A sense of calm runs through Russia despite the fact that these are dangerous months. The hopes the Kremlin had placed on U.S. President Donald Trump handing Ukraine to it on a platter have faded; the war is a drain on Russia with no strategic victories, and security forces are tightening their control over the state just months before legislative elections that are shaping up as a plebiscite on Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Almost at the same time on Wednesday morning, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke from Washington while Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, spoke from Havana. Both were addressing the people of Cuba. The former highlighted the date, May 20, as the day “the Cuban flag flew for the first time over an independent country” in 1902, an image preserved in a period photograph that forever enshrined the birth of the republic. The latter, however, said that date should be credited for only one thing: “Having planted in Cubans of that era an anti-imperialist sentiment.” Rubio invoked 1902 as an epic moment, but Díaz-Canel asked the people not to forget that May 20 marks the day of U.S. “intervention” and “interference” in Cuba. That has been the narrative between Washington and Havana to this day: two governments wrestling over the meaning of history.

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Three U.S. Tomahawk missiles forever changed the lives of dozens of families who, on a seemingly ordinary morning in late February, sent their children to the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in Minab, a city in southern Iran near the Persian Gulf. What followed was the deadliest attack of the war that, according to preliminary investigations, was conducted by the United States against the Tehran regime, killing 156 people, over 100 of them children. Two and a half months later, the wound remains open in Minab.

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Enough time has passed since Donald Trump’s inauguration to begin to understand that the president lacks a decent political project for the United States, and even less a coherent vision of his country’s role in the world. Trump’s political project began, firstly, with avoiding prison and, once in power, focused on enriching himself and his family as much as possible by shamelessly exploiting the system’s gray areas, using the exceptional platform afforded him by the head-of-state role in the planet’s superpower. His is a project of systematized corruption and of extractive subjugation of institutions to his will.

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The vote in the House of Representatives on Wednesday to limit Donald Trump’s authority to continue his war in Iran will not bring that conflict to an end. But it does represent a symbolic setback for the U.S. president on an issue — the Middle East — that has become, both domestically and in foreign policy, the most painful stone in the shoe of his return to the White House. Meanwhile, the weeks go by and, with the peace deal with Tehran stalled, it seems clear that Washington has no idea how to extract itself from a quagmire of its own making.

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Two red hearts stood out on her fitted dress, one over her chest and another at the throat, similar to those in images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the entryway to her office in Seattle, Washington, there was a large painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe, next to which her clients lit votive candles to pray for their cases. These religious symbols were not chosen at random. Alexandra Lozano called herself “The lawyer of miracles,” an effective marketing strategy that drew hundreds of anxious undocumented immigrants living in the shadows to her law office. “I fix cases that are supposedly impossible to win,” Lozano promised in a Facebook video. A phrase that now rings hollow.

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On one of the main roads out of Dahieh, the name given to the Beirut suburbs now at the heart of Middle East geopolitics, a row of streetlights bearing the same photograph of Iran’s penultimate supreme leader, the late Ali Khamenei, seem to bid farewell to those leaving the area. A few meters further on, as the city of Beirut begins, the iconography that floods Dahieh with the faces of Iranian and Hezbollah leaders — its Lebanese allies — vanishes, as does, to a large extent, the threat of Israeli strikes.

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Everything, it seems, has a limit. The nearly $1.8 billion public fund that the Donald Trump administration plans to create to distribute to its allies has even shocked lawmakers who until now had been staunchly loyal to him. So much so that Republican leaders in the Senate have scrapped plans to vote this week on the bill that would allocate billions in additional funding to immigration agencies (including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE), because of deep disagreements over the multimillion-dollar compensation fund for Trump supporters “persecuted” by the justice system during Joe Biden’s administration.

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Despite all the difficulties, as numerous as they are, something is moving in the Strait of Hormuz. Even before the United States and Iran agreed to reopen it, the world’s most important energy shipping lane has shown signs of a slight loosening. Despite the double blockade — imposed first by Tehran and then by Washington — the number of ships managing to transit has grown in recent days. Some — the majority — do so with the permission of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Others are escorted by the U.S. Navy. A few take the risk on their own.

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Let’s start with the proven facts: Disclosure Day is the most anticipated film of the summer. Its director and screenwriter, Steven Spielberg, revealed details about its plot this week on one of Stephen Colbert’s final shows: he says it tells the story of the theft by officials, “committed to the truth,” of all information held by the government “about UFOs and extraterrestrial visits,” and the system’s desperate attempts to prevent it being revealed.

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With the latest exchanges of fire between the United States and Iran, the war in the Persian Gulf and its fragile ceasefire — marked by increasingly serious skirmishes — has entered a new phase, the most dangerous yet, raising the prospect of a return to hostilities. While the United States attacked Iranian targets for the second consecutive night, the Iranian General Staff has once again announced the complete closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the Revolutionary Guard Corps has warned that Iranian troops will respond “decisively” to any attack by the adversary. President Donald Trump has threatened attacks may continue on Thursday if Tehran does not accept his conditions for peace.

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Talks to end the war with Iran and reopen the Strait of Hormuz appear, for the first time in three months, to be moderately on track. At least that is the impression conveyed by public statements and leaks from both sides: water is beginning to fill the deep negotiating well, which until now had been practically dry.

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