Mark’s piece on the “amateur-hour bungling of yesterday’s speech and policy declaration” by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his staff, by which he unilaterally upturned over a decade of U.S. policy toward Russia and undermined negotiations with the Kremlin, is excellent.

In the penultimate paragraph, he wonders how this episode occurred and who had a hand in convincing Hegseth to promulgate notions that will only frustrate Trump’s goal in Ukraine. My guess is that the explanation is a simple one: The secretary has spent many years occupying the role of pundit, and he spoke as a pundit would about one of the globe’s most sensitive geopolitical crises into which his boss is now intervening. But he’s not on the set anymore, and diplomacy, as I wrote, is not always well served by “straight talk.”

Hopefully, the misstep convinces Hegseth to avoid getting ahead of the diplomatic process in the future.