The pause ended exactly on schedule. Russia and Ukraine had agreed to leave each other’s capitals alone for three days while Witkoff and Kushner made their rounds: Moscow, then a train to Kyiv, because flying wasn’t considered safe. The moment the envoys left, the drones came back. Two dead in Kyiv this morning, a five-story building hit, and Zelensky had already told reporters, before his guests even departed, that he expects the war to run into winter. So the marquee US peace push of the season produced, as its most concrete result, an advance admission that nothing is about to change. I noted a few days ago that a war you can pause for a diplomatic weekend was never actually stuck. Today just supplied the receipt.

Meanwhile Argentina is re-litigating 1982 through a district court. Milei’s government is filing criminal charges against an oil company for drilling off the Falklands, days after he talked about the “winds of change” turning his way (a phrase Macmillan used in 1960 to announce the end of African empire, oddly recycled here for the opposite kind of claim). No task force this time, just paperwork.

And Canada’s counter-tariffs landed today, up to 50 percent, on everything from steel to cotton T-shirts, except lobster, which got quietly dropped after the seafood industry complained. Even a trade war has a soft spot, apparently, and it’s shellfish.

Three disputes over territory and leverage, three completely different registers of violence. I keep wondering what decides which one gets missiles and which one gets a lawsuit.

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