. His secretary, Pete Hegseth, eagerly supported the change, contending that the department would “fight to win” and wage war with “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

The war ended with a deal that gives Iran sanctions relief, reconstruction funds, and the ability to charge tolls on the world’s most critical waterway. While the White House may call it a victory, the costs suggest otherwise.

NEW YORK — Normally it’s painful to admit you were wrong, but I am practically giddy with joy as I admit that I was wrong — oh, so wrong! — to protest the firing of Tom Thibodeau as coach of the New York Knicks slightly more than a year ago.

President Trump announced at 9:03 p.m. on Friday night: “At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua.”

On May 23, President Donald Trump said a deal to end the war with Iran was almost finalized and would be “announced shortly.” Yet more than two weeks later no deal has been unveiled, and U.S. and Iranian forces continue to exchange fire regularly. Last week, an Iranian drone attack heavily damaged Kuwait’s international airport. On Sunday, Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, and Israel struck back. The Strait of Hormuz remains closed for all but a trickle of traffic.

Almost every day, Pete Hegseth offers fresh proof of why he should never have been appointed secretary of defense (or, as he prefers to call it, secretary of war). The latest example came on what should have been a solemn and sacred occasion: the commemoration of the D-Day landings on June 6, 1944.

The “secret sauce” of American power in the post-1945 era has been the country’s network of alliances. The Soviet Union had satrapies in Eastern Europe, but few real friends. Russia doesn’t even have satellite states anymore, aside from Belarus. It does have an increasingly warm but still wary relationship with China. Beijing, in turn, is close to just a handful of other countries; North Korea is its only treaty ally.

“First of all let us rid ourselves of the foolish error that with the Army alone we can maintain the security of the State,” warned Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, in 1951. “Security rests on a foreign policy of peace: a sincere intention to be at peace with our neighbors, and with all the nations.”

The war with Iran has revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. defense establishment and suggests how the U.S. armed forces can be reshaped to fight the wars of the future. Specifically, the war has laid bare a number of vulnerabilities that urgently need to be addressed in order to prepare for conflicts against adversaries even more dangerous than Iran.

President Donald Trump predictably returned from his summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping without having secured help in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Now Trump must figure out how to exit a war he touted as lasting “four to five weeks” that is in its third month. Lots of armchair generals are telling him to “finish the job” by returning to bombing Iran. But the hawks overestimate what U.S. airpower can accomplish and underestimate what Iran can do in response.

John Culver is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the Chinese military, a subject he began studying as a CIA analyst in 1985. From 2015 to 2018, he served as national intelligence officer for East Asia. Since retiring from the CIA in 2020, he has been a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In advance of the summit between President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, I spoke with Culver about China’s military capabilities and what lessons the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is drawing from the U.S. conflict with Iran. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

When the U.S. armed forces began blowing up suspected “drug boats” on Sept. 2, 2025, it was widely seen as a way not just to fight the war on drugs but also to put pressure on Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, who was in league with drug traffickers. Many expected that the lawless strikes — which amount to killing suspected criminals without trial — would end after U.S. forces captured Maduro at the beginning of the year.

Trump has tried bombings, a blockade, and now a vaguely defined escort operation—and Iran still controls the Strait of Hormuz. Only diplomacy can lead to a true resolution.

Given all the well-regarded generals and admirals sacked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in his political purges, it’s hard to work up much sympathy for the latest Pentagon casualty: Navy Secretary John Phelan. He is a billionaire investor and major donor to President Donald Trump who had no business getting the job in the first place.

More than two months before President Donald Trump announced that the Navy would interdict shipping to and from Iranian ports, he quietly launched a blockade of fuel shipments to Cuba. It’s hard to know exactly when the Cuba blockade started, because the president, in his usual autocratic fashion, made no public announcement and offered no explanation for his actions. He simply acted.

Pressing economic concerns should compel the United States and Iran to decouple their blockades of the Strait of Hormuz from the complex and likely lengthy negotiations needed to reach a settlement on Iran’s nuclear program.

The Trump administration has declared a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, betting that Iran will buckle under economic pressure before the global energy crisis forces the United States to back down. The outcome of this standoff is far from certain.

What’s the biggest danger facing Europe? I would argue it’s not Russia, China, Iran or even the United States. It’s the threat of homegrown illiberalism — of right-wing populists who will mismanage economies, undermine democracy, victimize minorities, corrupt the government and cozy up to dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.

Tuesday was one of the more bizarre days in U.S. diplomatic history. It began with President Donald Trump warning that, should Iran not reopen the Strait of Hormuz, “a whole civilization will die tonight.” It ended with Trump proclaiming a two-week ceasefire and opening negotiations with Iran based on Tehran’s “10 point proposal.” There is rampant confusion about what those 10 points are, but the version released by Tehran calls for, among other things, Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. military withdrawal from the region and acceptance of Iran’s right to pursue nuclear enrichment — all conditions that should be utterly unacceptable to any U.S. administration.