Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who spent more than two decades in the U.S. Senate and emerged as one of Washington’s most influential voices on defense and foreign policy, died Saturday night after what his office described as a brief and sudden illness. He was 71. A medical examiner’s preliminary findings pointed to an aortic dissection as the cause of death, according to officials familiar with the case. Graham had recently returned from a trip to Ukraine.

The joint statement by the foreign ministers of Germany, France, Italy, and Britain is precisely the kind of performative multilateralism that has made European foreign policy increasingly irrelevant to the realities of the Middle East. Let’s be precise about what the bill actually does: it expands the possibility of capital punishment for terrorists in specific, extreme circumstances. It does not mandate it. It does not apply to ordinary criminals. It targets perpetrators of mass atrocities — the architects and executors of violence on a scale that, one would think, Europe above all should understand.

A Russian tanker is currently en route to Cuba carrying oil the island desperately needs. The timing is not incidental. It lands as Donald Trump softens his posture toward Moscow for what is, by now, an uncountable number of times — each retreat dressed up as diplomacy, each concession framed as dealmaking. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence and too durable to be strategy. Trump does not appease Putin because he is outmaneuvered.