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In one respect, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was a game changer. But in another way it wasn’t. By sinking or damaging the U.S. Navy’s battleships on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese forced the United States to rely instead on aircraft carriers. But neither the Pearl Harbor attack nor even the attack nine hours later on Clark Field in the Philippines — which devastated Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s air force on the ground — shook the U.S. military’s reliance on bases within the enemy’s strike range. Indeed, much of the Pacific campaign that followed consisted of landings by U.S. soldiers and Marines to secure island bases to enable air attacks on Japan.

President Donald Trump’s second term has been notable for some head-spinning changes in U.S. foreign policy. Who could have predicted that Trump would launch a cold war with Canada and a love-in with the Chavista regime in Venezuela?

Donald Trump is a master at creating crises and then resolving them by claiming he won a massive victory when the status quo barely changed.

There is no moral comparison between Ukraine and Iran: The former is a liberal democracy, the latter a vicious dictatorship whose rulers kill their own people to stay in power. But in purely military terms, there are a number of parallels between the wars they are fighting against much larger adversaries — Russia and the United States.

With the regular churn and chaos of the Trump administration, it’s easy to overlook the drama unfolding over at the Pentagon. Last week, Dan Driscoll, the secretary of the Army and a close ally of Vice President JD Vance, resigned. His departure crowns several months of turnover at the highest levels of the military. I talked to two of my colleagues who follow the military closely — Max Boot and Ted Johnson — to talk about what’s going on. — Damir Marusic

The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin probably did not utter the maxim often attributed to him: “Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw.” But it’s an accurate description of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s methodology.

It was obvious from the start that appointing Pete Hegseth — a former Fox News weekend host — as secretary of defense was a spectacularly bad idea: He was, by far, the least qualified person ever to lead the Pentagon. So, too, was it obvious that Hegseth’s decision to fire more than two dozen senior officers and to block the promotions of at least 45 officers — for reasons he never explained — was a spectacularly bad idea that would deny the armed forces the veteran, apolitical leadership they need.

Whatever else you may say about him, President Donald Trump is a consummate salesman. As former House speaker Newt Gingrich once noted to me, the former real estate tycoon did a brilliant job with his campaign slogan: It wasn’t “Trump for President”; it was “Make America Great Again.” Despite his outsize ego, he kept the focus on the country, not on his own ambition. But Trump’s normally deft marketing touch has deserted him during his second term.

As a defense hawk, I’ve long been in favor of more military spending — up to and including when the defense budget hit $1 trillion this year. But I’m experiencing real sticker shock at the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion request for next year. In inflation-adjusted terms, that 50 percent increase would result in the largest defense budget ever — exceeding even the World War II peak.

The unnecessary war with Iran continues to drag on, with no end in sight, more than five months after it started. There are many reasons for this quagmire, but a significant part of the explanation is President Donald Trump’s schizophrenic approach. He veers between conciliation and confrontation, alternatingly praising Iranian leaders as “very rational people” and denouncing them as “scum” — with metronomic regularity.

Israel is the mouse that roared. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu depends on US support for his country’s security and his political survival—Israel couldn’t attack Iran without the US military protecting it against Iranian missiles and drones—but he also feels free to ignore President Trump’s demands whenever he fears that going along with Trump would create a political problem for him at home.

I have great respect for Andrew Sullivan as a writer and thinker, and I agree with many of his views. In particular, I agree with him that “the cult of Trump and the cult of Woke” are both an abomination—the former a manifestation of the far-right, the latter a manifestation of the far left. Where he’s lost me is by engaging in what looks like moral equivalence by suggesting, as he does in his latest Weekly Dish, that these twin cults are an equal danger to the republic.

There are many appalling spectacles in Washington these days but, for sheer grotesquerie, it is hard to beat yesterday’s Senate hearings in which one Republican senator after another competed to see who could make the most far-fetched and offensive allegations against Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio is either the luckiest or the shrewdest member of the Trump Cabinet — maybe both. His good fortune has been that President Donald Trump has handed the most intractable diplomatic problems — ending the U.S.-Iran and Russia-Ukraine wars — to someone else: special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and, in the case of Iran, Rubio’s presumed rival for the 2028 Republican nomination, Vice President JD Vance. Neither set of negotiations is showing much progress, but Rubio has escaped the fallout.

Last week, a Blue Angels jet buzzed a crowded beach in Pensacola, Florida. Typically the Navy’s elite flight-demonstration squadron does not fly lower than 500 feet over people on the ground. In this case, the jet was probably less than 100 feet from the beachgoers.

Of the leaders in the world’s nearly 200 countries, there is none that I admire as much as Volodymyr Zelensky. He has been a profile in courage with few equals since the days of Winston Churchill. His country might not still exist if he had heeded the urging of allies to flee when Russian troops were just outside Kyiv in February 2022. He reportedly turned down a U.S. evacuation offer by saying, famously, “I need ammunition, not a ride.”

President Donald Trump is not exactly known as a model of consistency, but, even by his standards, he executed two head-spinning U-turns at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, last week — one on Iran, the other on Ukraine.

After Iran’s attacks on merchant shipping killed the ceasefire, Trump said he would reimpose the U.S. blockade and resume air strikes. But with no military path to regime change and the war already deeply unpopular at home, the president faces the same strategic dilemmas that have defined the conflict from the start.

America’s 250th anniversary arrived just after I marked a more personal milestone: my 50th year as an American. I left the Soviet Union with my divorced mother and widowed grandmother in December 1975. After a few months in Vienna and Rome, we arrived in Los Angeles on April 28, 1976, shortly before the bicentennial celebrations. I was 6 years old. Now I have lived to witness fully 20 percent of America’s history.

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.