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For Europe, this is a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency moment. The United States, which has guaranteed European security against Russian attack for 80 years, appears to have switched sides under President Donald Trump.

In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump did serious damage to America’s soft power by moving to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and defund the National Endowment for Democracy. Now he seems bent on damaging U.S. hard power, too.

As Ukrainians mark the third anniversary of Russia’s horrific full-scale invasion, they have to contemplate the once unthinkable possibility that they might be abandoned by their most important foreign ally. And ponder whether, and for how long, their fight against the invader could carry on without U.S. assistance.

Amid the assault on federal institutions orchestrated by tycoon-in-chief Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service disciples, the National Endowment for Democracy has found itself unable to gain access to its congressionally appropriated funds at the U.S. Treasury. As a result, sources told me, NED’s operations are grinding to a halt.

Since President Donald Trump returned to office, he has repeatedly threatened other nations with steep tariff hikes unless they do what he wants. In the case of Colombia, he dropped his tariff threat after that country’s president agreed to keep receiving Colombian deportees from the United States. In the cases of Mexico and Canada, Trump agreed to delay his 25 percent tariffs for at least a month after the leaders of those countries offered assurances they would do more to stop the flow of fentanyl and migrants (even though they were already doing much of what they promised to do). And, in the case of China, Trump imposed additional 10 percent tariffs, apparently as punishment for that country not doing more to stop fentanyl shipments to the United States. (Naturally, China retaliated with its own tariffs.)

Political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term “soft power” in 1990 to denote “the ability to affect others by attraction and persuasion rather than just coercion and payment.” Long before this capability had a name, it was a key part of America’s power projection: Soft power helps to explain why the United States has military bases in at least 80 countries, why the dollar has become the international reserve currency, and why English has become the global language of business and diplomacy.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced he was launching a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars,” with the goal of rendering nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” He imagined lasers in space shooting down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, effectively creating a space shield to save America from nuclear Armageddon.

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.)