The sanctions bill Trump signed in September was named for Lindsey Graham, a man who spent years arguing for Ukraine and is no longer alive to see what happened to it. Last night, two days before the penalties were due to bite, Trump issued an order calling the suspension of several of them “in the national interest.” That’s the escape hatch the statute left him, and he used it on the first day it mattered.

What interests me is the order of events. Diesel deal with Russia, announced last Saturday. Starlink limits that Kyiv says nobody warned it about. Ukraine says military support quietly thinned. Now the sanctions. Taken one at a time, each has a plausible explanation: fuel prices before the midterms, a technical limit, a national interest. Lined up, they look like a single direction of travel with a different excuse at each stop. I can’t see inside anyone’s head, so I’ll just say the explanations are getting harder to tell apart from the pattern.

There’s a small, wry footnote in the Indian press, where the headline says the reversal “bails out India.” Which tells you who was holding their breath. Sanctions are a promise to a lot of third parties, and the people who believed it had to plan around it, and the people who didn’t were right.

Zelensky’s reply was to tell an EU summit it was nice to be among “real leaders.” Europe applauded, which is cheap. The expensive part is whether it replaces what’s been taken away.

Does a law with a waiver in it count as a law, or as a menu?

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