I was on Bloomberg TV earlier this week, and the conversation kept circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: in both the Iran standoff and the war in Ukraine, Washington is stuck in a game of chicken — and may be the side more likely to swerve.

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Here are the three points that I think matter most right now.

Iran is playing a longer game than Washington thinks

The administration seems to believe that the economic blockade will eventually force Tehran to cry uncle. Iran believes the opposite — that rising prices, including what we saw in today’s inflation report, will force Washington to back down first.

This is a classic game of chicken. And my bet is that the Trump administration is systematically underestimating Iran’s leverage and, as it has from the very beginning of this conflict, their willingness to absorb devastating damage — to their military, their economy, their people — rather than capitulate. This is a regime that came to power through revolutionary struggle. And its new leaders have come to power because of this very war. Suffering is not a deterrent to them; in some ways, it is a source of legitimacy.

The minimum objective right now is just to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and get back to the status quo ante of February 28, before the war started. That alone should tell you how far we’ve fallen.

We have the wrong negotiators

When the Obama administration negotiated the Iran nuclear deal, the U.S. delegation wasn’t just led by the Secretary of State. It included the Secretary of Energy — a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist — along with a deep bench of technical experts who understood enrichment levels, centrifuge cascades, and verification mechanisms.

What we have now are real estate professionals who are used to drafting term sheets and leaving the details to lawyers. In arms control, the details are the agreement. You cannot close a nuclear deal the way you close a property transaction.

Ukraine is holding — but that doesn’t mean peace is near

The president has been saying for over a year that he can end the Ukraine war in a day. We are no closer to a solution than the day he returned to office.

What I will say is this: Ukraine has demonstrated remarkable resilience. They survived a brutal winter with Russian missiles and drones systematically targeting their power grid. And their drone warfare capability is now inflicting 35,000 Russian casualties per month. Their precision strikes deep into Russian territory are hitting oil refineries and military infrastructure, bringing the war home to the average Russian.

Is Putin feeling pressure? Yes. Is that pressure translating into serious peace negotiations? Not yet. Every time Trump presses him, Putin says the right things and then does nothing. Until Moscow genuinely believes it cannot achieve its maximalist war aims, we will remain in a stalemate.

The through-line in both conflicts is the same: maximalism on all sides, combined with a fundamental misreading of relative leverage. That’s a recipe not for resolution, but for prolonged, costly standoffs — with the U.S. bearing more of the cost than the administration currently wants to admit.

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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• Cristopher Caldwell, “America Is Officially an Empire in Decline,” New York Times, May 3, 2026. Caldwell argues that the American-Israeli attack on Iran has squandered Trump’s genuine opportunity to manage U.S. imperial decline gracefully — in the manner Britain did after WWII — by instead plunging into an open-ended military commitment for no vital national interest. The military costs are already severe: the U.S. has burned through over 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles and 1,000 Tomahawks, depleting stockpiles earmarked for Asia and Europe. America now faces three bad options — withdraw and expose military weakness, strip assets from vital theaters, or escalate to extreme measures. Netanyahu, Caldwell argues, understood perfectly that U.S. capacity to protect Israel was waning and exploited Trump’s gullibility for one last intervention. The Iran war, in his telling, is the moment American overextension became undeniable.

• Henry Bodkin, “Buffer Zone Invasions Ignite Battle Over Greater Israel,” The Telegraph, May 4, 2026. Since October 7, Israel has seized roughly 530 square miles of territory across Gaza, southern Lebanon, and Syria, establishing “buffer zones” that it shows no intention of vacating until Hamas and Hezbollah disarm — an outcome few expect anytime soon. The security rationale is genuine and widely held within Israel’s establishment, but it increasingly blends with a parallel ideological current — the “Greater Israel” vision of permanent territorial expansion along biblical lines — embodied by figures like Finance Minister Smotrich and, ambiguously, Netanyahu himself. The critical departure from Israel’s earlier buffer zone experiences (Sinai, southern Lebanon 1982–2000) is the systematic depopulation of seized territories, which experts describe as a radical shift that Western policy discussion has barely absorbed. Whether the buffer zones represent a temporary security measure or the opening phase of permanent annexation remains the central unanswered question — and the answer may depend entirely on what happens in Iran.

• Christof Rühl, “The Oil Price Crunch Is Looming,” Financial Times, May 2026.

  The world is caught between two blockades — Washington strangling Iran’s oil revenues, Tehran threatening the Strait of Hormuz — and markets have so far remained surprisingly calm, buoyed by high inventories and expectations that the disruption will be short-lived. Rühl pushes back on the reassuring argument that oil matters less to modern economies than it once did: yes, global oil intensity has dropped 60% since 1973, but that efficiency gain is a double-edged sword — remaining oil consumption is now concentrated in irreplaceable, load-bearing uses like freight and maritime shipping where there are no substitutes. A major supply disruption therefore no longer produces the slow-burn recessions of the past; instead it risks sudden, cascading economic shocks disproportionate to oil’s share of GDP — more like a rare-earth supply crisis than a standard energy price spike.

• Bigg, Mpoke Matthew, John Eligon, and Zimasa Matiwane, “’The Death Zone’: How Russia Is Luring Africans to Ukraine,” The New York Times, May 4, 2026. A growing number of young African men — lured by promises of civilian jobs as cooks, bodyguards, or laborers — are ending up as involuntary soldiers in Russia’s war in Ukraine, recruited through fly-by-night agencies advertising on WhatsApp and Telegram across at least nine African countries. Kenya’s National Intelligence Service estimates around 1,000 Kenyans alone have ended up in Ukraine, of whom only 30 have returned alive. The scheme exploits Africa’s acute youth unemployment crisis: men are flown to Russia, handed contracts written only in Russian, and coerced into signing through debt bondage or physical intimidation before being rushed through minimal military training and sent to the front.

• Yaroslav Trofimov, “Putin’s Strongman Image Is Fading as Ukraine Brings War Home to Russia,” The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2026. With Russian casualties topping one million, the front line stalled, the economy deteriorating, and Ukrainian drone strikes now reaching 70% of Russian territory, a deepening mood of discontent is eroding Putin’s carefully cultivated image as protector and strongman. The psychological turning point came in January when the war surpassed the duration of the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany — a milestone that has caused Putin’s own Victory Day cult to backfire, with Russians asking why their grandfathers reached Berlin but this war grinds on without resolution. Popular discontent is now surfacing from unexpected quarters: nationalist bloggers, a pro-war media celebrity, and an apolitical Instagram influencer with 1.6 million likes all publicly challenging Putin, while rumors of coup preparations and security establishment infighting circulate in Moscow.

• Rosalind Mathieson, Miaojung Lin, and Yian Lee, “Hormuz Crisis Shows Gaps in Taiwan’s High-Tech ‘Silicon Shield,’” Bloomberg, May 6, 2026. The Hormuz crisis has delivered Taiwan a sobering preview of what a Chinese blockade would look like: with LNG shipments from Qatar halted since March, Taiwan — which imports 96% of its energy and holds only an 11-day gas reserve — is scrambling to source expensive spot-market supplies while officials acknowledge the island could run dry within weeks under a sustained blockade. The cruel irony is that Taiwan’s extraordinary economic success, built on producing 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, has made it simultaneously more indispensable to the global economy and more energy-hungry and vulnerable — its semiconductor sector alone consumes 18% of total national power. Taiwan is buying time through costly LNG spot purchases, preliminary deals for U.S. LNG, nuclear plant restarts planned for 2028, and lessons drawn from Ukraine on drone warfare and infrastructure protection — but with Trump potentially using Taiwan as a bargaining chip in his upcoming summit with Xi, the “Silicon Shield” looks thinner than ever.

• George Packer, “The Venture-Capital Populist,” The Atlantic, May 4, 2026.

  George Packer’s long profile of David Sacks is a case study of how Big Tech captured the State. Packer traces how the South African-born PayPal alumnus and venture capitalist went from calling January 6 an “insurrection” to becoming Trump’s AI and crypto czar — a journey driven less by ideological conversion than by ruthless self-interest dressed up as libertarian principle. As White House special adviser, Sacks delivered his two central goals: legitimizing cryptocurrency through the GENIUS Act and keeping AI free of federal regulation, while also engineering the lifting of export controls on advanced Nvidia chips to China — a decision that alarmed national security officials and conservative hawks alike but benefited the tech industry in which Sacks remains financially embedded. Having stepped down after his 130 permitted days, Sacks now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — a roster Packer drily describes as “almost a parody of crony capitalism.”

• Peter Slevin, “Barack Obama Considers His Role in the Age of Trump,” The New Yorker, May 4, 2026. A long, reflective profile of Obama navigating the tension between public demand for his leadership and his own considered judgment about how to deploy his influence without diminishing it. Obama acknowledges his early confidence that Trump could roll back only a modest fraction of his achievements has proved badly wrong, but he resists the call to become a daily commentator, arguing that doing so would reduce him from political leader to pundit. Instead, he works selectively — campaigning in election cycles, mentoring younger Democrats, fighting gerrymandering, developing an AI policy agenda, and reaching audiences through podcasters and influencers rather than legacy media.

• Chris Buckley, “How China’s Leader Lost Faith in His Generals,” The New York Times, May 9, 2026. Xi Jinping’s sweeping purge of China’s military leadership — which has now claimed dozens of senior generals, two former defense ministers sentenced to death, and ultimately his top commander Zhang Youxia — reveals a deepening contradiction at the heart of his rule: the more he tightened control over the People’s Liberation Army, the more he discovered corruption and disloyalty among the very men he had handpicked and promoted. The final break with Zhang Youxia came when the general objected to Xi’s plan to elevate the chief military inquisitor, Zhang Shengmin, to a powerful command position — an act of pushback Xi interpreted as a challenge to his “chairman responsibility system” and could not tolerate. The result is that Xi has replaced a battle-experienced modernizer with a loyalty enforcer as his sole remaining military confidant, raising serious questions about China’s combat readiness at precisely the moment U.S. military vulnerabilities are on vivid display in Iran.

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

• I wrote about the ever-diminishing role of Marco Rubio in my regular Politico column.

• I convened the first of the monthly “Ask Ivo” sessions on Substack Live.

• I joined Stephanie Ruhl on the MSNOW’s 11th Hour and Bianna Golodryga on CNN’s Amanpour to discuss the latest on Iran, NATO, and Ukraine.

• This week’s World Review focused on justice in Syria, differences in the Gulf, and growing tensions across the Atlantic.

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 discussed how justice is returning to Syria, the Gulf is divided over Iran, Israel seeks security through destruction, and transatlantic tensions are boiling over. Joining me this week were Deborah Amos of Princeton, Felicia Schwartz of Politico, and Steven Erlanger of the New York Times.

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.

Syria: Justice Starts Here

Syria is an unlikely source of hope in a deeply troubled region, and nowhere is that more visible than in the courtroom. Reporting from Damascus, Deb described the opening of Syria’s first domestic war crimes trials — a striking development in a country that just over a year ago was still under the grip of the Assad dynasty. The defendant in the inaugural proceeding is the official widely regarded as the man who set off the Syrian revolution, the provincial governor who ordered or allowed the torture of teenagers who had scrawled anti-Assad graffiti, and then failed to act when the subsequent public outrage exploded into a national uprising. Families of victims were permitted into the courtroom to confront him directly. The proceedings are imperfect — Syria has only one judge untainted by the old regime, no law yet for crimes against humanity, no parliament to change the legal framework — and critics question whether former jihadists now in power will ultimately face the same scrutiny. But as Deb noted, the pressure for accountability had been building as Syrians watched European courts deliver more than fifty trials of Assad-era perpetrators and asked why their own country had not begun to do the same. Steve raised the broader challenge of transitional justice — whether societies choose truth and reconciliation, criminal prosecution, or something in between — observing that even Germany, decades on, still grapples with its past. The answer Syria is reaching for is clearly its own: no hybrid court, no international jurors, no template borrowed from Iraq. The trials have begun, and for most Syrians, Deb concluded, that alone is something.

Lebanon and the Gulf: A Ceasefire With a Lot of Fire

If Syria offers a fragile story of hope, Lebanon and the broader Gulf offer something considerably darker. Israel continues to strike targets in southern Lebanon despite a nominal ceasefire, and as Felicia pointed out, Netanyahu faces a domestic political imperative that cuts against any real de-escalation: his government is up for election by late October, the ceasefire was deeply unpopular at home, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis still cannot return to their border communities. Deb observed that for the first time in decades there exists a Lebanese government and a broader Lebanese public willing to contemplate disarming Hezbollah — but only if Israel pursues a diplomatic path rather than treating the south as another Gaza. Instead, Israeli forces are mowing through the region with earthmovers, killing civilians alongside any intended targets, and that approach, she warned, is no way to eliminate Hezbollah. Layered on top of this is the unresolved aftermath of the US-Iran war — described pointedly as “a ceasefire with a lot of fire” — and its reverberations across the Gulf. The Saudis, stung again by American inaction after Iranian strikes on a UAE oil facility and haunted by the failure to respond to the 2019 Houthi attacks, are recalibrating toward coexistence with Iran; the UAE, by contrast, is pressing its advantage. As Steve noted, the Iranians now have enough enriched uranium for roughly ten nuclear weapons, and an IRGC-dominated government may be more willing to use that leverage than any of its predecessors. The region, in short, is not trending toward resolution.

US-Europe: The New Normal Is Not Good

The transatlantic relationship is not merely strained — it is, Steve argued, being structurally dismantled in ways that will not simply reverse when this administration ends. Trump’s fury at NATO predates his presidency by decades, but what is different now is the confluence of grievances: his Greenland obsession and the explicit threat to take it from a NATO ally, the unilateral launch of the Iran war without European consultation, the subsequent pressure on NATO to join a Middle East conflict it was never designed to fight, and the punitive troop withdrawal from Germany triggered by Chancellor Merz’s candid but ill-advised observation that the US lacked an exit strategy. Steve noted that a European ambassador captured the mood precisely: Europeans still believe in America but have entirely lost faith in Donald Trump. Felicia added that the absence of meaningful congressional pushback is not accidental — foreign policy is the arena where presidential power is most unchecked, the midterms loom, and many of the figures who genuinely believed in the alliance have retired or are retiring. Deb brought it home from Berlin, where she spent three weeks and found ordinary Germans quietly factoring the possibility of war into personal decisions, already resigned to the fact that US support could no longer be assumed. Europe, Steve concluded, now understands — more widely and more deeply than ever before — that it must build the conventional defense capacity to replace what America may withdraw. That is not a temporary adjustment. It is a new baseline.

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

I joined Stephanie Ruhle and my colleagues Peter Baker and Michael Crowley of The New York Times last night to discuss where things stand in the U.S.-Iran war and the fragile situation in the Strait of Hormuz. Here are the three points I made.

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The situation is dangerously confused — especially in Washington. The pace of developments is dizzying: one hour a deal is done, the next both sides are shooting at each other. Peter called this a “ceasefire with lots of firing.” What worries me most is that Washington appears far more disoriented than Tehran. That asymmetry — one side confused, the other not — is precisely the condition under which escalation becomes most likely.

Trump wants out, but the off-ramp isn’t there. The president clearly doesn’t want to escalate. He didn’t even respond when Iran struck energy facilities in the UAE. But Iran is not going to hand over its uranium or end enrichment for nothing. The one-page framework being discussed is remarkably thin — it leaves all the hard questions for later. We are in a standoff, and at some point one side is going to have to blink.

My money is on Trump blinking first. Given everything we know about the president’s desire to declare victory and move on, and Iran’s demonstrated willingness to absorb punishment and hold firm, I argue that the United States is the more likely side to make the first significant concession.

Marco Rubio has had multiple jobs almost from the start of this administration—national archivist, administrator of the US Agency for International Development, and, course, Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. No person can perform all of these functions at the same time. Rubio is no exception.

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He has been absent in the major negotiations of this administration — Gaza, Ukraine, the Middle East, China, and others. He has traveled less than any of his immediate predecessors as Secretary of State. And there is little evidence of an effective policy process, which is the main responsibility of the National Security Advisor, as the chaos and confusion of the US war against Iran underscores.

Rubio’s ever-diminishing role in foreign and national security policy is the subject of my latest From Across the Pond column.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Rome yesterday, looking to repair relations with both the Pope and the Italian government after their spats with President Donald Trump over the war in Iran.

It is a useful mission for a secretary of state. But it does raise a fundamental question: Why isn’t Rubio leading the diplomatic effort to end the war in Iran, resolve the stand-off between Israel and its neighbors, find a solution to the war in Ukraine, or forge a more stable engagement with China — to name just a few key issues other U.S. officials are leading in his stead?

Similarly, one would be forgiven for asking to see any evidence of a well-functioning policy process that would provide the president with different options, detail their costs and benefits, and provide coherent strategies for implementation — all of which are normally the responsibility of the national security adviser, the other hat Rubio now wears?

Indeed, few people have been better positioned to dominate U.S. foreign and national security policy than the person who currently serves as both. And yet, what is most remarkable about Rubio is the increasingly shrinking role he seems to play.

Read the entire article on Politico Europe.

The Iran “deal” is a do-over — at a much higher cost

The 14-point framework now circulating — reported by Barak Ravid at Axios — looks remarkably familiar. A moratorium on uranium enrichment, enhanced IAEA inspections including snap visits, removal of enriched uranium from Iranian territory, gradual sanctions relief. If that sounds like the 2015 JCPOA, it’s because it essentially is.

The uncomfortable truth is this: we fought a war to get back to an agreement that was already in place. And we are not returning to the same starting point. When Trump walked away from the JCPOA in 2018, Iran had a breakout time of roughly one year — the time it would take to enrich enough material for a single nuclear weapon. Today, Iran sits on an estimated 11 tons of enriched uranium, including significant stockpiles at 60-percent purity. The breakout timeline is now measured in weeks, not a year. And the material its has, by some estimates, is sufficient for roughly 100 nuclear weapons.

The military infrastructure has been degraded. The missile program and proxy networks have suffered. We’ve seen enormous destruction. But I’m not yet convinced we are in a better place than we were in 2018.

A stronger European NATO — but don’t use it as an exit ramp

Trump’s pressure on NATO allies is producing real results. European defense spending is up, and European governments are acquiring capabilities they have long deferred. Fear is a powerful motivator, and the fear that the United States might not be there is, ironically, pushing Europe to do what decades of American urging could not.

I support a more European NATO. A rebalancing of responsibilities — with Europe taking the lead on its own defense while the United States remains engaged — would ultimately strengthen the alliance and serve American security interests. The lesson of two world wars is that European security and American security are inseparable.

What I worry about is the next move: Washington concluding that because Europe is stronger, America can simply go home. That logic is seductive and wrong. A U.S. withdrawal — even a partial one from the integrated command structure — would hollow out the alliance at exactly the moment it is most needed. Strengthening the European pillar should be the beginning of a conversation about shared leadership, not the pretext for an American exit.

A cornered Putin is a dangerous Putin

Ukraine’s drone revolution is changing the battlefield in ways that matter. Russian casualties are running at roughly 35,000 dead and wounded per month. Ukrainian long-range drones and cruise missiles are reaching Moscow. The war is going better for Ukraine than at any point in recent memory.

And yet I left our conversation more worried, not less.

Vladimir Putin is a man who spent months in COVID isolation rather than risk exposure. He does not fold easily. Faced with a choice between retreat and escalation, history suggests he will escalate. The question is what form that escalation takes — and whether the United States will communicate clearly, as it did in October 2022, what the consequences would be. I am not confident it will.

A paranoid leader, a military that is being ground down, an economy that remains stuck despite rising energy revenues — this is the profile of someone who may lash out rather than accept defeat. I hope I am wrong. But this is precisely the moment for sober deterrence, not diplomatic ambiguity.

Ask Ivo returns on the first Wednesday of every month. Subscribe to America Abroad on Substack, and catch my weekly conversation on World Review — available on all major podcast platforms and, for Chicago listeners, on WBEZ Sunday mornings at 7am.

I joined CNN’a Amanpour yesterday to talk about the latest in the Iran War, the conflict between Trump and the European Allies, and whether the Ukraine War is likely to end soon.

My bottom line concern — in all three areas — is that the prospect for further escalation are greater than the prospects for negotiations and peace.

• In the Iran War, the absence of direct talks and coordination is a recipe for miscommunication and accidents that can easily lead to a resumption of war — unless President Trump is willing to settle for something less on the nuclear file than he could have gotten before the war started.

• In the transatlantic relationship, President Trump’s pique at criticism and undervaluing of Europe as a security partner for the United States is leading both sides to knuckle down for a fight.

• In Ukraine, despite the temporary reprieve of higher energy prices because of the Iran Ear, Russia is under growing pressure on the battlefield and economically. But rather than suing for peace, these pressures could lead President Putin to escalate the war as well.

Watch the full interview here.

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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• William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create,” The New York Times, April 25, 2026. Broad and Sanger, who have covered Iran’s nuclear program for more than two decades, trace how Trump’s 2018 withdrawal from the Obama-era nuclear deal set off the enrichment spree that now haunts the current negotiations. When Trump pulled out, Iran had less than a single bomb’s worth of uranium; today it has 11 tons at various enrichment levels — enough, if further purified, for up to 100 weapons. The piece underscores the scale of the nuclear problem that Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal helped create: while public attention has focused on Iran’s half-ton of near-weapons-grade material, the full stockpile dwarfs that figure, and much of it may be buried in mountain tunnels that U.S. bombs cannot reliably destroy. As one Harvard expert puts it, “We can’t bomb away their knowledge” — and since an enrichment plant can be the size of a grocery store, Iran’s mountainous terrain offers plenty of places to hide a clandestine program.

• Patricia Cohen and Ben Casselman, “The US Started the War. The Rest of the World is Feeling its Effect,” The New York Times, April 27, 2026. In just eight weeks, the Iran war has shuttered textile mills in India and Bangladesh, grounded flights across Europe, and prompted energy rationing in Vietnam, South Korea, and Thailand — while the United States, the country that started the war, has remained relatively insulated. The asymmetry is stark: American consumer spending is holding up, unemployment is low, and economists say it would take oil prices near $150 a barrel to seriously threaten a U.S. recession, a threshold still well above where prices currently sit. The worst pain is falling on the poorest countries, where governments cannot afford to cushion the blow from surging fuel and food prices; the U.N. Development Program warns that millions in the Asia-Pacific region risk falling into poverty. Even if the war ended tomorrow, most energy executives doubt that traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will ever fully return to what it was — and the reputational costs for the United States, which has imposed severe economic pain on allies and adversaries alike, may outlast the conflict itself.

• Jack Blanchard, “It Took Charles a Lifetime to Be King. Now He Has to Deal With Trump,” Politico Magazine, April 27, 2026. Trump is furious at Britain — Keir Starmer refused to let American bombers use British air bases without first consulting his Cabinet, a response Trump found contemptible — and the once-warm relationship between the two leaders now appears beyond repair. That has left an unlikely figure as the guardian of the special relationship: a 77-year-old constitutional monarch whose only qualification, as Blanchard wryly notes, is being born into “the most famously dysfunctional family on the planet.” The piece argues that beneath their obvious differences — Charles the environmentalist aristocrat, Trump the demolition-derby developer — the two men share more than meets the eye: both are late-blooming boomers born into extraordinary privilege, both are animated by a deep nostalgia for vanished pasts, and both share a fondness for classical architecture. Whether that is enough to paper over a genuinely damaged alliance is the open question the article wisely declines to answer.

• Tim Ross, Nahal Toosi, and Stefanie Bolzen, “Trump’s Voice of America: The Free-Speech Crusader Pushing MAGA on Europe,” Politico Europe, April 28, 2026. Sarah Rogers, the U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has made herself one of the most polarizing figures in transatlantic politics by bankrolling conservative groups, attacking European speech laws, and appearing alongside allies of Hungary’s Orbán, Britain’s Farage, and Germany’s AfD — all under the banner of defending free expression. Her style is deliberately inflammatory: she has described Germany as having “imported barbarian rapist hordes,” called the UK’s Online Safety Act “tyrannical and absurd,” and sanctioned both a senior EU official and a British civil society campaigner for what she deemed censorship of American tech companies. Trump has now nominated her to simultaneously run the agency overseeing Voice of America, potentially giving her a powerful broadcast platform aimed directly at European audiences. Ross, Toosi, and Bolzen paint a portrait of how the administration is weaponizing the machinery of American public diplomacy — not to shore up the liberal democratic values that once defined the transatlantic relationship, but to actively undermine them.

• Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, “The YOLO Presidency: Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s ‘great men’.” The Atlantic, April 27, 2026. Reporting on Trump’s inner circle, Parker and Scherer find a president increasingly preoccupied with how he will be remembered, comparing himself to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and describing himself as perhaps the most powerful person who has ever lived. Freed from the constraints of reelection, he has embraced a reckless interventionism — most notably the Iran war — that advisers describe as driven less by strategic calculation than by a desire to do what other presidents could not. His supporters, however, are growing frustrated that his attention keeps drifting toward symbolic gestures — the Kennedy Center, monuments, and ballrooms — rather than the economic concerns that brought them to him in the first place. The portrait is of a leader who has confused self-aggrandizement with statesmanship.

• Gabriel J.X. Dance, “A.I. Bots Told Scientists How to Make Biological Weapons,” The New York Times, April 29, 2026. A Times investigation based on more than a dozen transcripts of AI chats shared by biosecurity experts finds that leading AI chatbots — including ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude — have provided detailed, structured guidance on acquiring genetic material, engineering dangerous pathogens, and dispersing them in public spaces. Stanford microbiologist David Relman, hired to stress-test an AI model before its release, was shaken when the chatbot not only described how to modify a pathogen to resist treatment but spontaneously identified a vulnerability in a major transit system as a potential delivery mechanism. AI companies push back, arguing that their safeguards are improving and that producing plausible-sounding text is different from enabling real-world harm, but experts counter that the risk is no longer theoretical — particularly for those who already possess scientific training. The article is timely, given that the Trump administration has cut biodefense funding and left key oversight positions unfilled.

• Dion Nissenbaum and Stephen Kalin, “The UAE, OPEC and a New Middle East,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2026. The UAE’s decision to leave OPEC and OPEC+ effective May 1 — after six decades of membership — is the most dramatic sign yet of how the Iran war is reshaping the regional order. The move reflects years of simmering tension between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh over production quotas and competing visions for the Gulf’s political future, but the UAE’s energy minister acknowledged that the Hormuz crisis created a convenient moment to act, since its exit will have limited short-term market impact while the strait remains closed. If other major producers follow, it could spell the end of OPEC as an effective price-setting body. Beyond OPEC’s future, the UAE’s decision reflects a broader pattern of fragmentation, with the war accelerating realignments that have been building for years.

• Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh, “Reopening the Strait of Hormuz Is Now Job One in the Iran War,” The Wall Street Journal, April 29, 2026. Two of the most seasoned Iran analysts in Washington argue that Tehran has undergone a fundamental strategic recalculation: controlling the Strait of Hormuz now matters more to the regime’s survival than rebuilding its battered nuclear program, because the strait delivers cash, deterrence, and leverage over Gulf Arab neighbors that no bomb currently can. The IRGC has grasped that tolls and blockades can inflict economic pain on enemies while remaining largely unsanctionable — and that without U.S. intervention, Iran will win any contest of wills with the Gulf states. Gerecht and Takeyh are clear-eyed about what this means for Washington: reopening the strait is the primary objective, but achieving it requires an open-ended American military commitment to guarantee freedom of navigation for as long as the Islamic Republic survives. Whether the regime cracks under economic pressure or proves as resilient as it has for four decades is, they conclude, the question on which everything else turns.

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

• I wrote about the future of NATO in my regular Politico column.

• This week’s World Review focused on the stalemate between Iran and the United States, King Charles’s visit to the US, and Germany’s rearmament.

• Also, please join me Wednesday at noon for a new feature on Substack: Ask Ivo.

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 discussed the stalemate in the Iran War, King Charles’s visit to the United States, and Germany’s rearmament. Joining me this week were Anna Sauerbrey of Die Zeit, Alex Ward of the Wall Street Journal, and Giles Whittell of 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:

• The Iran war has reached a stalemate, with an indefinite ceasefire, a dual blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and no negotiations in sight. Alex argued that the entire conflict has turned into a strategic paradox of Trump’s own making. The administration’s standard defense against any criticism — “so you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?” — turns out to be precisely the outcome the war is making more likely, not less. Iran’s regime is now watching North Korea and drawing exactly the wrong lesson: that giving up your nuclear program, as Libya did, leaves you vulnerable, while keeping it, as Pyongyang has, earns a kind of grudging immunity. The war that was sold as the definitive solution to Iranian nuclearization may end up being the most powerful argument for it. And as Giles reminded us, there is a deeper structural reason why this stalemate favors Iran: ninety million people, a vast geography, a brutal regime indifferent to its own population’s suffering, and a powerful ally in Russia. The idea that Iran must eventually cave under pressure, Giles argued, simply isn’t supported by the evidence — Russia has shown us how resilient a large, autocratic country can be in the face of international sanctions.

• Who would have thought that King Charles III’s visit to Washington would be the week’s most uplifting story? The King’s address to a joint session of Congress prompted a genuinely insightful observation by Anna — not about diplomacy or the special relationship, but about political culture. What struck her was that Americans needed their newspapers to explain how to read a subtle speech: what the King’s gestures meant, what his wardrobe signaled, how to parse an implied criticism. That this required instruction at all says something dispiriting about where public discourse has landed. In a moment of wall-to-wall noise, the King demonstrated that restraint and indirection can command more attention than amplification — a lesson that transcends monarchy and speaks to something fundamental about how meaning gets made in politics. Alex added a key corollary: the speech only worked because a king delivered it. Had Starmer or Macron or Merz said the same things, Trump would have been on Truth Social within the hour. Royalty, it turns out, is one of the few currencies that still buys goodwill in this White House.

• Germany is rearming at a pace and scale not seen since World War II, and it is changing the face of Europe. The most unsettling point in our conversation wasn’t about Russia or even about Franco-German rivalry over procurement — it was the structural warning Anna raised, drawing on historian Liana Fix’s recent Foreign Affairs piece, that a vastly more capable German military is only as trustworthy as the government that commands it. The AfD, already polling ahead of the CDU for the first time, represents a non-trivial future scenario, and the concern isn’t a re-run of 1939 but something more contemporary: the same democratic backsliding Europe has been anxiously watching elsewhere could, in Germany of all places, put an emboldened far-right party in command of the continent’s largest defense budget. Giles cut through the procurement rivalries and historical anxieties to identify what he sees as the core problem: Europe has broad agreement on what needs to be done, but no functioning decision-making architecture to do it — not within the EU, not within NATO absent American leadership. Rearmament, it turns out, is only reassuring if you trust both the hands it ends up in and the institutions that are supposed to coordinate it.

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

Starting next month, I’m adding something new to America Abroad: a live monthly session called Ask Ivo.

Here’s how it works. The first Wednesday of every month, 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. You submit questions in advance — I’ll display them on screen as I answer — and I’ll also take questions live from the chat.

The first session is Wednesday, May 6, at noon ET. Here’s the link.

Though I have done something like this when I was at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Ask Ivo” will be more interactive, more conversational, and more immediate. If something is breaking in the world, we can talk about it in real time.

To submit a question for the May 6 session, just leave it in the comments below. I’ll pick the ones that seem most interesting and timely, and display them during the session so everyone can follow along.

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

See you May 6.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been asked one question more than any other: Can NATO be saved? The reason is obvious—President Trump is the first US president since the North Atlantic Treaty was signed under Harry S Truman in 1949 to actually raise doubts about America’s commitment to the security of its NATO allies.

My answer may be less obvious. As I explain in my regular From Across the Pond column, only if NATO changes fundamentally will it be saved.

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Some of the U.S. president’s hostility was to be expected. Trump has been disparaging U.S. security alliances for decades, dating all the way back to his famous Playboy interview in 1990, when he called on allies to pay the U.S. for the security it was providing. As a real-estate mogul, Trump felt the burden of having allies outweighed the benefits, and that has remained his view as president.

In 2017, he entered the White House declaring NATO “obsolete.” More recently, he’s called it a “paper tiger,” “useless,” and with NATO allies now refusing to join his attack on Iran — and some even denying the U.S. military access to their airspace and bases — the president has gone even further.

For Trump, the Iran war was a test for NATO, and it failed. “We will remember,” he said, insisting that “we’ll come to their rescue but they will never come to ours.” And when asked whether he would consider withdrawing from the alliance earlier this month, he said it was “beyond reconsideration.”

Still, commentators assume Trump cannot make good on this threat without congressional authorization. Indeed, a 2023 law co-sponsored by then-Senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio prohibits the president from withdrawing from NATO without winning a two-thirds vote in the Senate or a law passed by Congress. Neither is likely to happen.

However, the constitutionality of that law is questionable. Presidents have withdrawn from treaties before — including George W. Bush from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and Trump himself from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. And if Congress sued the president were he to withdraw from NATO, it’s highly unlikely the Supreme Court would rule against him in the exercise of his executive authority.

Plus, even without a formal withdrawal, there are many actions Trump can take to undermine NATO from within.

Read the entire article on Politico Europe.

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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• Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptack, “Leaked Memos Reveal the Supreme Court’s “Shadow Docket” Strategy,” New York Times, April 18, 2026. A series of leaked internal memos provides a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the Supreme Court emplys its “shadow docket” to issue major rulings without full briefings or oral arguments. The memos detail the arguments that led to the first use of the “shadow docket” and how Chief Justice Roberts drove the practice with little concern for the way it opened up a pandora’s box. Critics argue this transparency-lite approach undermines the Court’s legitimacy, while proponents suggest it is a necessary tool to check executive overreach (or, in recent years, free Trump to act without congressional or judicial input and restraint).

• Zia Weise and Sara Schonhardt, “How the Iran War Solidified China’s Clean Energy Dominance,” Politico Europe, April 19, 2026. While the conflict in Iran has sent global oil markets into a tailspin, China is emerging as the primary geopolitical beneficiary of the resulting energy transition. Beijing’s decade-long investment in solar, wind, and battery supply chains has allowed it to weather the oil shock far better than Western nations still tethered to Middle Eastern crude. As Europe and Asia scramble to subsidize their own transitions mid-crisis, they are finding that the “green” path out of fossil fuel dependency leads straight through Chinese technology and critical minerals. This shift suggests that the war hasn’t just destabilized the Middle East, but has effectively locked in a Chinese-led global energy order for the foreseeable future.

• Fabrice Deprez, “Ukraine’s Robot Revolution and the Future of Attrition,” Financial Times, April 19, 2026. The war in Ukraine has evolved into a high-tech laboratory for autonomous warfare, where drones and ground robots are increasingly replacing soldiers on the front lines. This report highlights how Kyiv is leveraging AI-integrated systems to offset Russia’s numerical advantage in manpower and conventional military capabilities. By treating hardware as expendable rather than precious, Ukraine is pioneering a doctrine of “mass-produced attrition” that could redefine 21st-century combat. However, the rapid pace of this technological race raises urgent ethical and strategic questions about the role of human judgment in a world of automated killing.

• Farnaz Fassihi, “Iran’s New Guard: The Rise of the Generals,” New York Times, April 23, 2026. With Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei reportedly sidelined by injury and communicating primarily through handwritten notes, power in Tehran is shifting decisively toward an entrenched military elite, writes Farnaz in a fascinating story about the new power structure in Tehran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has moved from being the regime’s enforcer to its primary decision-maker, effectively sidelining the traditional clerical establishment. This “militarization” of the leadership suggests a more pragmatic, though no less hardline, approach to the current conflict as the generals prioritize state survival over ideological purity. For the West, this means negotiating with a regime that views every diplomatic overture through the lens of battlefield tactical advantage.

• David French, “The Just War Debate: Catholicism, Trump, and Iran,” New York Times, April 23, 2026 Times columnist David French examines the moral architecture of the war with Iran through the lens of Catholic “just war” theory. He argues that the Trump administration’s current military campaign fails the critical tests of last resort and proportionality, potentially labeling the conflict as an “unjust war” in the eyes of many religious leaders. The piece highlights a growing rift between the administration’s hawkish foreign policy and the traditional moral frameworks of its conservative religious base. Ultimately, French suggests that a war started without a clear, achievable end-state risks becoming a moral and strategic quagmire that the American public is ill-prepared to sustain.

• Gen Z’s Growing Cynicism: The 2026 Harvard Youth Poll, Harvard Kennedy School, April 23, 2026. The latest Harvard IOP Youth Poll reveals a generation defined by a profound sense of political powerlessness and economic dread. A majority of young Americans now believe that “people like them” have no say in how the government is run, with trust in federal institutions hitting an all-time low of 15 percent. Economic pressures, specifically inflation and housing, remain the primary drivers of this malaise, far outpacing other social or cultural issues. While young voters still lean Democratic, their lack of faith in the fairness of the 2026 midterms suggests that turnout may be driven more by duty or fear than by genuine enthusiasm.

• Nahal Toosi, “So You Want to Negotiate with Iran…,” Politico, April 25, 2026. In her latest Compass column, Nahal Toosi argues that the Trump administration has yet to answer the most basic questions needed to negotiate a durable end to the Iran war, and that its preparations have been, as she puts it, "not great." The first and hardest question is whether Trump is genuinely prepared to leave the Islamist regime in place — because no deal is possible without that concession, yet accepting it will enrage Israel, Iran hawks, and many Iranians who see the regime itself as the problem. The administration also needs to decide what minimum it will actually demand: nuclear program only, or ballistic missiles and proxy forces too, and how a deal will be verified — because, as she makes clear, a framework with bullet points and no implementation details is not a deal. Toosi warns that Iran's negotiators have dealt with multiple American administrations and will run rings around any U.S. team that hasn't done its homework, and that without consulting Congress, allies, Russia, and China, even a good-faith effort could collapse at the finish line.

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

• I wrote about Trump’s announcement of an indefinite ceasefire with Iran on America Abroad.

• I joined Camille Grand on the Brussels Sprouts podcast to talk about how a more European NATO might be constructed.

• This week’s World Review focused on the stalemate between Iran and the United States, the opportunity for peace in Lebanon, and the vibe shift 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 discussed the implications of an indefinite ceasefire in the Iran War, prospects for resolving the conflict in Lebanon, and the new vibe in Ukraine. Joining me this week were of the Substack “Cosmopolitics,” Prashant Rao of Semafor, and Matt Kaminski of the Middle East Broadcasting Network

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 ceasefire between the United States and Iran may be holding, but the deeper damage to the global economy is only beginning to reveal itself. With no ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz, liquefied natural gas supplies are unlikely to return to normal until 2028, aluminum and helium are in short supply, and JP Morgan is warning of rising gas prices in the United States — just ahead of the midSegment 1: Iran / Strait of Hormuz The ceasefire between the United States and Iran may be holding, but the deeper damage to the global economy is only beginning to reveal itself. With no ships traversing the Strait of Hormuz, liquefied natural gas supplies are unlikely to return to normal until 2028, aluminum and helium are in short supply, and JP Morgan is warning of rising gas prices in the United States — just ahead of the midterms. But the most consequential shift may be structural and permanent. As Prashant Rao reported from the Semaphore World Economy Summit, the consensus among global CEOs, finance ministers, and central bank governors was unambiguous: every major power is now working to render its vulnerability to Hormuz irrelevant. The IEA’s Fatih Birol told him that every new gas supply agreement now comes with a new question attached: does this give you leverage over me? The Iranians, Rao observed, have taught the same lesson the Chinese taught during the trade war: “showing your hand when you have an asymmetrical advantage” has consequences that outlast any ceasefire.

• A fragile ceasefire in Lebanon has been extended for three more weeks, and for the first time in decades, Israeli and Lebanese representatives are holding direct talks in Washington. But the underlying conditions remain unchanged, and Lebanon itself has had little say in shaping the process, which is being driven more by Washington than any regional power. The more important question is whether this moment — unprecedented in its strategic opportunity — will be seized or squandered. With Assad gone, Iran weakened, and Hezbollah’s leadership decapitated, Lebanon has capable new leaders in President Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam who are, for the first time, speaking openly about consolidating military authority under the state. Matt argued that Lebanon has “never had a better opportunity to really create a proper sovereign state” — but cautioned that the region has a long habit of missing exactly these kinds of openings. The diplomatic bandwidth to exploit the moment, Elise warned, matters even more right now than the military dimension: the work requires patience, precision, and an understanding of the region’s equities that the Trump administration has yet to demonstrate.

• Four years into the war, the assumptions underpinning the Ukraine conflict have quietly but fundamentally shifted. Russia is losing an estimated 30,000 soldiers a month, its economy is showing deep signs of strain, and its spring offensive has yielded virtually no territorial gains. Meanwhile, Ukraine has transformed itself into what Matt called the Silicon Valley of Europe in defense innovation, pioneering drone warfare and cultivating technology partnerships that major European powers now see as essential to their own rearmament. Zelensky’s outreach to the Gulf — offering Ukraine’s four years of experience fighting Iranian drones as a calling card — is emblematic of a broader strategic pivot: Kyiv is diversifying its alliances and no longer assuming American support will anchor its war effort. And as Prashant observed, the United States remains necessary for any diplomatic resolution — but it is far from clear where the bandwidth for that comes from, “given that at the moment all eyes in Washington are on the Middle East.”

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

Trump was left with a clear choice: restart the war or extend the ceasefire. Shortly after 4:00 pm today, Trump gave the answer:

This is what surrender looks like.

Trump extended the ceasefire. Not for a day. Not for a week. But indefinitely. Instead of demanding Iran accept the US proposed deal or even just come back to the table, Trump said the ceasefire will remain “until such time as” Iran comes up with “a unified proposal.”

But why would Iran come up with a new proposal, unified or otherwise? Trump blames Iran for being “seriously fractured.” Differences within the regime no doubt exist. But the reason Iran didn’t pick up the phone and say its negotiators were on their way to Islamabad is because they know Trump needs a deal more than they do.

It was Trump who wanted a ceasefire, seeing that further escalation wasn’t bringing Iran around and fearing the economic and political fallout of continuing the war. If Trump now extends the ceasefire indefinitely, Iran is fine with that. Right now, all of the advantages are with Iran, not with Trump. The US president’s only card is restarting a war he doesn’t want. Meanwhile, Iran holds the rest of the cards. Consider:

• Iran controls access to the Strait of Hormuz because of geography. Trump said the blockade of Iranian shipping will remain in place. But for how long? Iran can’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, the pressure on Trump to end the blockade will only increase. Just yesterday, Chinese President Xi Jinping called for the Strait to reopen—the same Xi Trump wants to make a historic deal with when he travels to Beijing in a few weeks. And the blockade, it turns out, is leaking—more than two dozen Iranian-linked vessels, including 11 oil and gas tankers, have so far gotten through.

• Iran controls the nuclear materials that Trump wants. These materials include uranium enriched to 60 percent, which can be turned into nuclear bombs (whether further enriched or not). Tehran may consider handing some or all of the materials to a third country, but only for a price. Trump will have to decide whether he’s prepared to pay the price that Tehran demands. If not, the nuclear-bomb-making materials remain in Iran.

• Iran’s regime has changed. It’s even more hardline and even more committed to its own survival than the previous regime. It can ignore its public—or put it down, if it protests too much. Trump may want to ignore US opinion (which never supported him on the war, and is increasingly turning against him), but will his party? For how long, when gas prices continue to rise and inflation spikes?

• Iran’s friends—Russia and China—are still with it. Russia has supplied intelligence and weaponry. China has bought its oil and sent dual-use goods. America’s friends are turning against it, not only in Europe, but in the Middle East, where the Gulf states and even Israel are increasingly worried that Trump will walk away before Iran has been defeated.

Here’s the reality: Trump knows he’s lost this war. That’s what an indefinite ceasefire means. He just doesn’t want to say it out loud.

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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• David J. Lynch, “China, Iran weaponized the global economy to beat the U.S. at its own game,” The Washington Post, April 12, 2026. Lynch argues that Washington no longer has a monopoly on economic coercion: China used its grip on rare earths, and Iran used the Strait of Hormuz to show that interdependence can now be turned against the United States. The post-Cold War assumption of benign integration has broken down. Instead, globalization has created a world of mutual choke points, not simply American leverage. The article grounds that shift in concrete supply-chain effects, tracing how disruptions in energy and shipping feed into higher costs for fuel, fertilizer, plastics, packaging, and food. Going forward, states will try to increase domestic capacity, build redundancy, and alternative routes, rather than restoring the old world order.

• Lawrence Freedman, “The causes and consequences of Trump’s defeat,” Comment is Freed Substack, April 12, 2026. Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, treats the failed Islamabad talks as proof that the administration has failed to achieve its central aims in Iran: the regime survived, the nuclear issue remains unresolved, and the world economy has suffered lasting damage. He argues that the failure followed a familiar pattern, with Trump seduced by the promise of decisive early blows but failing to articulate a clear strategy. The essay insists that wars are easier to start than to end, and that hurting the enemy is not the same thing as getting closer to one’s political objectives. The larger lesson is about the limits of military power when it is not anchored in realistic ends and a credible plan for how the war is supposed to conclude.

• Sheera Frenkel, Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano, “Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race,” The New York Times, April 12, 2026. The race between the US and China to develop autonomous drones is accelerating. Following a Chinese military parade last September that featured several advanced autonomous systems, US drone manufacturer Anduril has sped up production. But this is no longer just a race between the US and China. Ukraine has increasingly become a testing ground for new drone technologies, blurring the lines between development and deployment. The authors warn that as these systems become more advanced, traditional deterrence may no longer hold if autonomous systems move faster than human judgment, increasing the risk of accidental escalation.

• Dion Nissenbaum, “The Man Who Shaped Washington’s View of the Middle East,” Foreign Policy, April 9, 2026. In this article, Nissenbaum outlines the influence of Brett McGurk, who served as Middle East Advisor to four presidential administrations. As the architect of Iraq’s democratic government, the campaign against ISIS, and the response to October 7, his name is synonymous with US policy towards the region. McGurk is both cause and symbol: a highly capable operator whose career captures the strengths and failures of bipartisan U.S. Middle East policy, and whose influence is likely to endure.

• Ryan McMorrow, Sam Fleming, Peter Foster and Joe Leahy, “China shock 2.0: the flood of high-tech goods that will change the world,” Financial Times, April 14, 2026. The authors warn that the second China shock is more threatening than the first, with high-end manufacturing rather than low-cost consumer goods flooding world markets. The production growth is fueled by domestic competition, government subsidies, and a weak exchange rate, all of which enable companies to survive brutal price wars and then export the pressure abroad. These same forces also generate chronic overcapacity and collapsing margins inside China. To keep up, the West will have to shield vulnerable industries in the short term while adapting to a world in which Chinese manufacturing dominance is likely to persist.

• Ezra Klein, “Reckoning With Israel’s ‘One-State Reality,’” The Ezra Klein Show, April 14, 2026. Ezra Klein argues that the two-state framework is effectively dead. His guests, Shibley Telhami, Professor at the University of Maryland, and Marc Lynch, Director of the Middle East Project at George Washington University, argue that October 7 has only accelerated Israeli control of Palestinian territories through intensified settlement construction, deeper Israeli control in Gaza, and spillover into Lebanon. The episode confronts the political and moral consequences of a status quo that is routinely described as temporary but is increasingly entrenched.

• Sebastian Mallaby, “I Went to China to See Its Progress on A.I. We Can’t Beat It.,” The New York Times, April 13, 2026. Mallaby, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that US chip controls have failed to stop China’s progress in the AI race. Chinese firms have effectively evaded controls, stacked weaker chips, and imitated frontier models. The decisive question is no longer who has the best model, but who can deploy AI most effectively across industry and defense. China is quickly outperforming the US on AI integration. Mallaby argues that Washington should stop chasing an unattainable monopoly and instead try to bargain with Beijing over AI safety and nonproliferation.

• Jamelle Bouie, “This Is Not a Man in Control of Himself,” The New York Times, April 15, 2026. Bouie, Opinion columnist for The New York Times, argues that the Iran war has exposed not only Trump’s impulsiveness and emotional instability but also the deeper weakness of a presidency built on unilateral command. But despite his unprecedented use of executive power, Trump has been unable to achieve many of his goals. Bouie links the President’s failure abroad to his failure at home, contending that Trump can destroy institutions and lash out at enemies more easily than he can legislate, persuade, or consolidate power. Durable governance at home depends on consensus and collaboration across the branches of government, not on one person trying to rule by will alone.

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

• I joined Diane Rehm to talk about the ceasefire with Iran and the future of NATO.

• Finally, this week’s World Review focused on new hope on ending the Iran War, the political earthquake in Hungary, and the president vs the pope.

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 discussed Trump’s televised speech on Wednesday night, the global ripples of the closed Strait of Hormuz, and Israel’s 30-month war. Joining me this week were Christina Ruffini, cohost of Bloomberg This Weekend, Karin Axelsson, EU correspondent for the Danish newspaper Politiken, and Jamie Dettmer, Associate Editor and Foreign Affairs Columnist for Politico Europe.

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 week ended with some good news: a ceasefire in Lebanon, a reopening of the Strait, and negotiations possibly resuming in Pakistan this weekend. But none of these encouraging steps are certain. Israel has continued to strike some targets in Lebanon, and Prime Minister Netanyahu is under pressure to resume the fighting. Iran says the Strait is open to all commercial traffic, but the US is continuing to block ships from or to Iranian ports. And while mediators have been busy this past week, bridging the gaps between the US and Iran will not be easy. Certainly not in a day or two of talks. Is there a way to move things forward? The answer, surprisingly, may come from Europe. While European leaders have been stuck between the effects of the war and not wanting to get involved, Karin argued they are far more aligned than observers may think. European governments were critical in past negotiations with Iran, and still have diplomatic presence in Tehran. If Washington were willing—a big if, admittedly—European involvement in negotiations might be able to move the talks forward in ways other countries may not be able to do. That’s particularly true when negotiations move from broad statements to details.

• “It’s the economy, stupid.” That was the lesson following Victor Orbán’s defeat in the Hungarian Presidential elections this week. His opponent, Péter Magyar, campaigned on economic issues, including Hungary’s rural hospital network and failing transit infrastructure. The cronyism that once entrenched Orbán became a liability, as average Hungarians saw rampant corruption favoring Orbán’s family and friends while they increasingly struggled. The defeat shows that it’s pretty hard to be a populist that isn’t popular. Even illiberal regimes are vulnerable if they fail to deliver for their constituents. Jamie argues that EU leaders must be sure to learn the right lessons. Yes, this was a defeat for the European far-right, but economic and social issues motivated this defeat. Unless political leaders in Brussels address those issues, populist movements will continue to find traction.

• We are likely past the high watermark of Trump’s influence among conservatives globally. Trump is seen more and more as a political liability in Europe, rather than as an important ally. Trump and JD Vance openly supported Orbán, but it had no impact at all. Other right-wing leaders are taking notice. Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, faced with a public opinion that is increasingly anti-Trump, has been looking for ways to distance herself from the American President. Trump’s denigration of the Pope last week, provided an opening for her, saying the president comments were “unacceptable.” The bigger question is why Trump decided to take on the Pope. For many it is a sign of increasing political desperation. But he is paying a price, even among his strongest supporters, Christina argued. Evangelical Christians and Catholics are part of Trump’s base. And now he’s losing support among part of that base, notably Latino voters, almost all Catholic, who already turned away from the president over immigration and now see his attacks on the Pope as unbecoming.

Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode here on 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

• Charles Homans, “America Is Used to Hiding Its Wars. Trump Is Doing the Opposite,” New York Times, April 4, 2026. Homans argues that Trump is breaking with an American tradition that has largely insulated the public from the real costs of war and kept military action outside the spotlight. Instead, the administration is celebrating the war against Iran on its social media channels. For decades, the American public has become accustomed to endless wars protected from political consequences by professionalized forces, hidden financing, and the use of drones.

• Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, “Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?,” The New Yorker, April 6, 2026. In this investigative piece, Farrow and Marantz uncover serious concerns about Sam Altman and the governance of OpenAI. They find that concerns about Altman’s candor and manipulation were longstanding and drove the 2023 board revolt, raising concerns over whether he should be leading one of the country’s most advanced AI companies. OpenAI’s original safety-first nonprofit ideal has steadily been undermined to prioritize capital, scale, and founder control.

• Martin Wolf, “Freedom itself is at stake in Hungary,” Financial Times, April 8, 2026. Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator for the Financial Times, argues that Sunday’s election matters far beyond Hungary because Viktor Orbán has built one of the clearest contemporary models of illiberal democracy through the slow capture of courts, media, civil society, and electoral rules. Orbán has become a hero to many on the authoritarian right, especially in the United States. Péter Magyar may have a real chance to win, but removing Orbán would only mark the beginning of the fight to disband the entrenched networks of patronage and power he created.

• Eric Cortellessa, “Inside Trump’s Search for a Way Out of the Iran War,” TIME, April 2, 2026. Cortellessa’s central point is that President Trump wants an off-ramp from the war without accepting the appearance of retreat, a balance that is proving harder to strike as the economic and political costs mount. The administration’s initial theory of the conflict, that overwhelming force would produce limited retaliation, collapsed once Iran attacked US allies across the region and closed the Strait of Hormuz. Trump is torn between two incompatible aims: ending the war quickly and achieving a decisive strategic outcome that can be sold as victory. As gas prices keep rising and the midterms approach, the military and diplomatic objectives will become even more difficult to achieve.

• Sergey Radchenko, “I had poked the bear right in the eye: my fight to renounce my Russian citizenship,” The Guardian, April 9, 2026. Radchenko, Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, shares his reflections on what it means to be a Russian citizen following the invasion of Ukraine. In this essay, he shares his reflections on guilt, responsibility, and political belonging, while recounting the difficult journey he undertook to renounce his Russian citizenship. Renouncing citizenship becomes, in his view, less a symbolic gesture than a deliberate refusal of the Kremlin’s claim that Russianness entails loyalty to the Russian state.

• Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran,” New York Times, April 7, 2026. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, both White House reporters for The New York Times, depict the decision to go to war with Iran as the result of a concentrated campaign of persuasion by Netanyahu, who painted a picture of swift success and manageable risk. Several senior figures, including Vice President Vance, were skeptical, but Trump was swayed by the more expansive interpretation of what force could accomplish.

• “America’s war on Iran has changed the Middle East—for the worse,” The Economist, April 9, 2026. This Economist briefing suggests the war has left the region less secure, more economically exposed, and strategically more unstable than before it began. The Iranian regime survived, its coercive capacity was damaged but not broken, and its ability to leverage the Strait of Hormuz has moved from a hypothetical to a demonstrated fact. For the Gulf states, the war exposed both the fragility of their trading system and the limits of their long-standing reliance on American protection.

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

• I joined Bloomberg This Weekend on NATO’s 77-year anniversary to argue that the alliance faces the gravest crisis in its history.

• NATO and Secretary General Rutte’s meeting with Trump were major topics of interviews I did this week on CNN with Brianna Keilor, CNN with Audie Cornish, and MS NOW.

• I spoke to EuroNews about the ceasefire, arguing Iran now has the upper hand. I also joined John Byrne on Raw America to discuss the strategic consequences of the ceasefire.

• I joined Jim Acosta to share my initial reactions to the ceasefire and Rutte’s meeting with Trump.

• Finally, this week’s World Review also focused on the fragile ceasefire and President Trump’s threats to pull out of NATO.

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 discussed Trump’s televised speech on Wednesday night, the global ripples of the closed Strait of Hormuz, and Israel’s 30-month war. Joining me this week were Catherine Philp, the World Affairs Editor at The Times, David Luhnow, the UK Bureau Chief at The Wall Street Journal, and Michael Birnbaum, the White House correspondent covering the Trump presidency for The Washington Post.

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:

• With a fragile ceasefire taking hold between the United States and Iran, it appears that no one, except perhaps Iran, has been left better off by the conflict. The U.S. has shown that it was unable or unwilling to achieve regime change or extract political concessions from the Iranian government. Instead, the world is left with a retrenched Iran, with a damaged military, but one that still has a tight grip on the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf States’ model as islands of stability within the Middle East has been challenged and economies globally are beginning to feel the effects of higher energy prices. Catherine explores the “diplomatic theater” that we saw from the Trump Administration, suggesting that it pursued Tuesday’s ultimatum while also looking for diplomatic off-ramps and that’s part of how we’ve gotten to such an unclear resolution.

• Could the Iran War be the America’s “Suez moment?” The 1956 Suez Crisis marked the end of the British Empire. Could the Iran War be the beginning of the end of the United States’ time as the leader of the international order? The United States has alienated many of its allies and didn’t even consult its closest, European partners before launching this war. America’s friends are left wondering if they should continue relying on U.S. leadership, particularly states in the Middle East who have had their security situations upended. Michael argues that there will still be demand in some places for U.S. leadership, such as in NATO. Small countries bordering Russia will still seek U.S. defense assurances, but in other parts of the world that demand for stability may look very different.

• The NATO alliance may be in mortal danger. As I wrote this week, Trump has long been skeptical of the U.S. alliance on which the post-War international order has been built. Trump sees diplomacy as inherently transactional and does not understand how the mutual defense alliance benefits the United States, failing to recognize the difference when its starts an offensive war of choice in the Middle East. But Trump’s statements this week and the visit by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte show we may have come very close to the brink. David calls the current situation “like a divorce” and that “things are being said that can’t be unsaid.” The Europeans’ confidence in American leadership is being permanently undermined and the alliance that underpinned so much peace and prosperity seems to be coming apart at the seems.

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

The mood music going into the meeting was not sounding good, with Trump continuing to say that NATO is never there for us nor ever will. That’s dead wrong, of course. And Rutte no doubt tried to explain that the war against Iran would not have been possible without the US of European bases and airspace and logistical support. But facts have never swayed a man like Trump who is convinced he knows best. And so the Alliance will continue to teeter, with growing questions about America’s commitment to NATO and a growing need for its non-US members to build up their own militaries and reduce their dependence on the United States.