The countries will negotiate next week through intermediaries in Vienna to try to bring both back into compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement.

When the Internet began to flourish in the 1990’s, there was an assumption that it would foster the values that the United States and its European allies held dearest: Freedom of expression, the spread of democracy, the empowerment of the individual. Presidents, prime ministers and German chancellors embraced the idea that the world’s democracies would be bound together, and that over time greater connectivity would enhance not only trade and understanding, but the alliance. 

Now, a new reality is dawning.

Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) convened a strategy group of experts and former government officials from the United States and Europe over the past year to discuss the crisis in the transatlantic relationship and to propose a strategy to revive and strengthen it.

The intelligence finding that Russia was most likely paying a bounty for the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan has evoked a strange silence from President Trump and his top national security officials on the question of what to do about the Kremlin’s wave of aggression.

Mr. Trump insists he never saw the intelligence, though it was part of the President’s Daily Brief just days before a peace deal was signed with the Taliban in February.

The State Department inspector general fired by President Trump on Friday was in the final stages of an investigation into whether the administration had unlawfully declared an “emergency” last year to allow the resumption of weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for their air war in Yemen.

The secretary of state is preparing an argument that the U.S. remains a participant in the Obama-era nuclear deal, with the goal of extending an arms embargo or destroying the accord.

President Trump insists that choosing when to reopen the economy is “the biggest decision I’ve ever had to make,” and, in the short term, he is undoubtedly right. It is a perilous balance of public safety versus economic revival that would test any president, even one not consumed by a looming election.

The United States, China and Europe are battling to be the first to find a cure, bringing a nationalist element to a worldwide crisis.

As accusations swirled Sunday about Russia’s efforts to interfere with the 2020 election, President Trump’s national security adviser and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. could not agree on what Moscow is, or is not, doing.

Their disagreement came as intelligence officials disputed reports that emerged last week about a briefing of the House Intelligence Committee. The officials now maintain that the House members either misheard or misinterpreted a key part of the briefing, and that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not mean to say that it believes the Russians are currently intervening in the election explicitly to help President Trump.

President Trump opened a small window for diplomacy with Iran on Wednesday, but combined his words with bald threats that made it hard to see how the two countries could break out of their cycle of confrontation and revenge.