SEVENTY-TWO HOURS. FIVE THEATERS. THE WORLD IS NOT STABLE.

Baltic drills, broken ceasefires, troops leaving Germany, ships stranded in the Gulf, and a summit in Beijing that decides what comes next.

The Baltic is practicing nuclear strike simulations. Germany has just been told five thousand American soldiers are leaving, with more to follow. Two thousand ships sit motionless in the Persian Gulf waiting for a war to end. Kyiv endured a mass drone attack on Friday night while Zelensky warned that Belarus is moving troops to the border. Donald Trump lands in Beijing in eleven days for the first American presidential visit to China in nearly a decade. And the Strait of Hormuz, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil once flowed without incident, remains a minefield that the United States Navy estimates will take six months to clear, assuming the war is actually over, which it is not.

What follows is a dispatch from the last seventy-two hours.