President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda has hit a wall — infrastructure talks have collapsed, bipartisan opposition has hardened against his awful electoral reform bill, and the filibuster looks safe — so attention turned this week to U.S. relations abroad. The president needs a win or two from his trip to Britain for a G-7 meeting, Brussels for a NATO conference and summit with the European Union, and the finale of his trip, in Geneva, a no-preconditions summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The administration’s overseas adventures (which I dissect in the latest Washington Examiner‘s The Debrief) got off to a shaky start on June 6, however, when a technical fault obliged Vice President Kamala Harris’s plane, Air Force Two, to return to base after setting off for Guatemala and Mexico. Her first foreign trip as veep was a debacle, and Biden must hope the cicada that landed on his neck as he boarded Air Force One to cross the Atlantic was not delivering a similar portent of failure.