Today's report deliberately forgoes a broad scope in order to gain depth.

The money is real and the Europeanization of the commons is a genuine step forward, but the structural deficits that condemn Europe to dependency remain intact.

I am writing this on one of those days when current events confirm, with almost didactic clarity, what I have been describing for months.

Two epicenters shaped the day, and both—not by chance—overlapped in time and illuminated each other.

I am writing this edition as two clocks tick in opposite directions on global geopolitics.

We are living through, without rhetorical exaggeration, one of the most delicate moments the international order has experienced since the end of the Cold War.

Monday dawns, condensing into a mere twenty-four hours almost all the fault lines I've been describing since the outbreak of the Iran-Contra conflict.

The king of sports can be an instrument of cohesion and a balm for nations, but also an alibi for tyrants and a smokescreen for execrable regimes.

The day unfolds along a single thread, and it's worth pulling on it directly because it's the one I've been describing for months: the lack of leadership—the absence, where it's most needed, of an authority capable of making decisions and, above all, of guaranteeing those decisions—remains the underlying malady of our time.

Today's events, which we analyze with unusual clarity, encapsulate the two major pathologies of the international order that I have been describing for months: the absence of legitimate authority where it is most needed and the deliberate erosion of certainties where they were hardest to build.

Three assassinations and a narrow strait explain the day's events, and it's best to state it bluntly, because therein lies the key to what I've been describing.

Today's events revolve around a single question: who is truly in charge when leadership is most needed?