doubts

What’s your favorite sighting heading into the long weekend?

A rare red fox outside Yosemite? A 3-year-old gray wolf roaming Los Angeles County, the first such visit in nearly a century? Or Kiké Hernández returning to the Dodgers after a long offseason spent waiting for him to resign?

I’m Glenn Whipp, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, host of The Envelope newsletter and the guy answering all of the above to this newsletter’s initial question.

Let’s spend a little more time with The Envelope’s latest cover star, “Sinners” scene-stealer Delroy Lindo, this week.

Cover story: Delroy Lindo

(Bexx Francois / For The Times)

Everyone loves a surprise or two on Oscar nominations morning, and this year gave us the gift of Delroy Lindo, 73, finally earning his first Oscar nomination for his standout performance as bluesman Delta Slim in “Sinners.”

Some people are still smiling about the news. Lindo certainly is.

Lindo and I talked about the lessons he has learned as an actor over the course of a career that has spanned a half-century. He recalled the self-doubts that plagued him when he first played the lead in “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a struggling Black family dealing with discrimination in 1950s South Chicago, and how he overcame those fears when he revisited the role three years later.

“This was an absolute period of growth for me as an actor all because I learned the most important thing: preparation, preparation, preparation,” he told me.

But even when you exercise that level of care, you still deal with doubt. Actors will be the first to tell you that they’re needy, neurotic.

To play Delta Slim, Lindo read books on the blues, listened to Son House, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and immersed himself in the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Musicians helped him hone his harmonica and piano playing. He was ready.

But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t use a little affirmation for a final boost.

Lindo says there were two such “seminal moments” for him while making “Sinners.” The first came when they filmed the scene where Lindo stands as his car passes a chain gang. Delta Slim exhorts the prisoners to “hold your heads.”

“[Director] Ryan [Coogler] was very nervous,” Lindo says. “He didn’t want any accidents.”

Shortly after shooting the scene, the movie’s unit publicist, Anna Fuson, emailed Lindo’s agents, telling them how his work had moved her and the crew.

“That doesn’t happen,” Lindo says, his voice cracking with emotion.

Later they shot Delta Slim’s monologue, in which he recalls the lynching of a fellow musician, ending with Lindo breaking into a guttural humming and drumming, expressing pain that transcends words. That night Zinzi Coogler, Ryan’s wife and a producer on “Sinners,” wrote Lindo telling him how much that scene had meant to her.

“Those two moments gave me a grounding,” Lindo says quietly. “It let me know this work is impacting people. And you can’t put a value on that kind of thing.”

WASHINGTON — The crisis touched off by President Trump’s demand to take ownership of Greenland appears over, at least for now. But the United States and its European allies still face a larger long-term challenge: Can their shaky marriage be saved?

At 75 years old, NATO has survived storms before, from squabbles over trade to estrangement over wars in Vietnam and Iraq. France, jealous of its independence, even pulled its armed forces out of NATO for 43 years.

But diplomats and foreign policy scholars warn that the current division in the alliance may be worse, because Trump’s threats on Greenland convinced many Europeans that the United States has become an unreliable and perhaps even dangerous ally.

The roots of the crisis lie in the president’s frequently expressed disdain for alliances in general and NATO in particular.

Long before Trump arrived in the White House, presidents from both parties complained that many NATO countries weren’t pulling their weight in military spending.

But earlier presidents still considered the alliance an essential asset to U.S. foreign policy and the cornerstone of a system that prevented war in Europe for most of a century.

Trump has never seemed to share that view. Even after he succeeded in persuading NATO members to increase their defense spending, he continued to deride most allies as freeloaders.

Until last year, he refused to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to help defend other NATO countries, the core principle of the alliance. And he reserved the right to walk away from any agreement, military or commercial, whenever it suited his purpose.

In the two-week standoff over Greenland, he threatened to seize the island from NATO member Denmark by force, an action that would have violated the NATO treaty.

When Britain, Germany and other countries sent troops to Greenland, he threatened to hit them with new tariffs, which would have violated a trade deal Trump made only last year.

Both threats touched off fury in Europe, where governments had spent most of the past year making concessions to Trump on both military spending and tariffs. When Trump backed down, the lesson some leaders drew was that pushing back worked better than playing nice.

“We do prefer respect to bullies,” French President Emmanuel Macron said.

“Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said.

The long-term danger for the United States, scholars said, is that Europeans might choose to look elsewhere for military and economic partners.

“They just don’t trust us,” said Richard N. Haass, a former top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration.

“A post-American world is fast emerging, one brought about in large part by the United States taking the lead in dismantling the international order that this country built,” he wrote last week.

Some European leaders, including Macron, have argued that they need to disentangle from the United States, build military forces that can defend against Russia, and seek more reliable trade partners, potentially including India and China.

But decoupling from the United States would not be easy, fast or cheap. Europe and Canada still depend on the United States for many of their defense needs and as a major market for exports.

Almost all NATO countries have pledged to increase defense spending to 5% of gross domestic product, but they aren’t scheduled to reach that goal until 2035.

Meanwhile, they face the current danger of an expansionist Russia on their eastern frontier.

Not surprisingly for a group of 30 countries, Europe’s NATO members aren’t united on the question. Macron has argued for more autonomy, but others have called for caution.

“Despite all the frustration and anger of recent months, let us not be too quick to write off the transatlantic partnership,” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at Davos.

“I think we are actually in the process of creating a stronger NATO,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “As long as we keep doing that, slowly and surely we’ll be just fine.”

They argue, in effect, that the best strategy is to muddle through — which is what NATO and Europe have done in most earlier crises.

The strongest argument for that course may be the uncertainty and disorder that would follow a rapid erosion — or worse, dissolution — of an alliance that has helped keep its members safe for most of a century.

The costs of that outcome, historian Robert Kagan warned recently, would be borne by Americans as well as Europeans.

If the United States continues to weaken its commitments to NATO and other alliances, he wrote in the Atlantic, “The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies, and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less. … If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.”