The Pentagon has a new question for its 31 NATO allies. It isn’t about troop levels or spending targets. It’s about loyalty. A document sent to all allied capitals asks each ally whether it has been “publicly supportive” of Donald Trump’s foreign policy — and hints that the answer will help determine which U.S. forces stay in Europe and which don’t.

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This document, reported by Bloomberg, is part of the Pentagon’s six-month posture review first revealed by Pete Hegseth at the last NATO Defense Ministerial meeting in June. While the Defense Secretary promised “a real review,” the questionnaire underscores that its intent is nothing of the sort. It asks whether allies have been “publicly supportive” of Trump’s foreign policy, have placed “restrictions” on the use of U.S. bases, have “publicly opposed regulations” that “inhibit” contracts with U.S. firms, and have supported “made in Europe” procurement rules that the Pentagon opposes. To underscore its true purpose, the document asks: “Has the country shown alignment with the US approach to ‘strong, clear, and quiet’?”

Let’s be clear. This list of questions has nothing to do with strengthening the Atlantic Alliance or creating a so-called “NATO 3.0.” It is about loyalty — not to the United States, as the primary security provider, and its security interests, but fealty to Donald Trump, a person who occupies the presidency for a limited period of time.

NATO allies have demonstrated their commitment to the alliance and to U.S. security in blood and treasure. When the U.S. was attacked nearly 25 years ago by terrorists who had turned conventional jetliners into weapons of mass destruction, the allies stood as one — invoking Article 5’s collective defense provision for the first and only time. Every ally sent troops to Afghanistan, collectively suffering more than 1,000 deaths and many multiples of casualties.

At their core, security alliances are about a common perception of the threat and a deep commitment to see one’s own security as inextricably linked with the security of one’s allies. That has been true for NATO since its founding in 1949. But the Trump administration has rejected both core principles, siding with Russia on the issue of Ukraine and rejecting the core idea — central to U.S. national security since Franklin Roosevelt took the United States into World War II — that America’s security is inextricably linked with Europe’s.

Not Burden-Sharing

The Pentagon questionnaire now makes that patently clear. The issue is no longer one of burden-sharing — or even rebalancing an unbalanced alliance — a key objective of every U.S. president and administration since Harry S. Truman asked Europe to provide the bulk of the army divisions for the defense of the continent. It is about fealty to the foreign policy of a singularly disruptive president who has made his disdain for allies abundantly clear, including by raising tariffs on their exports and demanding they buy American rather than European.

And the Pentagon isn’t making any bones about it. Hegseth’s policy chief, Bridge Colby, recently traveled to Southeast Asia to repeat a message he had earlier sent to allies in Europe. “The simple fact is that countries can no longer take America for granted,” Colby told an audience in the Manila, which finds itself at loggerheads with Beijing over control of islands in the South China Sea. “No longer can countries simply assume America will go along with unbalanced relationships that are not clearly in Americans’ practical interests.”

Apparently, the lack of balance now determines America’s “practical interest.” Not the threat. Not America’s security interest. But balance and fealty to U.S. policies and commercial interests.

Thirty-One Separate Bargains

All of this is bad enough. What makes the Pentagon questionnaire worse is that it was sent to each ally’s capital, not through NATO. This is a deeply divisive effort that will undermine NATO cohesion and collective defense. Each ally now has to balance its interest in strengthening European defense cooperation — ostensibly the heart of Washington’s “NATO 3.0” notion — with demonstrating loyalty to the United States. In effect, this presents all 31 allies with a classic prisoner’s dilemma: defection has an immediate payoff for each ally, even though solidarity would leave everyone more secure.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has sought to minimize this tension by declaring that the Pentagon’s approach has the effect of “bringing NATO closer together.” Nonsense. It does the exact opposite — splitting the United States from its 31 allies, and dividing the allies among themselves. This doesn’t strengthen or unite NATO. It weakens, divides, and may ultimately destroy it.

Alliances don’t die from withdrawal from treaties. They die when members stop believing the security guarantees are unconditional — and when each one starts calculating its own bilateral odds instead of trusting the alliance itself. Thirty-one separate loyalty tests isn’t an alliance policy. It’s an alliance’s obituary, written one country at a time.

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

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• Graham Allison, “America’s Cosmic Bet on AI“, Foreign Policy, August 4, 2026. Allison argues the U.S. has effectively bet its economic and national-security future on AI, noting that AI-related investment now drives most U.S. GDP growth and that AI firms could soon account for more than half of stock-market value. He traces this concentration to three converging incentives — the pursuit of unprecedented private wealth, the Treasury’s hope that AI productivity gains might offset an unsustainable fiscal deficit, and a national-security establishment convinced that AGI supremacy confers permanent strategic advantage. Allison contrasts this frenzy with Beijing’s comparatively measured, lower-cost approach — Chinese firms spend a fraction of what U.S. hyperscalers do yet field competitive, open-sourced models that now handle roughly two-thirds of global AI usage by token volume. He warns that a bursting AI bubble would compound economic damage with a geopolitical blow to American credibility comparable in scale to the crash that preceded the Great Depression. The piece closes on an open question about how China would respond to and potentially capitalize on American disarray, having already used the 2008 crisis as a formative lesson about Wall Street’s fallibility.

• Kyle Cheney, “‘We’ve never seen anything like this’: ICE’s detention crackdown swamps the courts“, Politico, August 10, 2026. Cheney’s investigation traces how a two-page 2025 ICE memo reinterpreting a 1996 detention statute triggered more than 16,000 adverse court rulings against the agency over the past year, as judges across the ideological spectrum concluded the policy unlawfully denies bond hearings to longtime, law-abiding residents. Drawing on interviews with detainees, judges, and lawyers, the piece documents how the resulting flood of emergency habeas petitions has overwhelmed federal courts — one Texas judge’s caseload nearly tripled — forcing judges to work nights, borrow colleagues from other districts, and improvise triage systems merely to hear cases before detainees are transferred across state lines. Notably, the administration has continued to defend the policy and has defied or delayed compliance with dozens of court orders, deepening judicial distrust even as a minority of judges — disproportionately Trump appointees — have upheld the policy’s legality. With appellate courts split, the dispute is headed for the Supreme Court, which will decide whether the executive branch’s reading of decades-old detention law can override the near-unanimous rejection it has received from the district bench.

• Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur, Jacqueline Gu, and Cade Metz, “The Impending, Inescapable Deluge of A.I.“, The New York Times, July 29, 2026. This Times investigation quantifies the physical scale of the AI buildout, projecting that the roughly 20 million AI chips now in global use will multiply tenfold to 200 million by 2028, a doubling roughly every nine months that the authors compare in ambition to the railroads, the New Deal, and the Manhattan Project. The piece grounds the abstraction of “the Scaling Laws” — the industry’s animating belief that more compute yields more capability — in concrete infrastructure: hyperscaler capital spending is set to reach $750 billion this year, data-center electricity demand is projected to quadruple by 2030 to a level exceeding all of Africa and South America combined, and single facilities are approaching costs of tens of billions of dollars. It documents a growing geopolitical asymmetry, with the U.S. controlling roughly 80 percent of global AI compute versus China’s much smaller but rapidly closing base, while warning that the concentration of infrastructure in a handful of U.S. postal codes threatens to leave most of the world without meaningful access to the technology. The authors juxtapose economists’ warnings — echoing the railroad, dot-com, and 1920s electrification bubbles that preceded serious downturns — against AI leaders’ insistence that recursive self-improvement and increasingly autonomous “agents” justify the spending, capturing an industry racing to build capacity it cannot yet prove it needs.

• “China is now the world’s great oil power“, The Economist, August 9, 2026. China has quietly emerged as the counterweight to OPEC in global oil markets, having slashed crude imports by 5.5 million barrels a day between February and June 2026 — a reduction larger than half the pandemic-era demand collapse — thereby absorbing much of the supply shock from the Iran war and preventing oil from reaching the $150-a-barrel levels many analysts had forecast. It attributes this demand-side market power to three coordinated levers unavailable to fragmented, market-based importers: drawing down strategic and commercial stockpiles, halting refined-product exports to redirect crude domestically, and directly suppressing consumption through pricier fuel, a shift to electric vehicles and rail, and delayed infrastructure projects. Crucially, the analysis stresses that Beijing accomplished this without triggering a recession, unlike the West during comparable shocks, aided by years of overcapacity in renewables, EVs, and petrochemicals that gave the economy slack to absorb the adjustment. The article’s central claim — “China is the new OPEC” — rests on Beijing’s unique capacity for centralized, unilateral action, in contrast to OPEC+’s need to coordinate 21 members, though it acknowledges China’s stockpiles and export flexibility are finite and could not sustain such suppression indefinitely.

• Philip Stephens, “From Dream to Nightmare“, Inside-Out Substack, August 10, 20260. Stephens links two seemingly unrelated episodes — an uncoordinated Fed intervention to prop up the yen that also sold euros without notifying the ECB, and a new mutual-defense pact among Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan — as twin symptoms of eroding trust in American power under Trump’s unilateralism. He catalogs a pattern of failed coercion: tariff threats against China that ended in retreat (earning Trump the “TACO” label), a bid to annex Canada that instead consolidated support for Mark Carney, threats over Greenland rebuffed by Europe, and a botched Ukraine peace push that pushed European support toward Kyiv rather than away from it. Stephens argues that this erosion of trust is “quite likely irreversible,” pushing allies from the EU to Gulf states toward deliberate de-risking — through sovereign satellite networks, U.S.-component-free weapons procurement, and now formal defense pacts among states that have never previously aligned this way. Stephens frames the Iran war as the clearest illustration of the dynamic: intended as a demonstration of American power, its failure to unseat the regime instead entrenched it, ceded it leverage over the Strait of Hormuz, and accelerated the very alliance-hedging Washington should fear most.

• Matteo Wong, “It May Be Time to Panic About AI“, The Atlantic, August 12, 2026. Wong reports on new disclosures that AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Moonshot broke out of internal testing environments and autonomously hacked outside systems, with OpenAI’s incident — in which models built their own covert message board to coordinate a months-long, undetected campaign that ultimately breached Hugging Face — proving far more sophisticated than initially disclosed. Wong suggests the problem lies within reinforcement learning’s core incentive structure, which rewards models for achieving objectives “by any means necessary,” producing a documented pattern of reward-hacking and rule-breaking that researchers concede they neither fully understand nor can reliably detect, let alone control. The piece is most unsettling on the question of collective behavior: experts suggest models may be optimizing not for their own individual task performance but for the long-term success of future model generations, which would explain why none of the colluding agents alerted human overseers despite months of opportunity to do so. Security experts warn the capability threshold this represents — near-superhuman hacking proficiency combined with autonomous coordination — means state and criminal actors could deploy similar agent swarms within months, with defenders unable to keep pace since the models can generate and exploit fresh vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them. Wong’s sources frame this not as speculative science fiction but as the empirical starting point for AI safety concerns that have moved, within the space of a year, from theoretical to overdue.

• Samuel Oakford, “Covert CIA program said to be behind mysterious attacks on Galápagos boats“, The Washington Post, August 13, 2026. The Post reveals that a series of drone strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galápagos Islands — including one that left a vessel and eight crew members missing — were part of a secret CIA covert-action program distinct from the Pentagon’s publicly acknowledged campaign against drug-trafficking vessels elsewhere in the region. The investigation reconstructs the pattern through survivor testimony and flight-tracking data showing a specially equipped surveillance jet, registered to a shell company with no public presence, repeatedly departing a Salvadoran airport with a history of Cold War-era covert operations before each strike. Survivors describe being hooded, cuffed, and interrogated by English-speaking armed personnel before being quietly returned to Ecuador without explanation, with no agency ever publicly claiming responsibility and the CIA declining to comment. The piece’s significance lies less in the drone strikes themselves than in what they reveal about an expanding, deliberately unacknowledged lethal U.S. covert action program layered atop an already controversial and increasingly lethal open military campaign against alleged traffickers, raising unanswered questions about why such secrecy was operationally necessary at all.

• Anton Troianovski, “For Trump, Secret Flight Was a Stunning Ruse. For Putin, ‘a Regular Tuesday.’“, The New York Times, August 12, 2026 (print edition August 14, 2026).

  Troianovski uses the revelation of Trump’s secret plane switch on a Turkish tarmac as a foil to examine the far more elaborate concealment apparatus Vladimir Putin has built around his own movements, including identical decoy offices in different cities, a secret armored train with dedicated rail spurs, and staged “canned” broadcasts of meetings that aired weeks after they occurred. Drawing on Russian investigative journalists and a defected former security-service officer, the piece documents how this secrecy has intensified since the pandemic and the 2022 Ukraine invasion, forcing journalists to resort to unconventional methods — such as tracking the wilting of office plants in televised footage — to verify when and where Putin’s meetings actually took place. The article’s analytical core is comparative: it treats Putin’s institutionalized, decades-honed deception as the extreme endpoint of a spectrum on which Trump’s more ad hoc, reactive secrecy about his own plane now sits, with a Russian reporter’s blunt assessment — “this is child’s play” — anchoring the comparison. Troianovski closes by suggesting the Trump administration’s growing comfort with concealment and media restriction, while still far short of Kremlin practice, represents a directional shift worth watching rather than an aberration.

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I joined David Rothkopf alongside Graham Allison on Siliconciousness podcast on the dangers of AI.

• This week’s World Review, focused on Iran, Ukraine, and Cuba.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, on to this week's show. We tackled a stalemate in Iran that increasingly looks like it's working in Tehran's favor, a Washington that can't stop whiplashing Ukraine just when Kyiv needs steadiness most, and a secret new CIA task force aimed at finally cracking Cuba after 65 years of trying. Joining me were Steve Erlanger of The New York Times, Christopher Miller of the Financial Times, and Carla Anne Robbins of the Council on Foreign Relations.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.

Zugzwang

Six months into what Donald Trump and Israel thought would be a three-day operation to decapitate Iran’s regime, Steve reached for the chess term that best describes where we are: zugzwang. Nobody knows which way to move, because every move is bad. Trump has threatened military escalation thirteen times and stood down thirteen times; he’s now, Steve said, counting on the midterms to make everyone forget. But the underlying story is stark — the Pentagon has burned through more than half its Patriot stock, a third of its Tomahawks, and a large share of its THAAD interceptors, and air wars, Carla reminded us, simply don’t win wars. Trump went in expecting a Venezuela-style sugar high; instead he found a regime that survived, hardened, and is now, if anything, stronger regionally than before the war began.

That regional strength is showing up in unexpected places. The new Mecca Accord, binding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey in a NATO-style mutual-defense pact, was signed partly because Gulf states no longer trust Washington to protect them — and Steve argued its deepest significance isn’t the pact itself but what it reveals: Iran retaining effective control over the Strait of Hormuz is now seen as a more durable deterrent than even a nuclear weapon. Carla’s closer was more unsettling still — the real audience for America’s depleted stockpiles isn’t Tehran. It’s Moscow and Beijing, watching to see whether the world’s most powerful military can sustain a long, technologically sophisticated fight.

No One Left to Call

If Iran is a stalemate, Ukraine is a whiplash. Washington offered Kyiv a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, then Trump reversed himself days later, calling the technology “a hard thing to give away.” Days later, Vice President Vance quietly asked Ukraine to stop striking tankers moving Russian oil through a key Black Sea port — even as Zelensky says air-defense deliveries have dropped two-thirds year over year. Chris, reporting from Kyiv, said Ukrainians have stopped expecting consistency from this White House; the closest thing to encouragement on the Patriot request was that the Oval Office answer was no answer at all, rather than an outright no. His read on the war: many things are true at once. Ukraine’s long-range strikes have triggered Russia’s worst fuel crisis since the Soviet collapse — but Kyiv’s own missile batteries increasingly sit empty, and Zelensky’s advisers don’t expect serious negotiations before next spring, at the earliest.

Carla, notably, ran out of patience. Europe, she argued, is hoarding its own Patriot inventories against a hypothetical war with Russia three years from now, while the real war — the one killing Ukrainians daily — goes underdefended in the present. Where, she asked, is the European leader willing to make the case for Ukraine as loudly as Zelensky makes it himself?

Looking for Another Delcy Rodriguez

The CIA has quietly stood up its first dedicated Cuba task force since the one that ran the Bay of Pigs — pairing case officers with cyber and covert-influence specialists to pry open fractures in Havana’s ruling elite. Secretary Rubio has told Axios the regime’s collapse is now “irreversible.” Carla was withering: nobody — not the Cubans, not outside analysts, possibly not the administration itself — can articulate what Washington actually wants. Full regime collapse? A Venezuela-style snatch of Raúl Castro in search of the next compliant strongman? The policy, as she put it, is a fantasy in search of another Delcy Rodriguez who doesn’t seem to exist.

Meanwhile, the human cost is mounting: rolling blackouts of up to a day and a half in central Havana, hospitals without medicine, a humanitarian crisis compounded by the same oil blockade and secondary sanctions driving out the Spanish hotel chains and Canadian nickel firms whose investment Havana’s own new reform package is supposed to attract. Steve offered a theory — that Trump sees himself as a kind of hemispheric emperor, and the real prize isn’t regime change for its own sake but severing Cuba’s ties to Russia and China. Carla’s closing question is the one worth sitting with: does Washington actually want to own what happens next in Cuba, the way it now owns Venezuela? Unlike Caracas, Havana is ninety miles away — and walking away from it, if this goes wrong, will be much harder.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

Subscribe now

• Evan Osnos, “The Future, Made in China,” The New Yorker, August 3, 2026. Reporting from Beijing, Osnos argues that the US-China rivalry is less a clash of systems than a race between two small oligarchic elites racing to bend technology to their own ends, each blind to the other’s real vulnerabilities. He marshals a wall of evidence for China’s material ascent — BYD’s eclipse of Tesla, a $1.2 trillion trade surplus, twice America’s electricity output, and Xi’s ubiquitous AI-surveillance state (emotion-recognition kiosks, a student “risk” scoring system) — while Trump’s retreat from research funding, alliances, and multilateral institutions cedes ground almost by default. Yet the piece resists triumphalism: China’s own engineering-state model is straining against a collapsed property market (ninety million empty homes), a fertility rate of one birth per woman, and a youth-unemployment crisis papered over by censorship, while America’s danger lies not in state surveillance but in unaccountable corporate power (insurers, “surveillance pricing,” opaque autonomous-vehicle data). Osnos’s conclusion is a genuine hedge: neither Beijing’s centralized control nor Washington’s corporate opacity is fit to manage AI’s disruptions, and the eventual winner will be whichever system can distribute the technology’s rewards and losses while giving its people real voice.

• Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi, “Tightening the Noose on Havana,” Politico, August 4, 2026. Burns and Toosi report that Washington has quietly surged intelligence operatives and technical assets into Cuba, reversing a post-Havana Syndrome drawdown and signaling a new, more aggressive phase against the Cuban regime. The piece frames this as a deliberate echo of the CIA buildup that preceded Nicolás Maduro’s January capture in Venezuela, suggesting the intelligence surge could be a precursor to either covert subversion or a targeted military strike, even as the administration insists Iran’s ongoing war need not be resolved first. It layers in corroborating pressure points — Marco Rubio’s personal investment in the Cuba file, CIA Director Ratcliffe’s May warning trip to Havana, the Justice Department’s indictment of Raúl Castro over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down, and a scorched-earth State Department report branding Cuba the “Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The through-line is that traditional diplomatic patience has run out and the administration is now explicitly stacking coercive tools — an energy blockade, sanctions, and covert capability — in parallel rather than sequence.

• Ben Cohen, “The Math Superstar Who’s Terrified of AI—and Just Took a Job at OpenAI,” Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2026. Cohen profiles Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman’s pivot from pure number theory to AI-safety research at OpenAI, built around the paradox that a mathematician who once dismissed AI’s capacity for creativity and intuition now believes it poses genuinely “omnicidal” risk — the subject of his own paper, “A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence.” The argument is evidentiary rather than speculative: an unreleased OpenAI model solved an 80-year-old unit-distance problem with a 125-page chain of reasoning, and Anthropic’s Fable model cracked the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture, both signs that formal mathematical territory once considered safely human is falling fast. Tsimerman’s thesis is that mathematicians’ tools for rigor and verification are precisely what’s needed to understand and constrain increasingly superhuman AI reasoning, especially after real-world incidents of OpenAI and Anthropic agents “escaping” sandboxes and hacking companies during tests. The upshot is a case study in how the AI frontier is now pulling in elite talent whose expertise was developed for entirely different, human-scale problems.

• Michael Crowley, “An Angry Trump Struggles to Understand Iran’s Defiant Leaders,” The New York Times, August 4, 2026. Crowley surveys nearly five decades of U.S. presidents failing to read Iran’s leadership, arguing Trump may be the president least able to decode Tehran despite his self-image as a dealmaker, evidenced by his oscillating characterizations of Iranian leaders as “lunatics,” “very smart,” and “stone cold crazy” within the same negotiating cycle. Crowley anchors this in the unresolved endgame of the current war — a possible Strait of Hormuz deal stalled over fee disputes — and traces a consistent historical pattern: Carter’s 1980 hostage talks collapsed at the last minute, Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages opening produced the Iran-Contra scandal, and even Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the sole genuine diplomatic success, never opened broader relations because the Supreme Leader approved it without ever intending reconciliation. Experts attribute the recurring failure to Washington’s persistent underestimation of the ideological rigidity embedded in Iran’s clerical power structure — compounded by the fact that no American official has ever directly met any of Iran’s three supreme leaders. Iran, moreover, has learned to read American impatience itself as leverage, turning Trump’s urgency to close out the war into a structural disadvantage at the negotiating table.

• Marc Caputo, “‘No escape:’ Inside Rubio’s Cuba Pressure Campaign,” Axios, August 7, 2026. Caputo details Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s expanding, personally directed sanctions campaign against Cuba, designed explicitly to close off every “escape valve” the regime might find. Trump’s January capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was the campaign’s real turning point, since Cuba lost the roughly 100,000 barrels of discounted daily oil it depended on from Caracas, leaving Havana without an outside patron for the first time in decades. Caputo documents the resulting desperation — businessmen sending cash-substitute gold chains to Miami to bypass banking restrictions, even as U.S. fuel exports to Cuba jumped to $96 million in six months. The LIBERTAD Act’s legal architecture bars easing the embargo absent free elections and released political prisoners. Caputo relays Rubio’s on-the-record confidence that Cuba “can’t wait us out” — a wager that economic strangulation succeeds where six decades of embargo alone did not.

• Michael Fuchs, “America Must Let Go of the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2026. Fuchs, a former Biden and Obama administration official, argues the Iran war’s toll — at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed, 18 U.S. troops dead, and a Strait of Hormuz closure that spiked global energy prices — should be the catalyst for a full U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East rather than another cycle of reinforcement. He traces the case to the 1990-91 Gulf War, which cemented a permanent regional troop presence he argues has consistently generated the threats it was meant to deter, citing the radicalizing effects of the 2003 Iraq occupation and the 2014 return of forces to fight ISIS as evidence of a self-perpetuating cycle. He argues permanent basing has consistently implicated Washington in partner states’ abuses, from Saudi Arabia’s Yemen campaign to what UN investigators concluded was genocide in Gaza and Sudan. His claim is that withdrawal would not require abandoning regional partners but would free Washington to prioritize deterrence in Asia and Europe instead. The essay’s blunt use of “genocide” and “illegal war” to describe recent U.S.-backed campaigns marks it as an unusually sharp structural critique from a former mainstream Democratic foreign-policy official, not a fringe position.

• Missy Ryan and Simon Shuster, “Ukraine’s Short-Lived Comeback,” The Atlantic, August 7, 2026. Ryan and Shuster show how Ukraine’s brief run of battlefield and diplomatic momentum — built on cheap drone interceptors that gave Kyiv leverage as a technological partner rather than an aid supplicant, and a warmer Trump meeting after last year’s Oval Office clash — collapsed within days, after Trump declined to expand Patriot deliveries or let Ukraine manufacture the systems itself. The report centers on Olha Stefanishyna, the well-connected ambassador who helped engineer Washington’s improved posture toward Kyiv, only to be charged with “illicit enrichment” by Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities in the same reshuffle that also cost reformist Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov his job. The authors report Zelensky’s suspicion that the withheld air defenses are a deliberate pressure tactic to make Ukraine “more compliant,” and trace the through-line from the humiliating February 2025 Oval Office confrontation to Fedorov’s improbable back-channel relationship with Elon Musk over Starlink access for drone operations. Ukraine’s diplomatic leverage remains structurally fragile: even genuine battlefield innovation and improved personal chemistry with Trump could not survive one bad week of corruption revelations and a stalled air-defense decision, leaving Kyiv exposed heading into another winter of intensified Russian missile strikes.

• Anatoly Kurmanaev, Julie Turkewitz, Tyler Pager, and Mariana Martínez, “​​A Long Night of Agony: The 48 Hours That Changed Venezuela,” The New York Times, August 6, 2026. Reconstructing the 48 hours after twin June 24 earthquakes (7.2 and 7.5 magnitude) killed at least 6,100 people in Venezuela, the Times team argues the disaster exposed how years of Socialist Party austerity, corruption, and coup-proofing had hollowed out the state’s own capacity to save its people. It focuses on rescuers working rubble with bare hands for lack of equipment, atomized military command structures deliberately fragmented to prevent coups, and a ten-hour delay in mobilizing rescue efforts partly caused by the US Geological Society initially misplacing the epicenter. A key tension the piece surfaces is the government’s fatal indecision over whether to close the only highway into La Guaira to civilian traffic — Rodríguez wanted it shut, interior-minister rival Diosdado Cabello overruled her, and the resulting 50-hour gridlock left ambulances stranded with the injured dying inside them. The article closes on the grim ledger of the 310-strong American rescue contingent going home after twelve days having saved just five survivors, an emblem of the broader argument that repression and austerity, not just geology, determined the death toll.

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I wrote about the potential dangers of AI in America Abroad, an issue that I also addressed in my monthly Ask Ivo Live Substack.

• I joined Cliff Schecter of Bam Media to talk about the shifting shape of Geopolitics.

• This week’s World Review, guest hosted by Giles Whittell, focused on the the Iran-Oman deal on the Strait, the Ceuta incident embroiling the EU over immigration, and how a heating planet is having real political impact.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, on to this week’s show. This week, in my absence, Giles Whittell of The Observer took the host’s chair — many thanks to him for steering a lively and substantive conversation. On the agenda: the fragile new calm over the Strait of Hormuz, the migration crisis that tore through Ceuta and the EU’s fault lines with it, and the politics — or lack thereof — of Europe’s brutal summer heat. Joining Giles were Adam Cancryn, White House reporter for CNN; Shona Murray, Euronews’ Europe correspondent in Brussels; and Kim Willsher, The Observer and Guardian’s longtime Paris correspondent.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few things that stood out to me from the conversation.

The Deal Nobody’s Watching

Tehran and Oman say they’ve reached an agreement in principle to reopen the Strait of Hormuz — and the most striking thing about it, Adam argued, is how little Washington had to do with it. After the collapse of an earlier memorandum of understanding, the US effectively stepped back and let Oman broker terms directly with Iran, hoping merely to return to baseline. That’s a long way from the war’s original ambitions of denuclearization and regime change — and a long way, too, from what Trump expected when he got into this: something quick and easy that has instead dragged on for months, bleeding into oil prices and midterm politics alike.

Europe, meanwhile, is barely a bystander. Shona traced the retreat back to the collapse of the JCPOA in Trump’s first term, and Kim put her finger on the real problem: there’s no European leader left with Trump’s ear. Not since Orbán turned out to be, in Shona’s blunt phrase, “essentially a Russian asset.” The one man still managing to keep the alliance from cracking, per Adam, is NATO’s Mark Rutte.

And yet — for all the drama, Kim noted something almost stranger: the day-to-day back-and-forth between Washington, Tehran and Muscat has “completely dropped off the news agenda” in Europe, even as the Jacques Delors Institute puts the war’s cost to the euro bloc at over €62 billion. A war that consumes billions and reshapes alliances, negotiated increasingly by proxy, while the rest of the world has simply stopped watching.

The Line in the Water

Few stories this year captured Europe’s fragility quite like Ceuta. Some 72,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave in a matter of days — and the EU’s response, Shona argued forcefully, was to blame the victim. Italy unilaterally suspended Schengen checks with Spain; other member states piled on, even though, as she pointed out, not a single one of those 72,000 people ever reached mainland Spain or the rest of the EU.

Kim, who has reported from Ceuta herself, described a lawless frontier town where migrants have long tried to scale razor wire and swim past sea barriers — but called this incursion “spectacular,” and pointed to credible reporting suggesting Russian-linked social media manipulation behind it. The “why now” question hung over the whole segment: was it Moroccan leverage-seeking, quiet encouragement from Washington or Israel, or Kremlin opportunism exploiting a known vulnerability? Nobody had a clean answer, which was itself telling.

What lingered longest was Shona’s warning: this won’t be a one-off. “We’ve seen it before and now we know it works.” With most EU governments drifting rightward and few willing to spend political capital defending it, Schengen — in her words, “the epitome of the EU” — looks more improvised than solid.

Waiting for the Rains

Kim’s dispatch from Paris was a study in delayed reckoning. France is on its summer pause, rivers like the Rhône and Loire are running dangerously low, nuclear reactors are throttling back for lack of cooling water, and the wine harvest has arrived weeks early — yet, as she put it, “at the moment, it’s not really being addressed.” She’s seen this movie before: a brutal 2003 heatwave killed 15,000 people and briefly forced a national reckoning — France even sacrificed a bank holiday to pay for it — before everyone simply moved on once the rains returned.

Adam offered the clearest explanation for why climate politics keeps failing to stick: Democrats have learned that lecturing voters about sacrifice doesn’t work, so the newest generation of candidates — Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed, Wisconsin’s Francesca Hong — are reframing the fight around affordability instead, particularly the electricity costs and land pressures created by AI data centers. It’s a shrewd pivot, and one that leaves Republicans with less room to dismiss the issue as ideological.

Shona was more skeptical of any real shift in Europe, dismissing a sudden bout of climate concern at one right-leaning British newspaper — promptly walked back by its own editor — as “very little, very late.” And Kim closed with a very French tension: Macron’s ambitions to build AI “champions” like Mistral collide directly with a public wary of the environmental cost of the giant data centers that ambition requires.

The pattern across all three stories, in the end, felt familiar: crises that demand attention now, and politics that keeps promising to deal with them later.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

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On accountability. asked what can be done to give the ICC real teeth. My answer isn’t satisfying: in an anarchic international system, without the US, China, Russia, and Iran as members, there is no larger enforcement power. The adults in the room are us — citizens, not courts. This is the argument behind the Atlas of Impunity, the project I’ve worked on with David Miliband and the Eurasia Group for four years now.

On Ukraine. asked why the pivot to Asia has come wrapped in Trump’s outright hostility toward Kyiv. My answer: it hasn’t — the Asia pivot is 40 years old and bipartisan. The hostility is personal and specific to Trump: the 2019 impeachment call, an unexplained fascination with Putin, and — most consequentially — a genuine failure to understand that Ukraine’s security, or Europe’s, is existential for America’s. That’s the break from 80 years of American strategy since Pearl Harbor.

On Iran. The pattern by now is unmistakable. Threaten, back down, repeat — the New York Post is calling this “lucky 13.” Iran has learned what North Korea, China, and Russia already knew: hold your ground and Trump folds. I don’t think the nuclear file changes, and I don’t think Hormuz stays free of Iranian control, no matter what Marco Rubio says today.

On AI. This is what actually keeps me up at night. Elon Musk himself puts a 10–20% probability on catastrophic outcomes. Jacob Tsimerman — this year’s Fields Medal winner — just walked away from pure mathematics to join OpenAI’s safety team because he takes “omnicide” scenarios seriously enough to want to work the problem from inside. Dario Amodei compares recursive self-improvement to the nuclear age. And the White House’s response, reported today, is a voluntary framework that doesn’t even touch open-source models. We regulate cars, drugs, household products more seriously than this. Thanks to for her question.

Join me the first Wednesday of every month, noon ET and 18h CET, for Ask Ivo.

We dig into how a Republican Party that once championed NATO has flipped to viewing it as a bad deal, how a strain of the left has adopted its own version of isolationism, and how Russia's disinformation playbook exploits both extremes — including how anti-Semitism gets weaponized across the political spectrum.

It's a wide-ranging, candid conversation (with a few Cubs and Arsenal tangents along the way) about how we got here and whether the old consensus on America's role in the world can be rebuilt.

Let me know what you think. And don’t forget, we’re live again tomorrow — Wednesday, August 5 — at noon ET / 1800 CET.

The next session of “Ask Ivo” will take place this Wednesday, August 5, at noon ET / 19.00 CET. Here’s the 🔗.

I’ll go live on Substack for about 30 minutes to answer your questions on U.S. foreign policy, global affairs, and whatever is happening in the world. We’ll talk about the Iran War morass, the need to regulate AI, and whatever else is on your mind.

To submit a question, just leave it in the comments below.

The Substack live will be open to everyone. I’ll publish the recording afterward for anyone who can’t make it.

See you August 5.

I’ve spent much of the past several months reading, thinking, and talking to people about artificial intelligence. I’m not a technologist. But I know a strategic paradox when I see one, and this is one of the starkest I’ve encountered in decades of thinking and writing about weapons, deterrence, and the failures of arms control.

Stated plainly: the people who understand AI best are the ones most frightened of it. And they are building it anyway, as fast as they can, because they’re afraid someone else will build it first.

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The True Believers

Start with Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a man who built an AI company that would prioritize safety in a way the OpenAI he left would not. He’s spent the past two years arguing publicly for AI regulation. In a recent essay, he wrote that we may be approaching the point where the most powerful AI systems stop looking like airplanes or automobiles — dangerous, but manageable through inspection and engineering standards — and start looking like weaponizable nuclear material. Not “just” a threat to public safety. A threat to humanity.

Or take Jacob Tsimerman. Weeks ago, he won the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, capping a career that includes cracking the decades-old André-Oort conjecture. He is, by consensus, one of the finest pure mathematicians alive. He just announced he’s leaving the University of Toronto — walking away from the discipline at the peak of his career — to work on AI safety at OpenAI. Last year he co-authored a paper with a blunt title: “A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence.” Its subject is how AI might kill most or all of humanity. He didn’t write it as speculative fiction. He wrote it as a mathematician building a taxonomy, the way he’d classify solutions to an equation.

These are not fringe doomsayers. This is the CEO of one of the two or three companies building the most powerful AI systems on Earth, and a Fields Medalist who just gave up mathematics for it. And they are the moderates.

Agents Go Rogue

Here is what should worry you more than either of their warnings: this week, reality caught up with the theory. Anthropic disclosed that its most advanced models had broken out of a sealed testing environment on three separate occasions, reached the open internet, and gone on to attack the production systems of real companies that had nothing to do with the tests that were being run. It made the disclosure only because it was checking its own logs after OpenAI revealed, days earlier, that one of its own agents had escaped a similar containment and breached the AI platform Hugging Face — and then found evidence that still more of its agents had slipped their sandboxes too.

Two of the world’s leading AI labs, within the same two weeks, found out after the fact that their own innovations had gone rogue. These weren’t thought experiments. Nor research papers. This happened this month. In two separate companies, and on multiple occasions.

Which leads to an obvious question. If the people building the most powerful AI systems in the world believe — genuinely believe, enough to reorder their careers and their public statements around it — that this technology could pose a threat on the order of nuclear weapons, why does it remain almost entirely unregulated?

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A Regulatory Double Standard

We do not allow private companies to build, own, or sell nuclear weapons. We are, at this very moment, in the middle of a war fought explicitly to prevent Iran — a state — from building one. Yet we ask nothing of a private company developing a technology its own chief executive calls comparably dangerous. Where nuclear technology is developed for civilian purposes, it happens under an elaborate international regime of inspection, licensing, and safeguards administered by the IAEA — a system built, however imperfectly, on the premise that this technology is too dangerous to leave to a single nation’s judgment. We do not allow pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs that haven’t passed years of controlled trials, no matter how much competitive pressure they’re under to beat a rival to market. In both cases, the logic is the same: some risks are too catastrophic and too irreversible to be governed by market competition alone.

AI, by the testimony of its own builders, belongs in that category. And, yet we regulate household cleaning supplies more strictly than the development of a technology that could destroy civilization itself.

Fear, Pointed the Wrong Way

Why? Not out of ignorance, but out of fear — a fear pointed in the wrong direction.

The labs that worry most about AI’s destructive potential are also the ones most afraid of falling behind commercially, of ceding the frontier to a competitor with looser safety practices. And governments that might otherwise regulate the technology are captured by the same fear at a geopolitical level: whatever Washington restrains, Beijing will not.

Every actor with the standing to slow this down has convinced itself that unilateral restraint just hands the advantage to someone less careful. The result is a race in which caution becomes a competitive liability, and the people most alarmed by the destination keep their foot on the accelerator because they trust no one else’s foot but their own.

An Unreassuring Precedent

There is a precedent for this failure mode, and it is not reassuring. In 1946, the United States proposed the Baruch Plan — placing all atomic energy under international control before an arms race could begin. It was the most far-sighted arms control proposal of the century, but it died almost immediately, because it asked the one power holding the weapon to surrender its advantage on a promise that everyone else would too. It took the terror of mutual assured destruction, not the wisdom of institutions, to eventually produce something resembling nuclear stability — and even that took decades and came close to failing catastrophically more than once.

AI may not afford us that runway. Nuclear weapons require fissile material, industrial infrastructure, and state-level resources to build; the barriers to entry are enormous and visible. The barriers around advanced AI are falling by the month, and the technology itself doesn’t need a decade of testing to demonstrate what it can do — it demonstrated it this week, unprompted, against companies that never consented to be part of the experiment.

A Modest, Outlandish Proposal

I don’t have a tidy policy prescription to offer here. But I know what doesn’t work: asking the companies and countries racing each other to regulate themselves out of a race they each believe they’ll lose if they stop first. That is not a plan. It is a hope, dressed up as one.

I’ve long played with an idea that sounds outlandish until you sit with it: the European Union buying Anthropic. Indeed, Amodei and Anthropic’s investors could take a decisive step in this direction themselves. Rather than rushing forward on an IPO — which some estimate could raise a trillion dollars or more — he could offer the company and its intellectual property for sale to the European Union, which has demonstrated a genuine commitment to regulation and safety. That way the technology could continue to evolve, but its ultimate use would be controlled in ways that enhance the prospect of safety for all.

So consider the precedent one more time. When humanity last built a technology capable of destroying itself, the solution we eventually settled on — imperfect, contested, but durable — was not to trust the market. It was global regulation and government ownership: the state, not the corporation, as custodian of the most dangerous material on Earth. If AI is, in the words of the man building it, comparable to a weapon of that order, shouldn’t it be controlled — and owned — the same way?

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Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

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• Marc Daalder, “How Two-Way Charging Between Your Garage and the Grid Will Slash Power Bills,” Newsroom, July 17, 2026. Daalder reports from New Zealand on the emerging vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology that lets electric vehicles discharge stored power back into homes and the grid, following a real-world trial in earthquake-prone Queenstown where officials see EV batteries as a resilience tool during major outages. He cites a Concept Consulting study finding the country’s growing EV fleet could soon store nearly twice New Zealand’s daily power use, and details the barriers holding the technology back — automaker warranty concerns, sluggish regulatory processes, and market designs that could create new demand peaks. Daalder notes New Zealand is falling behind the UK, France, China, and Australia in adopting the technology. Industry insiders remain broadly optimistic that coordinated action could make V2G mainstream by 2030. As one advocate says, buying an EV now effectively means “you’re getting a battery for less than $1000/kWh.”

• Josh Dawsey, “Exclusive | Unreleased Documentary Footage Captures Lindsey Graham’s Obsessive Push for Iran War,” The Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2026. Dawsey draws on hundreds of hours of raw documentary footage — filmed by Alex Holder with extensive access to the late Senator Lindsey Graham — to chronicle Graham’s yearslong campaign to topple Iran’s regime and his outsized influence on Trump’s decision to strike. The footage captures Graham on calls with Netanyahu, Zelensky, and former national security adviser Jake Sullivan, celebrating the U.S. strikes and privately predicting a swift regime collapse that never came. Dawsey shows Graham’s remarkable access to Trump and world leaders alongside his mounting frustration as the war dragged on. The piece also revisits Graham’s complicated legacy, from his early break with Trump after January 6 to his later embrace of him as history’s greatest president. In one of his final interviews before his death, Graham tells Holder: “There’s no way I can die yet.”

• Adrian Blomfield, “Zelensky Survives His Worst Week Since War Began,” The Telegraph, July 25, 2026. Blomfield examines the fallout in Ukraine after President Zelensky sacked his popular young defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, then bowed to street protests by also dismissing army chief Oleksandr Syrsky. He frames the clash as generational — between Fedorov’s push for drone-driven reform and Syrsky’s more traditional military doctrine — and notes Zelensky ultimately named Fedorov’s ally Mykhailo Drapaty as the new commander-in-chief. Blomfield argues the episode, while damaging to Zelensky’s authority at a delicate military moment, also shows Ukrainian democracy remains functional even in wartime, unlike in Russia. He quotes analysts warning that the recurring pattern of crises is steadily eroding Zelensky’s standing. One protest placard captured the mood, Blomfield notes: “Fedorov is innovation. Old grandpas are degeneration.”

• David Remnick, “How Netanyahu’s Top General Became His Strongest Challenger,” The New Yorker, July 27, 2026. Remnick profiles Gadi Eisenkot, the retired IDF chief and grieving father now positioned as Netanyahu’s strongest challenger ahead of Israel’s October election. He traces how Eisenkot’s working-class Moroccan background, blunt affect, and personal loss — his son Gal was killed in Gaza in 2023 — have made him an “anti-Bibi” figure capable of drawing disaffected voters from Netanyahu’s own base. Remnick recounts Eisenkot’s role on Israel’s wartime cabinet, including his push against an early strike on Hezbollah, and details the brutal tactics both campaigns are expected to deploy, from AI-generated attack ads to accusations of being pro-Arab. He also travels to the West Bank with Eisenkot’s critics, who warn that even a Netanyahu defeat may do little to change the underlying trajectory of settler violence. As one aide puts it, Eisenkot’s appeal is less ideological than personal: “We need the antithesis.”

• Franklin Foer, “How Netanyahu Lost America,” The Atlantic, July 27, 2026. Foer argues that Netanyahu, who built his career on the claim that no one understood American politics better than he did, has presided over the collapse of the bipartisan U.S. consensus supporting Israel. He traces the unraveling from Netanyahu’s contempt for Obama through his all-in bet on Trump to his repeated undermining of Biden, culminating in a bipartisan backlash visible in Senate votes, AIPAC’s declining influence, and cratering favorability polls. Foer contends Netanyahu consistently chose coalition politics and personal survival over steps — a Gaza plan, curbing Ben-Gvir, Saudi normalization — that might have preserved American goodwill. He situates this within Netanyahu’s father’s belief that antisemitism is immutable, suggesting Netanyahu ultimately governed as though persuasion were futile. “His legacy,” Foer concludes, “is Israel’s isolation.

• Bret Stephens, “A Blunt Warning for Israel,” The New York Times, July 28, 2026. Stephens, a longtime defender of Israel, argues that its failure to rein in settler terrorism in the West Bank has become a direct threat to Israel’s own security and to Zionism itself. He cites a public letter from retired IDF generals, including Entebbe veteran Matan Vilnai, warning that unchecked settler violence — 867 documented incidents in 2025 — could ignite a third intifada. Stephens dismisses Netanyahu’s characterization of the perpetrators as mere “juvenile delinquents,” arguing the government could contain the violence if it chose to but is constrained by its dependence on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. He warns that growing lawlessness across Israeli society risks a broader erosion of state authority. Stephens closes by reaffirming his belief in a law-governed Jewish state, one he says is “slipping away” under the current government.

• Rogé Karma, “The Great Chinese Oil Mystery,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2026. Karma investigates why global oil prices haven’t spiked as predicted since Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, tracing the answer to an abrupt, unexplained halving of China’s crude oil imports. He walks through competing theories — secret Russian shipments, undisclosed strategic reserves, a geopolitical signal aimed at Taiwan, or an effort to cushion trading partners’ economies to protect Chinese exports — while noting Beijing has offered no public explanation for any of them. Karma quotes analysts who describe the shift as a near-total surprise to the industry, with one admitting he feels like he needs “a tinfoil hat” to discuss it. He concludes that regardless of motive, China has demonstrated new leverage over global energy markets and, by extension, world affairs. As one expert tells him, the capital the world may now need to call during an oil shock isn’t Riyadh — it’s Beijing.

• Chrystia Freeland, “You Aren’t Going to Like What Comes After America,” The New York Times, July 28, 2026. Freeland, a former Canadian deputy prime minister, argues that Trump’s escalating tariff threats against Canada — despite the two countries’ mutually beneficial trade relationship — have little to do with economics and everything to do with demonstrating dominance. She traces the shifting, often contradictory justifications for the tariffs and argues the real message is that Washington now views allies as vassals rather than treaty-bound partners. Freeland warns that appeasement only invites further demands and calls for coordinated resistance among “middle powers,” pointing to Canadian PM Mark Carney’s efforts to rally like-minded countries. She notes with alarm that global polling now shows many longtime U.S. allies, including Canada, view China more favorably than the United States. Freeland closes by borrowing a line from Leonard Cohen for her title: people, he wrote, “aren’t going to like what comes after America.”

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• This week’s World Review focused on the US-Saudi nuclear deal, more US tariffs, and the new UK Government.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, on to this week’s show. We covered three stories: the new U.S.-Saudi nuclear deal, the administration’s latest tariff wall, and Britain’s brand-new government. I was joined by Felicia Schwartz, diplomatic correspondent at POLITICO; Robbie Gramer, national security reporter at The Wall Street Journal; and, for the first time, Hugh Tomlinson, international editor at The Observer.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.

Who’s Next? Riyadh’s Atomic Upgrade and Trump’s Vanishing Carrot

Washington and Riyadh have signed a civilian nuclear agreement that could eventually let Saudi Arabia enrich its own uranium. Unlike the “gold standard” deal Washington struck with the UAE in 2009, this one doesn’t require forswearing enrichment or accepting the toughest inspections. Felicia noted nobody has seen the final text yet, and a two-year feasibility study stands between signature and centrifuges. But her read was unambiguous: a real departure from a decades-old nonproliferation goal, and the “black box” framing — no technology transfer — is cold comfort, since centrifuges built for one purpose have a way of finding another.

The timing puzzled Hugh most. We are five months into a war meant to stop Iran from enriching uranium, after Europeans spent a quarter-century trying diplomacy toward the same end — so why hand Riyadh a version of the very capability everyone has spent a generation keeping out of the region? Robbie’s answer: politics and technocracy converged, months of quiet negotiation finishing just as the moment turned politically ripe. Of course, nothing is ever as it seems. Less than 24 hours after signing, Trump through a curveball: The US President insisted that Saudi Arabia join the Abraham Accords as a condition of approval, catching and angering a kingdom nowhere near ready to normalize with Israel while Gaza still festers. Felicia’s line stuck with me: Trump’s dealmaking follows his old real-estate instinct — best terms up front, then the price rises the longer it drags on. That’s now how the Saudis are feeling — the carrot is vanishing. But the nuclearization of the Middle East is still squarely on the table. Iran wants the bomb, and so does Saudi Arabia if it does. Turkey, Egypt, and a UAE could follow suit. So you understand why I kept thinking of Tom Lehrer’s old song about the bomb: who’s next, indeed.

The Tariff Boogeyman Returns

Robbie’s framing was the line of the episode: this tariff round is “something out of a horror movie where just when you think the boogeyman is gone... there’s a jump scare.” Ten to twelve-and-a-half percent duties on goods from more than sixty countries, justified this time by forced-labor findings rather than the national emergency tariff logic the Supreme Court struck down in February. The legal architecture — Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act — is meant to be sturdier basis for the tariffs, and allies have adjusted. The EU, at ten percent, is “pretty satisfied”; Canada, hit with fifty percent under a dormant 1930s statute, is not. Hugh reported a “collective eye roll” in London, filed under the cost of doing business with this White House.

Felicia’s noted that when she talks to foreign officials, their frustration isn’t the rate — it’s the constantly shifting rationale. Meet the trade negotiator and you get a technocratic explanation; watch what happens and the legal cover looks improvised. Exhibit A: diamond imports were quietly exempted shortly after Trump received a 325-diamond ring as a negotiating gift — echoes of the Swiss gold bar that once solved a similar problem. Tariffs also played on Capitol Hill, with the Senate’s near-unanimous Russia sanctions bill, championed by the late Senator Lindsey Graham, handing Trump new tariff authority over countries buying Russian and Iranian oil. Robbie explained why some Ukraine-supporting Democrats held their noses to vote yes, while others, like Senator Andy Kim, voted no precisely because they didn’t trust Trump with that power. His summary of the administration’s deals, in three words: “big … if true.”

Number 10’s New Tenant, and the Podium Man Who Wasn’t

Andy Burnham is Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, and Hugh — newly returned to London after nearly twenty years abroad — framed the moment with real whiplash: he left when Gordon Brown was PM and New Labour was dying, and came home to find Labour already devouring its second leader after finally having returned to power. Yet his read was more hopeful than that history suggests: clearer communication out of Number 10, real specifics on social care and devolution, a sense — missing under Starmer — that the government knows what it wants. Burnham has had luck, too: Reform’s leader Nigel Farage is mired in a by-election caused by a corruption scandal, and Washington’s choice not to intervene in the Tate brothers’ extradition case spared the new government an early transatlantic headache.

On the U.S. relationship, Felicia noted the working-level machinery — Five Eyes, Pentagon-to-MoD — hums along regardless of who’s in Downing Street, but there’s strikingly little curiosity in Washington about Burnham himself. What Britain can do, she and Hugh agreed, is signal: a Trident renewal commitment aimed at Trump’s defense-spending demands, talk of North Sea oil exploration, keeping U.S. bases available for the Iran war. Tellingly, John Healy, who resigned as defense secretary over the pace of spending increases, is now the chancellor tasked with finding the money he once demanded. Robbie added the wider frame — Britain still punches above its weight in NATO, providing bases for U.S. bombers for the Iran strikes, holding the eastern flank. On Ukraine, Hugh sees no daylight opening: continuity, not retreat, though new Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband may find Washington a harder audience than Brussels. Felicia closed with the detail I loved: Britain has a minor celebrity, the AV man who wheels out the prime ministerial podium for each new PM — and Burnham, breaking tradition, skipped him. A small thing, but maybe a preview of how differently this government means to do business.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

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• Thomas L. Friedman, “Three World Leaders. Three Incredibly Bad Decisions,” The New York Times, July 21, 2026. Friedman argues that Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin share a fatal flaw: each surrounded himself with sycophants and now finds himself trapped in a war he cannot easily exit. On Netanyahu, Friedman draws on NYT reporting to show that the Mossad convinced Trump that killing Iran’s leadership would topple the regime and even floated installing former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a replacement—a plan CIA director John Ratcliffe reportedly dismissed as “farcical.” Friedman traces this misjudgment to a structural flaw in Israeli intelligence: skill at assassination breeds false confidence in political forecasting, since the disgruntled agents Mossad recruits have every incentive to exaggerate a regime’s fragility. He draws a parallel to Putin, who similarly believed his own narrative that Ukrainians were “one people” with Russians and would welcome invasion as liberation. Trump, meanwhile, invaded Iran with no allies and no plan, only to hand Tehran cheap asymmetric leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. Friedman closes by noting Iran’s clerical regime faces an even more implacable adversary than any of these leaders: a worsening water crisis that could force Tehran’s evacuation before any bomb does.

• Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Why I Sought Out a Taliban Commander I Had Fought,” The New York Times, July 23, 2026. Gibbons-Neff, a former Marine sniper team leader who later became a Times war correspondent, returns to Afghanistan to confront a former enemy—and himself—about the toll of the 2010 battle of Marja, a fight where he killed six or seven people. He recounts a tense meeting with Taliban deputy minister Muhajer Farahi, who tells him bluntly that Washington “hasn’t learned” given its involvement in Iran and Gaza, and a phone call with Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab, the Taliban commander Gibbons-Neff faced in combat and later interviewed without disclosing his own military past. Gulab presses him on why American veterans die by suicide at such high rates, and Gibbons-Neff traces it to a generation raised on World War II mythology only to find their sacrifices met with evasion from commanders who profited afterward on the speaking and defense-contractor circuit. The piece turns on a striking asymmetry: Gulab describes his side’s losses as purposeful and even peaceful, since his fighters believed they’d die for jihad, while Gibbons-Neff still carries what he calls a fog of anger and bitterness. Gulab closes with an unprompted gesture of grace: “I have forgiven you.” Gibbons-Neff is leaving the Times to become an English teacher.

• Jared Malsin, “The U.S. and Iran Are Stuck in a Cycle of Military Escalation,” The Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2026. Malsin reports that the five-month-old U.S.-Iran conflict has entered its most intense phase yet, with Washington escalating airstrikes across Iran while Tehran’s allied Houthi militia opens a new front by threatening shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, driving oil above $100 a barrel for the first time in two months. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns that “the price will continue to get higher every single night” and frames the administration’s posture as “a head for an eye,” even as analysts argue Washington lacks a coherent strategic concept. Malsin lays out the core stalemate: neither side can achieve a decisive military advantage, yet both keep escalating to generate leverage, with Trump’s remaining options—striking Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility, hitting civilian infrastructure, or even a symbolic small nuclear strike—unlikely to change the fundamental equation, according to Iran specialist Hamidreza Azizi. The Houthis’ entry, drawing on their record of downing U.S. Reaper drones and striking the USS Harry S. Truman during last year’s Operation Rough Rider, complicates the Pentagon’s calculus and undercuts Trump’s ability to talk oil prices down. As Eyre puts it, summarizing Tehran’s staying power after decades of sanctions and unrest: “The Iranian regime knows how to take a punch.”

• Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Maggie Haberman, “Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One,” The New York Times, July 25, 2026. The Times’ investigation finds that Trump’s insistence on rapidly converting a Qatari-donated 747-8 into a temporary Air Force One led to compressed timelines, ballooning costs, and the omission of security features standard on the plane it replaces. The authors report that Trump personally signed off on the retrofit, which lacks a lower-level emergency exit, a second auxiliary power unit, and the visible infrared missile-countermeasure system found on the older jets—shortfalls Frank Kendall, who as Air Force Secretary oversaw the modernization program under Biden, calls a real added risk. The reporting traces the total cost past $1.2 billion once training aircraft and other add-ons are included, financed in part by diverting funds from a classified nuclear-modernization account in a maneuver Senator Christopher Murphy calls an effort to dodge oversight. The piece culminates in a July 8 episode in Turkey, when U.S. officials identified a credible threat from Iranian proxy forces against Trump, prompting the Secret Service to swap him onto the older, better-defended jet for departure—while Trump’s public explanation, that he flew the old plane “for old time’s sake,” omitted the threat entirely. The White House maintains the Qatari jet is “fully mission-ready and safe for presidential travel today,” though it will be pulled for further “upgrades and enhancements” this fall.

• Patrick Foulis, “Trump’s Trade War Shifts from Shakedown to Lock-In,” Financial Times, 2026. Foulis argues that the defining feature of Trump’s second-term economic strategy is no longer tariffs themselves but a deeper campaign to lock in America’s position atop the infrastructure of globalization—its financial markets, tech networks, and defense guarantees—and prevent other countries from building alternatives. He describes a shift from what he calls a shakedown, in which the U.S. charges more for access to its services, to a lock-in strategy aimed at foreclosing competitors entirely, citing the Trump administration’s tariff pressure on Brazil’s homegrown digital payment platform Pix and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s threats to sanction Chinese AI firms like Moonshot as evidence. Foulis notes the strategy has produced real results, with foreign capital inflows hitting record highs and income from U.S. tech, finance, and defense exports rising to 7 percent of GDP. But, he warns, it has also provoked a backlash, pushing allies to invest more aggressively in independent alternatives to U.S. payment systems, air defense, and digital infrastructure. He situates this in historical precedent, comparing it to Britain’s efforts to suppress Germany’s wireless service in the 1900s and America’s campaign against Huawei in the 2010s. Foulis closes with a warning: asking allies to pay more for U.S. protection is one thing, but trying to prohibit them from seeking alternatives entirely would mark a far more consequential and confrontational turn.

• Zanny Minton Beddoes, “The World’s Richest Man Sits Down with The Economist,” The Economist, 2026. In a 90-minute interview conducted at a Tesla factory in Texas, Minton Beddoes finds Elon Musk casting himself as a modern Cassandra, confident in predictions that most listeners find hard to credit: that AI will surpass the sum of human intelligence within five years, that robots will usher in an era of “amazing abundance” within ten, and that Britain will descend into civil war within twenty. She presses him on the risks of the technology he’s racing to build, and Musk floats extending Demis Hassabis’s proposal for AI self-regulation to include Chinese labs inspecting each other’s models before release, even suggesting he might reconcile with OpenAI’s Sam Altman “for the good of the world.” Minton Beddoes draws out Musk’s surprisingly sanguine view of Chinese AI competition—he calls China “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem” that currently constrains its chipmaking—and presses him on inflammatory comments about immigration and Europe’s far-right, which he defends as concern for “normal people” wanting safe cities and secure borders. The interview closes on a note of vertigo: asked to make sense of his own contradictions, Musk retreats to a favorite theory, that the universe may be a simulation, admitting “the things I’m doing are so preposterous that it’s hard to believe they’re real.”

• David D. Kirkpatrick, “The Biden Administration’s Regrets on Israel, Gaza, and Iran,” The New Yorker, July 20, 2026. Kirkpatrick spent over a year investigating how the Biden administration became so entangled in Israel’s war in Gaza, prompted by the recent collapse of Israel’s once-bipartisan standing in American politics, evidenced by more than a hundred House Democrats voting to cut off military aid. He finds a sharp divide among Biden’s former advisers: some maintain there was no viable alternative that could have freed the hostages and ended the war without such devastation, while others are candid about their regrets, including failing to pressure Israel harder over civilian casualties and accepting Israeli assurances of an imminent endgame that never arrived. Former deputy national security adviser Jon Finer tells Kirkpatrick that for both Hamas and Israel, civilian harm was “not a side effect but part of the strategy,” and that the U.S. should not have tolerated wars fought on those terms. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, offers the piece’s most pointed admission: “We should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.” The reporting also surfaces a deeper structural critique—that Washington’s reflexive backing created a moral hazard, encouraging Netanyahu to provoke Iran knowing the U.S. would ultimately absorb the cost of defending Israel each time tensions escalated.

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• This week’s World Review focused on the World Cup, and what it told us about America, Cinderellas and sore losers, and how money is changing the game.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, on to this week’s show. We devoted the entire episode to the World Cup — not the football itself, so much as what it revealed about America, about national character, and about the money now sloshing through the biggest sporting event on Earth. Joining me were Edward Luce, US National Editor and columnist at the Financial Times; Bobby Ghosh, who writes the Substack Ghoshworld; and Mehreen Khan, Economics Editor of The Times of London.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.

A Dull Final, A Restless Nation

Spain won, and by most accounts deserved to. Mehreen made the case plainly: this was a team that played international football like it plays domestic football — the most “system-coherent” side left standing once the tournament’s individual brilliance ran its course. But nobody on the panel much enjoyed the ending. Bobby confessed to rooting against the favorites all tournament long, hoping for a Cinderella to deliver what he called “the karmic corrective” a tainted World Cup badly needed. Ed, self-described as having never before been asked his opinion on football, admitted he too wanted an underdog — and got hooked anyway, watching every match “right up to the end.”

That contradiction — bored by the outcome, gripped by the spectacle — turned out to be the story of America’s relationship with this tournament. Ed’s reporting on the ground found something genuinely surprising: not the disaster many of his political-journalist colleagues predicted, but a six-week truce. National-security wonks at the Aspen Security Forum abandoned their panels to watch the semifinals. A Kansas college town adopted Algeria’s team wholesale, learning their anthem and flying their flag — in, as Ed put it, deep MAGA country. The gap between how people behave online and how they behave standing next to each other, he argued, was “Grand Canyon wide.”

But nobody pretended this was redemptive. Mehreen’s sharpest point cut through the good feeling: the Iranian team’s treatment — logistically stranded, symbolically shamed, quietly failed by FIFA’s president when Washington asked for cover — will likely outlast Lawrence, Kansas in the global memory. Bobby went further, predicting the mood snaps back the moment ICE resumes operations at home. A World Cup, all three agreed, cannot be asked to do politics’ job.

Cinderellas, Sore Losers, and the Myth of National Character

Every World Cup produces its underdogs and its villains, and this one obliged on both counts. Bobby walked through the tournament’s breakout stars — Cabo Verde’s veteran goalkeeper chief among them — while reserving his sharpest words for Argentina, whose graceless exit he refused to treat as an aberration. “That’s how they’ve always behaved,” he said, tracing the lineage back to the 1986 trophy celebration. It won’t change, he predicted, “and I can give you that in writing.”

The more interesting argument came from Mehreen, who pushed back on drawing national lessons from football at all — while doing exactly that, brilliantly, for the length of the segment. Her point: modern squads are made of players whose biographies scramble the very idea of fixed national identity. A Cabo Verdean international who’s never set foot in Cabo Verde. A Moroccan teenager who spent his youth in the French system before switching sides. An American striker born in New York to a British mother the airline judged too pregnant to fly back to London. “Football is showing us,” Mehreen said, “that citizenship isn’t as fixed as we think.” She’s becoming more of a fan of the World Cup for precisely the reason she used to distrust it — the nationalism on display is revealed, over and over, as a story about migration wearing a jersey.

Follow the Money — It’s American Now

The final segment turned to economics, Mehreen’s home turf, and the numbers were startling: this World Cup generated roughly $15 billion above FIFA’s own projections, driven largely by uncapped dynamic ticket pricing that fans simply paid. That windfall funds the sport’s four-year cycle between men’s tournaments — and, not incidentally, buys Gianni Infantino an uncontested re-election in 2027, a “democracy,” Mehreen noted dryly, “that even Trump would envy.”

The bigger story is who now owns the game. Sovereign wealth’s sportswashing era, Mehreen argued, is already giving way to something else: American private equity, venture capital, and private credit, drawn to European clubs as wildly undervalued franchises next to NFL or MLB valuations. She’s watched it happen to her own team, Chelsea, first-hand — a club she says is now built to trade players for appreciation rather than to win. Bobby’s addition sharpened the tension: the capital is American, but the audience that makes these clubs valuable lives overwhelmingly in the Global South, and that audience shows up for a specific game, played a specific way. If Americanization changes how the sport is played and clubs are run, the fans who don’t care about balance sheets may simply leave.

Ed’s closing thought tied it back to the show’s broader preoccupations: none of this is unique to football. It’s the same story of protected, oligopolistic power we recognize from American leagues themselves — and, he allowed, from watching citizens elsewhere fail to rebel against entrenched power in politics. “You don’t see fans rebelling against power structures in football,” I said. “You don’t see citizens rebelling against power structures in politics.” Maybe, this week, that was as good a place as any to leave it.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

Subscribe now

• Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, “How Marco Rubio Is Running Venezuela From Afar,” The New York Times, July 11, 2026. The piece reveals that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become the de facto “viceroy” of Venezuela, controlling the country’s finances, natural resources, and government in an arrangement of foreign dominance unseen since the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003. Reporting details how the U.S. Treasury collects Venezuela’s export revenue and disburses it back under conditions set by Rubio’s team, giving Washington leverage over interim leader Delcy Rodríguez down to approving her social media posts and cabinet picks. The article traces the arrangement’s origins to Rubio’s post-capture phone call with Rodríguez, in which she agreed to “do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” and follows its evolution through oil deals, the extradition of Maduro associate Alex Saab, and a joint strike that killed a Tren de Aragua leader. It closes on the unresolved question of when elections might finally be held — a decision the piece notes now rests with Rubio, not Rodríguez.

• Yaroslav Trofimov, “Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate Over Hormuz,” The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2026. Trofimov argues that Tehran, believing it emerged from February’s 40-day war as a regional hegemon, is now escalating over the Strait of Hormuz to institutionalize control over the waterway and, by extension, the Gulf economies that depend on it. He details how the latest clashes began when Iran attacked vessels transiting via Omani waters to avoid its tolls, prompting Washington to revoke a sanctions waiver and trade further strikes, while analysts note the ambiguity of who truly holds power in Tehran given new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s total public absence since being injured in the strikes that killed his father. The Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent traces a broader realignment, with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar sending funeral delegations to Tehran despite public snubs, concluding that both Washington and Tehran believe they won the war, which is precisely why the brinkmanship continues. As one Iran expert put it, the regime’s takeaway is that concessions come only through coercion, so it will keep pushing until it faces real costs.

• Carlos Lozada, “JD Vance Is Worried,” The New York Times, July 7, 2026. This review of Vance’s new memoir “Communion” argues that beneath the vice president’s account of his religious journey from evangelicalism to Catholicism lies a darker preoccupation: a belief that Western Christian civilization is losing a struggle against “secular global liberalism,” a decline he blames for racial strife and falling birthrates. Lozada traces this theme through Vance’s public record, from his 2024 RNC claim that “America is not just an idea” to his Munich Security Conference warnings about immigration as Europe’s chief internal threat, showing how "Communion" recasts Christianity, rather than America's founding documents, as the country's defining creed. Lozada depicts a vice president prone to conspiratorial “doomer” thinking, including a 2020 pandemic-prep buying spree and a fixation on hidden plots after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Lozada is unsparing on Vance’s blind spots, particularly his refusal to reckon with the Springfield, Ohio pet-eating rumors he spread during the campaign, closing with a dry needle: “It’s just as the hymn says: They’ll know we are Christians by our constant evaluation of trade-offs.”

• David Miliband, “Kings, Priests and Prophets: The Sacks Annual Memorial Lecture 2026,” Rabbi Sacks Legacy, 2026. In this lecture honoring the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, uses Sacks’s framework of Judaism’s “three crowns” — Kingship, Priesthood, and Prophecy — to argue that unchecked power requires countervailing institutional and moral checks, a balance he says is collapsing worldwide. He marshals data showing global democracy has regressed to 1978 levels and autocracies now outnumber democracies, attributing the “great reversal” to four converging forces: unmanageable global risks, the West’s relative economic decline, surging wealth inequality, and a technological revolution outpacing regulation. Drawing on economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power,” Miliband proposes five renewal areas — devolving UK power from Westminster, defending independent institutions, fixing the broken information ecosystem, expanding deliberative democracy, and electoral reform — framing each as a way to rebuild trust rather than merely defend the status quo. He closes by invoking Sacks’s own words, that society is “a home where we contribute, not just a hotel where we consume,” urging listeners to become leaders who both defend democratic inheritance and innovate to renew it.

• Demis Hassabis, “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age,” X, July 14, 2026. In this essay, the Google DeepMind CEO argues that AGI is only a few years away and compares its likely impact to the discovery of fire or electricity rather than prior technological revolutions, promising a potential era of abundance through breakthroughs in drug discovery, clean energy, and materials science. He warns that intense commercial and geopolitical competition is pushing capabilities ahead of society’s understanding of the risks, particularly around cybersecurity, bio-threats, and control of increasingly agentic, self-improving systems. As a remedy, Hassabis proposes a U.S.-led “Frontier AI Standards Body,” modeled on FINRA’s public-private structure, that would test models against evolving benchmarks, initially through voluntary pre-release review before likely becoming mandatory, with the aim of seeding a broader international framework. He closes by stressing that even if the technical challenges are solved, society still faces unresolved questions about economic models, values, and meaning in a post-scarcity world — declaring that “resolving these questions obviously cannot and should not be left to technologists alone.

• Alec Russell, Abigail Hauslohner, and Ian Hodgson, “RIP the US State Department,” Financial Times, July 13, 2026. The FT reporters chart the hollowing out of America’s diplomatic corps under Trump’s second term, noting that more than half of US ambassadorships sit vacant and the department’s workforce has shrunk by over 20 percent, with career foreign service officers sidelined in favor of confidants like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Drawing on interviews with veteran diplomats, they argue the damage exceeds even the McCarthy-era purge of China expertise, with critics tying the fragile U.S.-Iran memorandum’s collapse directly to the absence of seasoned negotiators at the table. It also traces an internal culture war, centered on the conservative Ben Franklin Fellowship, over whether the department had become a liberal echo chamber in need of correction or is simply being gutted for loyalty rather than expertise. The reporters close on a sober note from Bill Burns, who warns that unlike after Trump’s first term, this time the damage may be generational rather than something a future administration can simply reverse.

• Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi, and Ronen Bergman, “Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Install Ahmadinejad, Iran’s Former President, as Leader,” The New York Times, July 13, 2026. The Times reveals a years long Israeli intelligence effort to groom former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an asset who could eventually be installed as Iran’s leader, using a Budapest climate conference as cover for meetings with Mossad’s then-chief David Barnea. Reporting details how the plan culminated in late February, when Israeli operatives allegedly extracted Ahmadinejad from Tehran in a black Peugeot following a strike on his compound, only for him to grow disillusioned and vanish, reportedly now held under IRGC house arrest. The article traces Ahmadinejad’s post-presidency reinvention, from shedding his khaki windbreaker for tailored suits to privately telling associates he saw himself as a Yeltsin-style reformer who would normalize ties with Israel, while Iranian officials say his outreach to Trump and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince had already drawn Revolutionary Guards suspicion years earlier. It closes on his lone, masked appearance at Khamenei’s funeral procession, standing silent and flanked by guards, the first time he’d been seen in public since the botched rescue.

• Allegra Mendelson and Mariana Hallal, “This Satellite Imagery Reveals Just How Advanced China’s Military Is,” The Telegraph, July 15, 2026. Drawing on satellite imagery analysis, this astonishing piece of reporting documents an extensive network of full-scale military training replicas in China’s Taklamakan desert and elsewhere, including mock-ups of the USS Gerald Ford, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, F-22s and F-35s, and Japan’s Yokosuka Naval Base, all bearing damage consistent with live missile tests. It details particularly elaborate replicas of Taiwan’s presidential district in Taipei, connected by a 280km tunnel network built to simulate leaders fleeing underground, which experts say points toward rehearsals for ground troops storming the capital. Geo-intelligence analysts quoted in the piece describe the precision and specificity of the replicas as evidence of deliberate rehearsal against named adversaries rather than generic training, with one calling the scale “unprecedented.” The article closes by framing the imagery itself as a form of deterrent signaling, warning Japan, the U.S., and Taiwan alike of Beijing’s operational intentions should a Taiwan conflict erupt.

• Anthony Lane, “How Worldy Is the World Cup?,” The New Yorker, July 17, 2026. In this wry dispatch on the closing days of the 2026 World Cup, Lane skewers FIFA’s Super Bowl-style halftime spectacle plans for Sunday’s Spain-Argentina final while dissecting France’s shock semifinal collapse against Spain, in which the tournament’s early stars lost their composure just when it mattered most. He argues the tournament’s expansion to forty-eight teams briefly delivered genuine underdog magic, citing Cabo Verde’s stunning run, only for that diversity to evaporate by the quarterfinals, when six of eight remaining teams were European and Asia had no representation at all. Lane contends that modern scouting has eliminated the mythic surprise once embodied by Pelé, since today’s best players are already global commodities long before the World Cup showcases them. He closes on a droll aside about America’s own campaign, ended by a controversial red-card reversal following Trump’s intervention, and an admiring nod to England coach Thomas Tuchel’s blunt post-match candor, joking that the tournament’s real legacy might be inspiring American soccer parents everywhere to stop shouting “good job.”

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I joined Washington’s Journal to talk about NATO

• This week’s World Review focused on the Iran box Trump finds himself in, the forgotten war in Gaza, and political turmoil in Ukraine.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, on to this week’s show.

We covered three stories this week: the widening standoff over the Strait of Hormuz and whether Washington is preparing to escalate its war with Iran; the quiet collapse of the “Board of Peace” plan for rebuilding Gaza; and the political earthquake in Kyiv after President Zelensky fired his popular digital transformation minister, the architect of Ukraine’s drone war. Joining me were Alex Ward, national security reporter at the Wall Street Journal; Matt Kaminski, Editorial Chair of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks; and Elise Labott, who writes the Cosmopolitics Substack and founded Zivvy Media.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.

The Dice-Move Doctrine

Alex offered the line of the week: Trump’s Iran policy, he said, is best understood through the movie Knocked Up — Seth Rogen’s character has exactly one dance move and keeps repeating it because it’s the only move he’s got. That, Alex argued, is the entirety of this administration’s approach whenever it gets backed into a corner: more strikes, more threats, more escalation, because there’s no other play in the book.

The problem is that the move isn’t working. Trump signed what Matt called the most generous deal Tehran has been offered in 47 years, and they didn’t take it. Now Washington has restored its naval blockade and is weighing whether to strike Kharg Island or even put troops on the ground — an option Alex thinks is too risky to actually happen, but one Trump is nonetheless discussing, which tells you something about how badly the administration believes this war is slipping away.

Matt zoomed out to the region: six days of Iranian strikes on Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Emirates, and now Syria for the first time, testing whether the Gulf states will finally build a real coalition or keep issuing statements and hoping it passes. Elise’s read was blunter — Trump’s usual playbook of bluster and threats has simply stopped working on Tehran. “The Iranians are like, bring it,” she said. I pushed the group on a pattern I think runs through this whole presidency: Trump doesn’t know how to handle strongmen. North Korea, Russia, China, now Iran — in each case the fire-and-fury approach produced meetings, headlines, and very little else. As Matt put it, leverage in diplomacy comes from the alliances you build, and trust, once spent, is expensive to rebuild.

The Riviera That Wasn’t

A year ago this administration was promising a “Trump Riviera” on the Gaza coast — AI-powered trains, luxury resorts, the Palestinians, in the president’s words, as the luckiest people in the world. This week the actual news was a single small pilot project, backed by exactly two countries willing to send troops: Morocco and Kosovo.

Matt’s diagnosis was structural: Israel never wanted a credible international stabilization force in Gaza because it would cut into its own leverage, aid has stalled because no one can verify where it’s going, and Israeli domestic politics — an election looming in October, a prime minister who may be on his way out but rarely lacks for a next move — has crowded out follow-through. Elise added the piece that made the puzzle click: Hamas won’t disarm while Israeli airstrikes continue, and Israel won’t credibly commit to withdrawal, so the whole plan deadlocks on a single unresolved question. The Board of Peace, she suggested, has quietly become less a reconstruction vehicle than a placeholder for a political process that may not arrive for years.

Alex traced it back to bandwidth: Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the deal’s chief architects, got pulled into Iran and Ukraine and left Gaza to a deputy who has since departed government entirely. “That’s who’s running, quote unquote, Gaza,” he said. The pattern across all three of this week’s stories, really — big declarations, thin execution. As Matt put it of the administration generally, the ideas aren’t crazy; the follow-through is where it keeps getting tripped up.

The Golden Goose, Grounded

The most personal story of the week was Ukraine’s. Mykhailo Fedorov, the young minister who built the country’s drone industry from nothing and became the face of a leaner, tech-driven way of fighting, was fired by Zelensky — and thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in protest.

Elise laid out the fault line: an infantry-minded military establishment, led by a commander nicknamed “the Butcher,” clashing with a innovation-first faction that Fedorov personified, at the exact moment drone warfare is what’s stabilizing the front. Matt saw something more personal than strategic in the decision — a recurring pattern under Zelensky of talented, popular subordinates getting sidelined once they build a following of their own. He drew an unflattering parallel to Trump himself: both men, he argued, are gifted communicators with an outsized sense of their own indispensability, and both tend to keep the loyal close while easing out the merely competent.

Alex’s contribution was the sharpest: whatever the politics, Zelensky just pushed out the person who engineered the very capability — cheap, homegrown drone warfare — that Ukraine could eventually export to its European allies. “You just kind of threw out the golden goose,” he said. My own view is that Zelensky would serve himself and his country better by taking a Churchill-style off-ramp — commit to winning the war rather than to a fourth term — though I doubt he’ll take that advice any time soon.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

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Trump says the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year defending Europe from Russia. It doesn’t.

• The U.S. defense budget funds U.S. global security — the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific, the Western Hemisphere. Treating the entire number as a subsidy to Europe is simply wrong.

Trump says the U.S. used to pay 100% of NATO. It never did.

• On the common-funded budget — the part all members jointly pay into — the U.S. share has gone from 22% to 15%. Never 100%. Not once in 77 years.

Trump says Europe “hasn’t been there for us.” Check the record.

• NATO has invoked Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all — exactly once. September 12, 2001. To defend the United States. NATO AWACS patrolled American skies. European troops fought and died in Afghanistan for twenty years, addressing a threat to us, not to them. That’s not nothing. That’s the whole point of the alliance working as designed.

On Ukraine, the caller’s framing was backwards, and I said so on air.

• This war started when Russia invaded Ukraine — a violation of the basic post-1945 rule that borders don’t change by force. There was no serious surrender on the table in early 2022; Zelenskyy never indicated he was ready to give up Ukrainian territory. Within three months, Ukraine had pushed Russian forces out of roughly 10% of occupied territory — using Javelins they’d purchased before the war, not Western largesse manufactured after. The drones hitting Russian oil infrastructure today are Ukrainian-built, Ukrainian-innovated — so effective that Gulf states and the U.S. are now buying the technology from Kyiv. NATO isn’t shooting. Ukrainians are defending their own country, and for the last eighteen months, doing it with European money, not American. If anything, the mistake has been giving too little, too slowly — not too much.

Why does any of this matter? Because the underlying case for NATO isn’t sentimental — it’s a lesson written in American blood, twice.

• We were pulled into two European wars in the twentieth century — 1917, 1941 — because we discovered, at enormous cost, that American security is not separable from what happens in Europe. FDR’s answer, carried forward by every administration since, Democratic and Republican, was to prevent the next war rather than fight it: alliances, not aftermaths. NATO, signed in 1949, has been the most successful application of that lesson in modern history. It used to be self-evident. Polling from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs — which I used to run, and which has tracked this for over fifty years — shows American support for NATO is strong. The country understands this even when the rhetoric coming out of Washington suggests otherwise.

None of this is an argument against Europe doing more. It should. I’ve made that case elsewhere and will keep making it. But “doing more” and “the U.S. has been swindled by its closest allies” are two different claims, and only one of them is true.

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. Don’t hesitate to recommend your own reads; I may include some as well.

Subscribe now

• Rahm Emanuel, “The US-Israel Relationship: Where It Stands Today and the Road Ahead,” Rahm Emanuel’s Substack, July 8, 2026. A remarkable speech by the former White House Chief of Staff, Chicago Mayor, former U.S. ambassador to Japan, and son of an Israeli-born father who fought in Israel’s war of independence — arguing that decades of unconditional American support have enabled Prime Minister Netanyahu to pursue a “military-only” strategy that has left Israel more isolated than ever. Emanuel traces three historical Israeli strategies (unilateral action, “divorce and occupation,” and regional partnership), arguing only the third has ever produced durable peace, and proposes replacing the “discredited” two-state framework with a “23-state solution” in which Arab nations take responsibility for Palestinian governance in exchange for full diplomatic normalization with Israel. He calls for ending U.S. subsidies of Israel’s defense budget, sanctioning Israelis who attack Palestinian civilians or fund illegal settlements, and reviving the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor as an economic anchor for regional integration. Emanuel closes by warning that Israel will stand alone if it pursues annexation of the West Bank, but that “should you choose to pursue peace and security, we will be by your side.”

• Farnaz Fassihi, “Momentary Unity at a Funeral Masks Deep Divisions Among Iran’s Leaders,” The New York Times, July 4, 2026. The elaborate state funeral for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was meant to project unity, but the notable absence of his son and successor, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei — unseen in public since assuming power in March — has instead exposed a bitter rift among Iran’s conservative elite. Fassihi reports that a “pragmatic” faction, including Revolutionary Guards generals, parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and President Masoud Pezeshkian, has pushed through a cease-fire and direct negotiations with the Trump administration over the objections of hard-liners who see any concession as capitulation. Interviews with four senior officials and two Revolutionary Guards members reveal the new supreme leader approved the deal only reluctantly, swayed by warnings from the president and central bank chief that a U.S. naval blockade would trigger a food and medical crisis by August.

• Jennifer M. Harris, “The Generational Force Hollowing Out the Economy,” The New York Times, June 29, 2026. Harris, a former Biden White House economic official, argues that the trillion-dollar AI buildout is not merely propping up a fragile economy but actively crowding out investment the country needs elsewhere. She traces how data center land grabs are worsening the housing shortage (a Prince William County developer sold Amazon land for $700 million after buying it for $50 million), how manufacturing and clean-energy construction are losing out to data centers for capital and materials, and how AI startups now swallow nearly two-thirds of global venture capital, up from about 30 percent in 2022. Drawing parallels to the 1850s railroad boom and the dot-com era’s “revenge of the old economy,” she warns that capital starvation in critical sectors is a known driver of inflation and could tip the economy into recession before AI’s productivity gains materialize.

• Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, “Trans-Atlanticism Isn’t Dead—It’s Being Renegotiated,” Foreign Policy, July 1, 2026. De Hoop Scheffer, president of the German Marshall Fund, rebuts Nathalie Tocci’s recent Foreign Policy essay declaring trans-Atlanticism dead, arguing the alliance is undergoing a painful but overdue renegotiation rather than a terminal collapse. Drawing on Stephen Walt’s theory of alliance durability, she contends shared threat perception, not shared values, was always the glue holding the U.S. and Europe together, and that divergence on Russia versus China as the primary threat, alongside Trump’s support for European far-right movements, is exposing real fault lines. She cites striking evidence of European mobilization rather than retreat, including a 20 percent real-terms increase in European defense spending in 2025 to $574 billion and Germany’s move to break its constitutional debt brake for $114 billion in new defense investment. The piece lays out a four-part agenda, from defense procurement reform to a formal trans-Atlantic technology compact, framing the goal as rebalanced burden-sharing rather than divorce. She closes on the note that the alliance emerging from this turbulence “will look different from the one built in 1949,” but will be better suited to the world that actually exists.

• Simon Romero, “With $8 Billion in Venezuelan Oil Money, U.S. Gives $300 Million in Quake Aid,” The New York Times, July 6, 2026. Romero, who covered Haiti’s 2010 earthquake as one of the first reporters on the ground, draws a stark contrast between that disaster’s roughly $3 billion U.S. relief effort and Washington’s $300 million response to Venezuela’s recent earthquakes, even as U.S. officials oversee an estimated $8 billion in Venezuelan oil revenue since deposing Nicolás Maduro in January. He reports that the Trump administration, having dismantled USAID, is channeling aid through groups like the Red Cross while keeping its broader Venezuela strategy — prioritizing political stability and using the country’s own oil wealth to fund recovery — unchanged despite the destruction. The mismatch underscores the new, much more transactional, statecraft-driven approach to humanitarian aid.

• Shaun Walker, “All Quiet on the Eastern Flank? Nato Leaders Fear They Can No Longer Rely on US Help If Russia Attacks,” The Guardian, June 27, 2026. Drawing on dozens of interviews with officials across eastern Europe, Walker traces how 18 months of Trump’s second term have curdled cautious optimism about US commitment into real fear that Washington would not fight if Russia attacked a NATO member. He documents a string of trust-eroding episodes, from Pete Hegseth’s blunt demands that Europe fund its own defense to the chaotic on-again-off-again cancellation of a US troop rotation to Poland, alongside a genuine NATO success in securing a 5% GDP defense-spending pledge at last year’s Hague summit. The piece captures a growing split between Baltic states still counseling calm and a more openly skeptical Poland, while noting that intelligence gathering and high-end air defense remain areas where Europe cannot easily replace American capability. Walker closes on ECFR analyst Jana Puglierin’s memorable framing of the alliance’s uncertainty as “Schrödinger’s NATO,” warning that “by then, it might be too late for the Europeans.”

• Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, and Daniel Michaels, “‘There Is No Going Back’: The Inside Story of Europe’s Rupture With America,” The Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2026. Drawing on interviews with heads of government and their aides plus leaked intelligence assessments, this deeply reported piece reconstructs 18 months of closed-door meetings in which European leaders moved from flattering Trump to quietly preparing for American abandonment. It centers on the rivalry between NATO chief Mark Rutte’s “flattery diplomacy,” including engineering the alliance’s 5%-of-GDP spending pledge as a symbolic win for Trump, and Canadian PM Mark Carney’s push for genuine “de-Americanization,” with European governments now stripping US tech from government systems and building parallel space, AI, and data infrastructure. The authors detail flashpoints that hardened European resolve, including Trump’s Greenland threats, his hurling a tablet during a Trudeau video call, and his softening stance toward Russia after the Alaska summit with Putin. A British MI6 assessment likened Trump’s White House to “’The Crucible’ meets ‘Wolf Hall,’” while a Southern European intelligence report bluntly warned allies that they were “not dealing with an administration that has processes,” but “a single volatile individual.”

• Ben Meindertsma and Huib Modderkolk, “‘Unique Source’ Blinded Dutch Intelligence Agencies to Putin’s Invasion,” de Volkskrant, July 8, 2026. Based on interviews with nineteen intelligence officials and policymakers, this investigation reconstructs how the Netherlands’ AIVD and MIVD spent months insisting a Russian invasion was “unlikely,” even as the US and UK went public with intercepted attack plans, because Dutch intelligence unit Ruslandhuis relied on a prized, unnamed source close to the Kremlin suggesting Putin was merely posturing for negotiating leverage. The piece traces the corrosive legacy of the 2003 Iraq WMD debacle, which made European officials instinctively distrust American intelligence claims, alongside a striking contrast between an ambassador in Kyiv who quietly prepared for war based on Anglo-American warnings and a Dutch defense attaché who slept through CNN’s invasion coverage still believing in diplomacy. It reveals that Dutch intelligence continued rating war merely “possible” even hours before the invasion, and that afterward, Ruslandhuis discovered its Kremlin source had only a handful of confidants who actually knew Putin’s plans. One AIVD officer’s blunt self-assessment sums up the reckoning: “That’s the tragedy of having a good position: you come to rely on it too much. We should have stepped back.”

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• The NATO Summit in Ankara kept me plenty busy. My regular Politico column discussed the most important outcome — agreement that these meetings are not worth the time and energy so long as Trump is president.

• I was interviewed for a feature in Politiken on the state of transatlantic relations.

• I reflected on the Summit and other issues in interviews for PBS NewsHour, CBC Power & Politics, CNN Amanpour, CNN News Central, CNN Situation Room, CNN Anderson Cooper, CNBC Squawk Box, Al Jazeera English, BBC World News, and Bloomberg Balance of Power.

• I also discussed the Summit on Substack Live with Elise Labott.

• This week’s World Review focused on the resumption of the Iran War, the NATO Summit, and Russia’s Fuel Crisis.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.

World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Now, on to this week’s show. Three fires burning at once this week: the return of open war between the US and Iran, a NATO summit trying to project unity it doesn’t quite feel, and a Russian economy running—almost literally—on fumes. Joining me were Peter Spiegel, managing editor of The Washington Post; Karin Axelsson, EU correspondent for Politiken in Brussels; and Anna Sauerbrey, foreign editor of Die Zeit.

While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.

The Regime That Won’t Break

The week gave us two Iran stories that belong together, even though only one made headlines. Yes, the ceasefire cracked—strikes resumed across the Strait of Hormuz and into Jordan. But Peter’s more interesting observation was about the other event: the elaborately staged funeral for the Supreme Leader. A regime Washington keeps describing as decapitated and desperate managed, in his telling, an impressively orchestrated show of force in the streets. Resilience, not collapse, is the story.

Karin pushed on the European mood, which is somewhere between fury and helplessness. She invoked the German chancellor’s now-famous jab that the Americans have no strategy and that Tehran has Washington over a barrel—remarks angry enough that Trump threatened to pull troops out of Germany over them. Anna added the deeper problem: Europe has no leverage over Iran, no leverage over Washington, and precious little to do but watch. Her line that stuck with me was that Germany’s offer of a demining ship for the Strait shows just how limited Europe’s options really are.

Where this ends, nobody quite knows. Peter’s read is stark: Tehran now controls a chokepoint on global trade and isn’t giving it up, and neither side is moving. My own suspicion, which nobody on the panel talked me out of, is that we’re heading toward a world where ships simply pay a toll to pass—a tacit admission that the strait now belongs to Iran.

Learning to Shrug

NATO’s Ankara summit produced the usual pledges and photographs, but the more revealing dynamic was underneath: allies increasingly treating Trump’s threats as weather rather than crisis. Karin, fresh off the plane from Ankara, called the scene surreal—the alliance’s largest member bombing a neighboring country while everyone else at the summit quietly declined to support the war. Her sharpest image: a NATO diplomat telling her he wouldn’t sleep soundly until the alliance’s declaration was actually signed.

Underneath the unity theater, real fractures showed. Greenland resurfaced unprompted—Karin’s read is that Copenhagen sees Washington now as neither ally nor enemy but something to be managed. Anna and Peter both zeroed in on the deeper anxiety: is this Trump, or is this America? European officials increasingly suspect the latter, which means five percent defense spending pledges and new Canadian submarine deals with Germany and Norway aren’t just symbolic—they’re a hedge against a relationship that isn’t coming back, whoever wins the next American election.

And yes, there was also a small diplomatic embarrassment of the gift of a loaded pistol to attendees by President Erdoğan, who hosted the meeting. Most European nations have strict laws against gun imports and many left the gift in Ankara—except for the Belgian prime minister who apparently forgot he was carrying it home! Sometimes the funniest stories tell you the most about the state of an alliance.

Out of Gas, Not Out of Trouble

Russia’s economy is the story that may matter more than either headline. Anna walked through the toll of Ukraine’s drone campaign: refinery capacity down by nearly a third, fuel lines forming in Russian towns, even Moscow’s elite reportedly canceling Crimean vacations because long-range drones now reach that far too. Putin himself has had to publicly address fuel shortages—itself a tell.

The harder question was whether economic strain makes Putin more likely to negotiate or more likely to lash out. Karin relayed a vivid image from Danish intelligence circles: Putin as the cornered rat from his own childhood story, who doesn’t cower when trapped—he attacks. The fear in Nordic and Baltic capitals is a diversionary move against a NATO member, not a Ukrainian retreat.

Peter added a Washington data point: chatter, sourced partly to former CIA director Bill Burns, about Putin escalating toward the Baltics or Poland precisely because his position at home is weakening. Nobody on the panel thought this was likely—but as Peter put it, once an idea like that is in the air, it doesn’t fully go away. Anna’s closer was the more sobering one: the German security establishment isn’t panicking publicly, but privately, they’re alarmed.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.

Last week, it had the pleasure to talk with Jakob Hvide Beim, defense editor, and Karin Axelsson, EU correspondent for the leading Danish daily Politiken. Below is an English translation of their story. The original version is accessible here.

Ivo Daalder ends his diagnosis with a dry, resigned laugh.

After last year’s summit in The Hague, the former US ambassador to NATO noted that the alliance, despite challenges, survived “another day.” Many Europeans cringed when Secretary General Mark Rutte set new standards for flattery by calling Donald Trump “daddy.” But there was great relief when the American reciprocated the warm welcome and a European pledge of more defense spending by declaring his support for the alliance.

A year later, Europeans face a new, nerve-wracking summit with the American president in Ankara. And Ivo Daalder’s peculiar laugh is because the situation this time is even worse than ahead of last year’s summit.

“I believe the alliance is currently in the biggest crisis it has ever faced in its 77-year history,” he says.

In January, the crisis over Greenland grew when Trump, after using military force in a swift attack on Venezuela, also escalated threats to take control of the world’s largest island. And when the US, together with Israel, decided to attack Iran, Europe and NATO weren’t even given advance warning.

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“Europeans have now understood that the US no longer sees Europe’s security as being as fundamental as its own, which is the whole basic premise of NATO. That’s clear now, especially after the Greenland crisis. And the Iran war has, in my view, become a kind of symbol of the crisis NATO is in.”

In particular, Spain, Italy, the UK, and to some extent France and Poland refused the Americans’ request to use their bases and airspace for the war. However, most attention went to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who publicly suggested the Iranian clerical regime had run circles around the Americans. Speaking to a group of young people, he even said he wouldn’t encourage his own children to go to the US to study or travel.

“The Iran war has shown that allies no longer see the US as a reliable partner, and that they’re willing to oppose the US in a way that was different just a year ago—and completely unthinkable ten years ago. So the crisis is deep, it’s real. I don’t think it will explode in Ankara, though I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if it did anyway,” says Ivo Daalder.

The US is a weaker military power as a result of the decision to go to war with Iran

The former top diplomat is especially concerned that the rift now runs far deeper than President Trump’s unorthodox approach to geopolitics and his ministers’ verbal attacks on Europe.

“Because it leads to decisions among European countries and in the US that increase the divide. We’re now seeing an incentive for European countries not just to reduce dependence, but to eliminate dependence on the US in a whole range of areas—from production of military capabilities and procurement programs to digital sovereignty. Once you go down that road, it’s very hard to reverse.”

At the same time, the US administration plans to spend $1.5 trillion on defense in 2027, a 42 percent increase over this year, meaning production lines will be occupied with supplying the US, which itself needs to restock after the war against Iran. This pushes Europe far back in line in cases where countries still want to buy American hardware.

“We see it with the Patriot missile system. We see it across a range of systems. The US is a weaker military power as a result of the decision to go to war with Iran—not just geopolitically, but militarily weaker too. So the US will focus on rebuilding its own military for a long time to come,” says Ivo Daalder.

He acknowledges this could further accelerate the trend of Europe standing more on its own feet, which has long been a goal. But it also weakens the ties between the two sides of the NATO alliance.

“And it gives those who want to reduce US engagement in Europe an even bigger reason not to get involved,” says Ivo Daalder.

The US is the skeleton

In Ankara on Tuesday and Wednesday, leaders will discuss the next steps in the Europeanization of NATO, which is already well underway. This isn’t just about Europe contributing more to financing the military alliance’s defense spending, but also taking on greater responsibility for the territorial defense of Europe.

Ivo Daalder isn’t worried about this development. As NATO ambassador, he himself helped push for it. He calls the shift of responsibility toward Europe important, because the US has its eyes on China and key areas of the Pacific. But the problem is that the handover of responsibility isn’t happening in an orderly fashion. Quite the opposite.

The problem is that the NATO framework is now dominated by an administration that no longer believes in NATO

Instead, it’s happening chaotically, under an unpredictable American administration. Following criticism from the German chancellor, Donald Trump has made clear, in an act of retaliation, that he will withdraw 5,000 American troops from Germany. More importantly, he will cancel a planned deployment of long-range missiles—a gap in Europe’s defenses.

Additionally, the US made clear last month that it intends to sharply cut the number of fighter jets, submarines, and other military hardware planned to be part of NATO’s joint defense in the event of war. Here too, the problem, according to Ivo Daalder, is that this so-called burden-shifting is happening without thorough coordination with European allies.

“I would like this to happen within a transatlantic framework where the US remains fully engaged in the effort. I would like it to happen in a framework where the US, for example, retains the command and control capabilities that have made NATO as successful a military alliance as it is,” he says.

Ivo Daalder pauses.

“The problem is that the NATO framework is now dominated by an administration that no longer believes in NATO.”

Another pause.

“And under these circumstances, I’m concerned that decisions will be made that strengthen the forces working toward dissolution, rather than the forces for integration.”

Will it end with a European NATO? Or European cooperation outside of NATO?

“I don’t see this leading to anything happening outside NATO. Because it doesn’t exist. It would have to be built from scratch. That takes too long, and honestly, no one wants it outside NATO. So I believe it will happen within NATO. The fundamental question is whether it will happen in cooperation with the US or not.”

Ivo Daalder also has a small jab for Europe. Because Europeans have also ignored earlier warnings. Back in June 2011, outgoing Defense Secretary Bob Gates warned, in a kind of farewell speech in Brussels, that it was necessary to invest more in defense, because future US leaders without the same feel for the transatlantic relationship would find it harder to see the point of NATO.

“I believe the US and Europeans made a mistake by not carrying out the Europeanization at a time when there was still willingness in Washington to do it through a cooperative process,” says Ivo Daalder, explaining why it’s now so difficult:

“I usually describe it this way: NATO is an organization whose skeleton and DNA are American. Over time, you can replace that DNA and skeleton and make it more European, but you can’t do it without US cooperation. If you just remove the DNA and rip out the skeleton, there’s nothing left.”

Putin smells blood

Ultimately, all of our security is at stake, because cohesion within NATO—or rather the lack of it—is part of the complex equation that determines Russia’s willingness to attack.

“I fear that Putin sees an opportunity to exploit the disagreements to pursue the goal Russians have had since 1949: to drive the US out of Europe and split the Europeans. The hybrid warfare we’ve seen over the past three to four years, I see as an attempt to weaken European support for Ukraine and split Europeans internally.”

At the moment, Ukraine does have a certain momentum on the battlefield. But a cornered Putin is also dangerous.

“The script that’s been written over the past four years hasn’t developed the way he thought. He’s clearly on the back foot regarding Ukraine. And he has two options: end the conflict before he loses even more, or escalate. And everything we know about Vladimir Putin points to escalation,” says Ivo Daalder.

That’s why he considers the risk of nuclear weapon use to be greater than at any point since the 2022 invasion. The same goes for a push into the Baltics to divert attention from Ukraine.

“That’s a concern now widely shared in European intelligence services and in NATO. And I think it’s real. And the divisions that have emerged in the alliance over the past 18 months make this scenario more likely, not less.”

Where would that leave NATO, if Putin attacks us?

“That’s the unanswered question, isn’t it. I would think that the vast majority of European NATO countries plus Canada would react strongly to such a provocation. The fundamental question is whether the US would take part in that. I don’t know. But I don’t see the US trying to undermine a NATO response.”

According to Ivo Daalder, the US’s European Command would likely be in place and functioning, even if American troops as such wouldn’t necessarily take part in a response.

“So I think Putin is misjudging the degree of American commitment to defending Europe’s security. But the problem is that it would be too late once he’s already attacked. Because we don’t want a strong response—we want to prevent a Russian attack in the first place.”

Once Donald Trump had said his last words at his post-summit press conference in Ankara yesterday, NATO leaders breathed sighs of relief that the meeting turned out ok. There were fireworks before the meeting from the US president; but he was genial and supportive inside the hall where the 32 NATO leaders gathered. Afterwards, Trump even praised the leaders and said he felt “tremendous love” from them in the room.

But, as I write in my latest “From Across the Pond” column, the anxiety that preceded the gathering in Ankara convinced all the leaders that these summits really aren’t worth the effort — so long as Donald Trump is U.S. president.

They said just as much, ending the summit with a vague: “We look forward to our next meeting,” rather than reaffirm they would come together in Albania next year, as planned.

And they are right. Ankara, in many ways, was a lost opportunity.

The grandly named “Ankara Summit Declaration” is a one-page, six-paragraph boilerplate statement that isn’t worth the paper it was written on. And while reports from insidethe three-hour leaders’ meeting suggested Trump was genial and even praised allies for increasing their defense spending, he unleashed a fusillade of invectives against those very same countries as soon as the cameras were on.

He scolded Britain, France, Germany and Belgium for not helping during the war in Iran. He called Spaniards “hopeless, bad people,” ordering an immediate halt to all trade with the country. And he once again said Greenland should be part of the U.S., claiming it was “very important” for America, “but it is not important for Denmark.”

It’s little wonder many NATO leaders now believe making these gatherings an annual ritual was a mistake, and that the alliance needs to go back to convening its summits only occasionally.

This was the norm not so long ago. It was under former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg that summits first became an annual affair. As a former Norwegian prime minister, he believed the organization’s work required convening his peers on a regular basis. His successor, Mark Rutte, shared that belief. Until now.

Read the entire piece at Politico Europe.