The prevailing view in foreign policy circles is that the erosion of the international rules-based order is a uniform, global trend affecting every country at a similar pace. But according to the newly released fourth edition of the Atlas of Impunity—a massive data project by Eurasia Group and David Miliband with which I have been associated from the start—that mental model is wrong.

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By tracking 60 accountability metrics across nearly 200 countries, the Atlas demonstrates that global lawlessness isn’t spreading evenly. It is hyper-concentrating.

Looking strictly at the macro data, the global average impunity score has sat virtually unchanged since 2020. But that statistical flatline hides what the report calls the “Great Divergence” — with middle-tier nations incrementally tightening their legal and institutional guardrails, while a handful of highly repressive, war-torn states are collapsing into total systemic lawlessness. The gap between societies governed by rules and societies governed by raw force is wider today than at any point in recent memory.

The Concentration of Chaos

One way to understand what this divergence looks like in practice, is to look at how modern warfare impacts the data. We tend to think of global conflict as a generalized rise in tension, but the Atlas’s data reveal an extraordinary disparity in how the human cost of violence is experienced:

• A staggering 46% of every single organized military battle recorded on earth last year took place within a single country: Ukraine.

• 31% of all state-perpetrated violent events targeting civilians globally occurred in just one territory: Myanmar.

For the average citizen living in a median-ranked country, daily life has actually seen a post-pandemic cooling of civil unrest. The horror of modern breakdown isn’t everywhere—it is being dumped primarily onto a few high-misery geographies.

Three Crucial Pivot Points

This year’s Atlas is full of interesting data and points. It’s worth reading in full. But let me focus here on three vital conclusions that can be drawn from the report:

• Free information is the first domino to fall. We frequently treat threats to press freedom as domestic cultural issues rather than national security crises. The Atlas proves otherwise: institutional decay is the ultimate engine of global impunity, and the choking out of independent media is its primary transmission mechanism. When a regime blinds independent journalists, it doesn’t just silence critics; it destroys the information environment required to detect when rules are being broken in the first place. Dictators are successfully treating information warfare as the prerequisite for total strategic license. But that r.ality isn’t restricted to autocracies alone; increasingly illiberal democracies have learned the lesson as well.

• The US has transitioned from the anchor of the rules-based order to its chief volatile wildcard. In a historic shift for this index, the United States has broken away from its rich-country peers to become a primary driver of global impunity. Plummeting six places to 117th in the rankings, the second Trump administration’s “political revolution” has actively normalized the erosion of systemic checks. The real danger here isn’t just domestic overreach; it’s “copycat impunity.” When Washington signals that international law, treaties, and domestic norms are merely optional inconveniences, real and would-be autocrats worldwide treat it as a green light to drop their own constraints.

• The structural erasure of USAID is a massive geopolitical unforced error. The most devastating policy decision highlighted in the data is the wholesale dismantling of the US foreign aid networks. Under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, the US axed 86% of USAID awards, a $27.7 billion retrenchment that effectively shuttered the agency. This wasn’t about cutting fat. It systematically liquidated the global network of local anti-corruption watchdogs, legal aid agencies, independent media outlets, democracy promoting groups, public health efforts, and more that help battle impunity. By dismantling this accountability infrastructure, Washington didn’t save money—it left a massive institutional vacuum that America’s geopolitical adversaries are already moving to exploit.

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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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• Rosa Brooks, “How the War on Terror Primed America for Autocracy,” The Economist, June 2. Brooks argues that the September 11 attacks did not themselves threaten American democracy — al-Qaeda posed no existential danger to a nation of America’s size and wealth — but that the self-inflicted overreaction did: two decades of forever wars, expanded surveillance, executive overreach, and normalized due-process violations hollowed out the republic from within. Brooks traces a direct line from the PATRIOT Act and Abu Ghraib through Obama-era drone strikes and the steady militarisation of domestic policing, showing how emergency powers quietly became permanent fixtures of American governance. The psychological toll ran alongside the institutional one — a nation jolted out of its sense of invulnerability turned inward, fuelling Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, and accelerating political polarisation. By the time Trump arrived, Brooks argues, the groundwork had already been laid: a populace habituated to executive dominance and a Congress that had long since ceded its authority. She closes with a sharp historical sting: “it’s hard not to imagine Mad King George gazing out at Donald Trump’s America — and laughing.”

• John F. Harris, “The Generational Disaster of Trump, Bush and Clinton,” Politico, June 14. With all three men turning 80 this summer, POLITICO’s founding editor argues that Clinton, Bush, and Trump — born within months of each other in 1946 — share a collective responsibility for the degradation of American political life, even as they differ sharply in temperament and culpability. Harris’s case is not the standard boomer critique: he credits the generation with genuine cultural and technological creativity, but singles out its political legacy as uniquely corrosive, defined by a moralistic “which side are you on” tribalism that took root on Vietnam-era campuses and never let go. Each president intensified the pathology in his own way — Clinton and Gingrich turning governance into morality theatre, Bush making national security a partisan battleground, Trump weaponising social media grievance into a self-sustaining political movement. A distinctive signature of this generation’s politics, Harris argues, is that the argument itself has become the point — untethered from policy substance and therefore immune to compromise or resolution. The epitaph he offers is bleak: the cohort “will keep demanding to know ‘which side are you on’ until the answer is ‘the side that is six feet underground.’”

• Daniel B. Shapiro, “What Did You Expect?,” The Atlantic, June 17. Shapiro argues that Trump’s abrupt reversal on Iran — from “maximum pressure” warmonger to dealmaker offering sanctions relief, asset releases, and a $300 billion reconstruction fund — is not an aberration but the predictable result of Trump’s character playing out on a high-stakes national security matter. He walks through the gap between stated war aims and outcome on four fronts: the nuclear program’s enrichment and verification questions are merely punted rather than resolved, sanctions relief flows to the regime with no behavioral change, Israel was sidelined from the ceasefire negotiations and pressured to restrain operations against Hezbollah, and the same regime Trump once called uniquely evil is now flattered as reasonable. Shapiro traces the collapse to recognizable Trump traits — overconfidence in his own power to bend reality, susceptibility to strongman flattery, and a tendency to bail at the first sign of political cost once the war grew unpopular at the pump. The piece closes on a grim assessment that this outcome makes the JCPOA, the deal Trump once scorned, look ironclad by comparison.

• Max Seddon, Fabrice Deprez, “Vladimir Putin’s War Machine Sputters in Drone Age,” Financial Times, June 21. Seddon and Deprez document a decisive shift in the war’s character: Ukraine’s mid- and long-range drone strikes have hit refineries, air bases, and convoys deep inside Russia, while Moscow’s territorial gains have collapsed from 1,151 sq km a year ago to just 164 sq km between February and May. The reporting traces this to a structural change in warfare itself — “robotification” means Ukraine now needs thousands of drone operators rather than hundreds of thousands of infantry, eroding Russia’s traditional manpower advantage at a moment when Russian recruitment is already falling short of battlefield losses. Russia’s elite Rubikon drone unit has failed to close the gap, hampered by a defense sector running near capacity and an economy with record-low unemployment, while Putin himself appears insulated by military briefings that keep him convinced victory is just a matter of time. The authors don’t underestimate the challenges facing Ukraine, though — Russian gliding-bomb strikes continue grinding forward in Donbas, a problem Kyiv “hasn’t managed to find a solution for,” underscoring that technological asymmetry cuts in different directions depending on the front.

• Winston Ma, “Trump is Taking a Page Out of China’s Sovereign AI Playbook,” Financial Times, June 18. Ma argues that the US and China have independently arrived at the same conclusion — that frontier AI is too strategically important to leave to private markets — and are both moving state capital into the AI stack, from chips upward to models. The proximate evidence: Trump’s proposal that the US government take equity stakes in OpenAI and xAI, and China’s sovereign AI fund becoming the sole investor with direct ownership and voting rights in DeepSeek’s first external funding round, valuing it at over $50bn. Ma frames this through Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s five-layer infrastructure stack — energy, chips, cloud, models, applications — and shows that both governments are climbing it in parallel, with China a decade ahead at the chip layer and now extending into models. The distinction between subsidy and ownership matters enormously, he argues: once governments become shareholders in frontier AI labs, those companies face irresolvable tensions between commercial returns, national security objectives, and global market ambitions. The next frontier, Ma warns, may be the ownership and governance of intelligence itself.

• Ernest Moniz, “Ex-Energy Secretary Moniz Breaks Down Challenges of Nuclear Negotiations with Iran,” PBS NewsHour, June 23. In this interview with anchor Amna Nawaz, the chief architect and lead technical negotiator of the 2015 JCPOA delivers a pointed assessment of where the current US-Iran nuclear talks fall dangerously short. Moniz’s core concern is verification: the existing memorandum of understanding promises IAEA access to declared nuclear sites, but the JCPOA’s real teeth lay in inspector access to undeclared, potentially covert sites — with a 24-day window to prevent cleanup before inspection — and he sees no evidence the current framework replicates that. On enriched uranium, he flags Iran’s stockpile of 60-percent-enriched material as the first-order problem, noting that while it falls short of the 90-percent weapons-grade threshold, it is more than sufficient to build a bomb with slightly more material. He is openly skeptical that the 60-day negotiating timeline is adequate for the kind of detailed, loophole-closing agreement that actually constrains a nuclear program, warning that “ambiguity is something that can be manipulated.” His implicit verdict on the current team: competent technical assets exist in the national laboratories, but using them effectively requires knowing which questions to ask.

• Joyu Wang, “China’s Assertions of Authority Over Foreign Ships Near Taiwan Draw U.S. Rebuke,” The Wall Street Journal, June 24. Wang reports on a five-day Chinese coast guard operation earlier this month in waters east of Taiwan, during which Beijing issued direct commands to foreign commercial vessels — demanding port entry details and asserting jurisdiction — in what US, UK, French, and German officials have collectively condemned as destabilizing to regional stability and freedom of navigation. The operation, which China justified on procedural grounds related to Japan-Philippines maritime negotiations, is being read by analysts as something more ominous: a rehearsal for a naval quarantine of Taiwan, advancing incrementally to avoid triggering a decisive response. Stanford’s Raymond Powell describes the strategy as a boa constrictor rather than a viper — “each squeeze is incremental enough to explain away, but the pressure grows ever tighter” — and warns that radio challenges today lay the groundwork for boarding and redirecting ships tomorrow.

• Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, “Behind the Curtain: America’s Great Political Implosion,” Axios, June 25. VandeHei and Allen survey a political landscape in simultaneous meltdown on multiple fronts: MAGA fracturing between Trump loyalists and true “America First” believers over the Iran war, democratic socialists backed by New York’s Zohran Mamdani winning primaries and terrifying establishment Democrats, and a generational collapse in support for Israel remaking both parties as Pew finds 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. The throughline is a cross-partisan populist fury — over endless war, soaring prices, and elite impunity — that is consuming incumbents and party establishments alike, with AI emerging as the next accelerant as young voters across party lines increasingly see it as a machine for enriching billionaires at the expense of ordinary workers. The electoral picture that results is one of radical uncertainty: House control a toss-up, the Senate potentially splitting 50-50, and the 2028 presidential field wide open on both sides. The closing data point lands with force: in a new Gallup poll timed to the nation’s 250th anniversary, more than three-quarters of Americans said the founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.

• Rachel Sylvester, “Burnham Has Been Sphinxlike on Foreign Policy. That Is About to Change,” The Observer, June 25. With Andy Burnham set to succeed Keir Starmer as UK prime minister, Sylvester offers the first serious attempt to map his foreign policy instincts — and finds a leader who is more political, more economically focused, and less reflexively Atlanticist than his predecessor. Where Starmer is a human rights lawyer, Burnham is a self-described realist shaped by Iraq: he backed the war, regrets it, and has absorbed the lesson that civilian casualties breed radicalization — an instinct that put him ahead of Starmer on Gaza ceasefire calls and will inform how he handles the Middle East. On Europe, Burnham is privately more committed to the EU than Starmer ever was, and allies believe the political logic is clear — the voters Labour has lost to the Greens and Lib Dems are overwhelmingly pro-rejoin. On Trump, Burnham will neither play whisperer nor engineer a confrontation, betting instead that personal charm and a reputation as a winner will be sufficient currency. The organizing principle of the whole approach is what Sylvester calls the “Makerfield test”: every foreign relationship will be judged by whether it drives down the cost of living, cuts energy bills, or reduces Channel crossings.

• Yaroslav Trofimov, Thomas Grove, “Ukrainian Strikes Turn Crimea From Prize Asset to Liability for Putin,”The Wall Street Journal, June 26. Trofimov and Grove report that Ukraine’s campaign of over 100 drone strikes daily has pushed Crimea into a state of emergency — fuel banned from civilian sale, power outages spreading, tourists fleeing, and some 2,500 vehicles queued to escape via the Kerch Bridge — turning Putin’s signature 2014 acquisition from a strategic rear base into an isolated liability. The reporting traces a methodical isolation operation: Kyiv has destroyed bridges, railway tracks, fuel depots, ferries, and port facilities while targeting supply trucks on the Novorossiya highway, with one Kyiv defense analyst describing it as “a classic isolation operation” that typically precedes offensive action. The strategic reversal is compounding at a politically sensitive moment — Russian parliamentary elections loom, public discontent over fuel shortages is mounting, and Putin’s generals have been feeding him overly optimistic battlefield assessments that left him blindsided by Crimea’s vulnerability. The reporters close on a pointed human detail: with panic spreading on the ground, residents report buying black-market gasoline from soldiers at several times the normal price, while one Sevastopol woman says she has been taking sedatives for six weeks to manage panic attacks amid the strikes, outages, and water cuts.

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

• I discussed how the White House’s effort to spin the Iran MoU into a win was unserious and would convince no one on America Abroad.

• I was interviewed by the BBC on the G7 Summit’s statement on Ukraine.

• I spoke to Bloomberg’s Balance of Power about NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s visit with President Trump.

• This week’s World Review focused on Iran, Ukraine, and Brexit. Last week’s World Review discussed the geopolitics of the World Cup.

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. Ten years of Brexit, a nuclear deal that may not be a deal, and Ukraine’s new campaign to make Crimea ungovernable. Joining me were Catherine Philp, World Affairs Editor of The Times; Yannis Palaiologos, correspondent-at-large for Kathimerini; and Yaroslav Trofimov, Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent of The Wall Street Journal.

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 Decade of Self-Inflicted Wounds

The Brexit referendum turned ten this week. The verdict is in — and it isn’t flattering. Catherine reminded us that Britain is now on its sixth prime minister since the vote, and will soon have a seventh. In the previous two decades, there were three. Causation or correlation? Catherine’s answer was essentially: does it matter?

The polling is striking. Three-quarters of British voters now want a closer relationship with Europe. Sixty-three percent would accept freedom of movement — the very issue that drove the Leave campaign. Young voters, who’ve come of age since 2016, favor rejoining the EU by six to one. Yet Yannis cautioned that Brussels wants Britain back, but on its own terms. No cherry-picking. No bespoke arrangements. And no appetite to reopen negotiations until there’s genuine cross-party consensus in London.

Yaroslav added a geopolitical dimension. Britain still matters — as a nuclear power, as a headquarters for the Nordic-Baltic Joint Expeditionary Force, as a bilateral partner with France on extending a European nuclear umbrella. But full EU membership, he suggested, is widely seen in European capitals as more trouble than it’s worth. The new incoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is untested on foreign policy. Catherine wasn’t sure he’d prioritize Europe. The question may answer itself — eventually.

The Art of the No-Deal Deal

Negotiators in Switzerland are trying to turn the Iran framework agreement into something durable. So far, the two sides can’t agree on what they’ve actually agreed to. Vice President Vance says one thing. Tehran says the opposite.

Yannis laid out the dynamic: the United States, having achieved tactical success in the air campaign, has been giving things away. Sanctions on Iranian oil have been suspended for the first time since 1980. Assets are being unfrozen. Meanwhile, the nuclear file — centrifuges, enriched stockpiles, inspections — remains entirely unresolved. Iran has every incentive to drag things out. Trump has zero appetite to return to military action, especially as midterms approach.

Yaroslav coined the phrase that stuck: Pax Iranica. Iran won the war. A Singaporean vessel was fired on in Omani territorial waters — and Washington said nothing. The stick is broken. The carrot has already been handed over. Catherine suggested the carrots aren’t fully disbursed yet, but the point stands: America’s leverage is gone. The most likely outcome is that talks continue indefinitely — not because they’re succeeding, but because their failure would be worse. Lebanon remains the wild card. And Yannis couldn’t resist noting that a side deal on Iranian purchases of American soybeans may end up being the headline win.

Crimea on the Edge

Ukraine’s campaign against Crimea is reshaping the war. Yaroslav put it plainly: what was once Putin’s signature achievement has become a liability. Rolling blackouts. Closed gas stations. Water shortages. Empty supermarket shelves. ATMs down. A state of emergency declared in Sevastopol. Railway bridges inside the peninsula destroyed. Ferries knocked out. The Kerch Bridge — structurally damaged and restricted to passenger traffic — is the last link to mainland Russia. And the Ukrainians are keeping it open deliberately: they want settlers, military families, and tourists to leave.

Catherine, just back from the front, described what drone warfare actually feels like on the ground. It looks nothing like World War I from a bunker full of operators staring at screens. But for the soldier walking twenty miles through a kill zone, sheltering under trees, not having left the front line in six months — it feels exactly like it.

Yannis asked Yaroslav whether officials inside Russia were finally giving Putin an accurate picture of the situation. Yaroslav’s answer: some are, particularly on the economy. But the FSB, which holds the cards, still believes victory is within sight. Putin has three options — mass mobilization, nuclear escalation, or doing nothing. He appears to be choosing the third. Ukraine is taking full advantage.

The broader lesson, I suggested in closing, is one this war keeps teaching. A smaller, nimbler power — with innovative tactics, long-range strikes, and drone warfare that is fundamentally rewriting the rules of engagement — can outmaneuver a larger but less adaptable one. We saw it with Iran and the United States. We are seeing it now in Ukraine.

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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So how did Rutte do? In one sense, not bad. Rutte delivered a master class in flattery, giving Trump all the credit for the increase in defense spending by European allies and Canada. He brought charts depicting what he called “the Trump Trillion” — pointing to the $1.2 trillion increase in non-US NATO defense spending since 2017, when Trump first entered office. And during the first two years of Trump’s second term, Rutte showed on another chart, defense spending was expected to increase by $250 billion. Shrewdly, Rutte had a third chart showing the number of American jobs this increase in defense spending had created.

Rutte was less successful convincing Trump that NATO allies had been there for the United States in its war with Iran. Rutte mentioned that 4,000-5,000 US aircraft had taken off from US bases during the six-week war. Trump remained unconvinced. “They weren’t,” Trump interjected when the Secretary General suggested European allies were there to support the US in the war. “We were let down.” Those were “isolated cases,” Rutte insisted. But Trump was not persuaded. “I just want their loyalty,” he insisted.

And there lies the problem. Trump doesn’t want allies. He wants supplicants. But America’s allies in Europe and Canada have no interest in being Trump loyalist, let alone paying tribute to the President of the United States. As Belgian Prime Minister said earlier this year, “Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else.” NATO allies are increasingly weary of Trump and concerned America no longer is a reliable ally. That is in good part why they are increasing their defense spending — not only to counter a growing threat from Russia (as Rutte also pointed out) but to be less dependent and, perhaps, one day independent from the United States.

So, Rutte is right to call the new spending the Trump Trillion — but mainly because Europe and Canada no longer see the United States as an ally and now need to build up a military that no longer relies on America to come to its aid.

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 did something different this time: rather than our usual roundup of three news stories, we devoted the whole episode to a single subject — the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which had kicked off only days before we taped and was already making as much news off the pitch as on it. I was joined by Giles Whittell, deputy editor-in-chief of The Observer; Mehreen Khan, economics editor of The Times of London, making her World Review debut; and Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial 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.

America at War With Itself

The most provocative framing of the hour came from Giles, who argued that the real war on display at this World Cup isn’t the one the United States is still technically fighting with Iran — it’s the one Washington is fighting with itself. He traced it through the visa bans, the entry bonds, and the surreal sight of an Ultimate Fighting cage erected on the White House lawn just as the World Cup kicked off. This is Fortress America against the country that once welcomed the world’s huddled masses, the contest playing out for a global television audience.

The human cost was specific and real. Fans from partially restricted countries like Algeria must post a $15,000 bond just to attend, Giles noted — and I added the story of Cape Verde’s heroic goalkeeper, the man who kept Spain off the scoreboard, whose own mother couldn’t watch him play because she couldn’t afford that same bond. A Somali referee, recently named the best official in Africa, was barred from entering the country altogether; FIFA, asked to intervene, said border policy was Washington’s call, not its own.

Mehreen pushed back on how much weight the tournament’s “internationalism” can really bear — five of the world’s six most populous countries are absent from the field — but found something genuinely valuable in the patriotism on display anyway: a healthier outlet for an old impulse than the same flags waved at Britain’s nationalist marches. Gideon, who has attended every World Cup since 1994, Qatar and Russia included, was unbothered by the moral math. FIFA keeps handing its showcase to flawed hosts; the football, somehow, survives the company it keeps.

The King of Football’s Faustian Bargain

Mehreen laid out the numbers with the precision of someone who has covered FIFA’s finances for years: this World Cup will generate roughly $17 billion in revenue, well more than double what Qatar or Russia brought in, driven less by sponsorship than by a new dynamic-pricing system that treats World Cup tickets the way airlines treat plane fares. The catch, she argued, is that almost none of it reaches the host countries. The GDP bump for the US, Mexico, and Canada is statistically invisible — and Qatar’s experience, where billions in stadium infrastructure now sit flat-packed and shipped abroad, suggests these tournaments are essentially a wealth transfer to FIFA itself rather than to the nations that stage them.

That money explains the strange new alliance at this tournament’s center. A decade ago, the FBI was arresting FIFA executives by the dozen and Sepp Blatter was forced out in disgrace. Gianni Infantino spent his early years atop FIFA trying to scrub that memory from the internet, and according to Mehreen, found his answer in Donald Trump. The relationship, dormant under Biden, was reactivated the moment Trump returned to office: Infantino has joined him on trade trips, invented a “FIFA Peace Prize” for him after failing to secure an actual Nobel, and stayed conspicuously silent as US border policy barred officials — including that same Somali referee — from the tournament he’s supposed to administer.

Mehreen’s verdict was unsparing: Infantino now governs more like a strongman than a sports administrator, and the money pouring through FIFA all but guarantees his re-election regardless of how supine he looks — fittingly, the federation has already handed Saudi Arabia the 2034 tournament unchallenged. Gideon added the structural insult clubs feel most acutely: FIFA borrows the world’s best players for free, while the clubs paying their salaries get nothing back. Brilliant business, he said dryly, if you can get away with it.

Borrowed Allegiances

Once we turned to the football itself, the conversation kept circling back to one theme: this is being played by a more genuinely globalized cast than any World Cup before it. Mehreen’s best example was the American forward Folarin Balogun, born in New York only because his pregnant mother was denied boarding on a flight home to London — an accident of immigration bureaucracy that made him eligible to play for the United States rather than England or Nigeria, where he might easily have ended up. Stories like his, she argued, quietly dilute the blood-and-soil nationalism that usually attaches itself to international football.

Gideon’s contribution was more old-fashioned World Cup romance — the pleasure of discovering a team you’ve never properly watched, the way Morocco outplayed Brazil for the tournament’s opening half-hour with the kind of fluid, interchanging football Brazil is supposed to own. Giles, never one to spare England’s captain, used the moment to relitigate his long-running case against Harry Kane as the most boring great player in the game — a claim Mehreen countered point by point, citing Kane’s prolific Bundesliga scoring record and arguing his deep buildup play makes him far more complete than Giles gives him credit for.

The bigger story may be the men picking the teams. For the first time, Gideon observed, both England and Brazil are managed by foreigners — Germany’s Thomas Tuchel and Italy’s Carlo Ancelotti — an arrangement once unthinkable for two of football’s proudest footballing nations. Mehreen thinks Tuchel’s willingness to pick a team rather than simply field England’s biggest Premier League names could be genuinely transformative, if England’s old guard lets him get away with 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.

Trump is unlikely to increase pressure on Russia beyond what he has already done. But he could help move things along if he were to present President Putin with the true picture of what is happening on the battlefield. Just as the US showed Putin the intelligence on his pending attack, Trump could present the US understanding what is happening on the battlefield to counter the mis-information that Putin is getting from his generals who don’t tell him the truth.

The White House has yet to release the 14-point, one-and-a-half page Memorandum of Understanding it reached with Iran over the weekend. It must be a really bad agreement. If it was a good deal, they’d surely would have publicized it by now. In fact, rather than the actual agreement, the White House released a set of talking points that confirms how bad this deal really is.

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Here’s what the talking points refer to as the Bottom Line:

Let’s take these points in turn:

• “He blocked Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon.” In the MoU, Iran does affirm that it will not produce nuclear weapons. Tehran first made that commitment in 1968, when it signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and reiterated it in 2015 in the JCPOA. Trump thus got Iran to affirm a commitment it first made 58 years ago. Big Deal.

• “He ended the fighting on every front including Lebanon without another forever war.” It was the United States (and Israel) that started the war against Iran, so ending it was a unilateral decision Trump made.

• “Reopened the artery that carries a fifth of the world’s oil.” The Strait of Hormuz was open until the war. It’s now effectively controlled by Iran.

• “American families are safer and will feel relief at the pump.” Not so fast. Iran is more likely to acquire nuclear weapons because of the war Trump started than before. Prices at the pump have gone up because the United States started a war and ignored the likelihood Iran would shut down shipping from the Persian Gulf. It will take months for oil flows to resume and prices at the pump to come down. Inflation is above 4 percent.

• “There is more work ahead to reach a final agreement.” True. In fact, everything the administration claims to have achieved in this deal remains to be negotiated: a permanent, verifiable end to Iran’s nuclear program, a lasting settlement in Lebanon, and the free flow of commerce through international waterways.

Here’s the reality. The war devastated Iran’s military and decimated its top leaders. But Tehran’s nuclear program is untouched. Its missile forces and proxies remain in place. Its control over the Strait is firm. Its coffers are begin to fill up again as assets are unfrozen and its oil is sold at market prices.

President Trump sees himself as a winner. In this war, he is the loser. But he can’t accept he lost. So he and his aides have spun a tale of victory to hide their stinging defeat. Nothing underscores that better than the alternative reality depicted in the White House talking points.

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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• Mick Ryan, “Losing on Every Dimension,” Marching Orders, June 8, 2026. A rigorous five-dimensional assessment of Russia’s strategic position in 2026 concludes that Putin is losing not in one or two respects but across every measurable axis — military, cognitive, moral, industrial, and economic. On the battlefield, Russia is now losing more troops than it can recruit, suffering over 9,600 casualties per square mile gained in 2026 versus 200 in 2025, while Ukraine has for the first time seized a net territorial advantage over the past three months. Russia’s information operations are decoupling from a battlefield made transparent by open-source tracking, its moral standing is eroded by documented war crimes and a Gulf realignment toward Kyiv, its defence industrial growth has decelerated from 25 percent annually to a projected 5–7 percent, and its wartime economy — having exhausted the fiscal stimulus of 2023–24 — now faces 1 percent GDP growth, a labour shortfall of nearly 11 million, and food inflation above 20 percent. As Finnish President Alexander Stubb put it in May 2026: “The first year of this war for Ukraine was a struggle for survival. Then three years of resilience. And now it is pure mathematics.”

• Megan K. Stack, “Israeli Expansionism Is Shaking the Middle East,” The New York Times, June 8, 2026. Since October 7, Israel has shifted from a strategy of containment to one of open expansionism — occupying swaths of southern Lebanon, carving into Syria, razing parts of Gaza, and accelerating West Bank settlements, while establishing covert bases in Iraq and reportedly planning a foothold in Somaliland. Stack argues that this acceleration, enabled by unconditional U.S. support, is generating strategic blowback: 60 percent of American adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, half believe it is committing genocide in Gaza, and the diplomatic and military lifeline on which Israel depends is showing signs of strain. Failed and fragmented states on Israel’s borders may look less threatening than the autocracies of a prior era, but they incubate the next generation of armed movements — a dynamic Israel already experienced when its 1982 invasion of Lebanon gave birth to Hezbollah. Stack closes with a stark assessment of American complicity: “Through money, protection and diplomatic overindulgence, the United States helped to create the aggressive Israel we see today.”

• Jon Henley, “Only One in 10 Europeans Now See US as an Ally, Survey Suggests,” The Guardian, June 10, 2026. A 15-country European Council on Foreign Relations survey finds European confidence in the US security guarantee at a historic low, with just 11 percent now viewing Washington as an ally sharing their interests and values. Majorities in nearly every country no longer believe the US would come to their aid if attacked, while most expect at least some European neighbors would. The shift is driven by Trump’s Middle East aggression, threats against Greenland, talk of troop withdrawals, and skepticism toward NATO’s future, and is fueling growing support for “buy European” defence procurement and collective EU defence borrowing — though most Europeans still expect US-European relations to improve once Trump leaves office.

  

• Rebecca Feng, “China Is Propping Up the World Economy by Importing a Lot Less Oil,” The Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2026. China has cut crude imports from roughly 11 million barrels a day to 7.8 million in May, a drop of about three million barrels — equivalent to the combined daily consumption of Italy and France — helping explain why Brent crude remains below $100 a barrel despite the Strait of Hormuz being effectively closed for four months. The shift reflects a structural diversification away from oil: rail and EV travel surged during the May Day holidays as air and gasoline-car use declined, while refiners and petrochemical plants have cut run rates by 7-10 percentage points and Beijing has only recently begun drawing modestly on reserves estimated at one billion to 1.4 billion barrels. Yet the resilience may be partly an illusion, as the petrochemical slowdown is starting to create feedstock shortages that pushed producer prices up 3.9 percent in May, raising the risk that reduced oil demand eventually feeds through into higher manufacturing costs.

• Dario Amodei, “Policy on the AI Exponential,” darioamodei.com, June 2026. Amodei argues that AI’s exponential progress has now produced undeniable evidence of both its power and its risks — exemplified by Claude Mythos Preview’s demonstration of frontier-model cybersecurity risk — and that policy, which moves far slower than the technology, must urgently catch up across five domains: regulation and public safety, macroeconomics and tax policy, scientific innovation, the state and civil liberties, and geopolitics. He calls for FAA-style mandatory third-party testing of frontier models for cyber, bio, loss-of-control and automated R&D risks, alongside reforms to let regulators like the FDA adapt to an AI-driven flood of new drug candidates and therapies. On labor displacement, he warns that AI may act as a more thorough substitute for human cognition than past technologies and urges pro-employment incentives, and eventually long-term income support such as UBI, while on civil liberties he proposes bans on domestic autonomous weapons and closing data-broker surveillance loopholes. Geopolitically, he frames AI as a nuclear-weapons-level reset of the strategic landscape and calls for a coalition of democracies to control the AI supply chain, coordinate on risk, and reject AI-powered authoritarianism. The essay closes on a note of urgency tempered by optimism: “Treebeard and his forest are waking up.”

• Lawrence Freedman, “Putin Has Missed His Best Opportunity for a Ceasefire,” Comment is Freed, June 13, 2026. Freedman examines why Putin rejected Zelenskyy’s June 4 offer of a face-to-face meeting and full ceasefire — made pointedly during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, just as Ukrainian drones struck the city’s oil terminal and a Black Sea Fleet corvette. Putin remains insulated by a stream of false battlefield reporting that protects him from the reality that Russian forces are stalling or retreating in most sectors. Freedman argues the real obstacle is not the military balance but the internal politics of the Kremlin: as Ukraine’s drone campaign increasingly isolates Crimea and degrades Russian logistics and oil export revenue (down 34 percent in early 2026), the gap between Putin’s public claims and battlefield reality may eventually prompt Russian elites to ask why a ceasefire wasn’t accepted earlier. As Freedman puts it, Putin’s recent statements increasingly “sound delusional while others show him in denial.”

• Edward Wong, “Trump’s Sharp Turn on China: Embracing It as a Peer Power,” The New York Times, June 9, 2026. Following Trump’s Beijing summit with Xi Jinping, both governments adopted the phrase “constructive strategic stability,” signaling a marked accommodation that has unsettled officials from Taipei to Delhi to Manila. Trump praised Xi as a “central casting” leader, described a “G2” of equal superpowers, and is holding a $14 billion Taiwan arms package “in abeyance” as a negotiating chip — a shift that appears to violate the Taiwan Relations Act and the “Six Assurances,” while Trump has also publicly suggested Taiwan should “cool down” rather than risk war with China. The reversal follows China’s success in forcing a US retreat during last year’s trade war, and Beijing sees it as a long-sought validation of the “new type of great power relations” that Xi unsuccessfully pressed on Obama. Analysts warn the pivot is fraying the China-focused convergence that had underpinned US ties with India and other Asian partners, even as the Pentagon continues military exercises in the region. As one former Indian foreign secretary put it, “It doesn’t seem like this U.S. administration is interested in the broader geostrategic issues in Asia.”

• Philip Gordon, “Don’t Give Up on Global Order,” Foreign Affairs, June 9, 2026. Against the emerging bipartisan consensus that the U.S.-led liberal order is dead and not worth reviving, Gordon argues the order delivered historically unprecedented benefits — preventing great-power war, curbing nuclear proliferation, lifting over a billion people from poverty, and expanding democracy — and that America retains the underlying strength to lead it again after Trump. He marshals data showing U.S. GDP now 40 percent larger than the EU’s and seven times Japan’s, a defense budget triple China’s, and dollar dominance in global reserves, while warning that abandoning alliances and freedom of navigation risks a cascade of nuclear proliferation, with over 75 percent of South Koreans now backing an independent arsenal and Poland, Germany, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all signaling similar interest. He points to Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz after Trump’s February 2026 strikes — which sent gas prices up 50 percent and pushed some Asian economies to four-day workweeks — as a preview of the costs of ceding control of global chokepoints. Gordon’s prescription is reform rather than retreat: a renewed alliance bargain with greater burden-sharing, recommitment to rules and institutions, correction of trade overcorrections, and military humility, arguing that polling already shows Americans souring on Trump’s unilateralism and craving renewed global leadership.

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

• I warned about the US decoupling security from Europe in my bimonthly Politico Europe column.

• This month’s Ask Ivo discussed Russia, US standing in the world, European and other allies losing trust in America, and much more.

• This week’s World Review focused on Iran, US-European relations, and the AI revolution.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

During much of the Cold War one of Europe’s dominant fears was that US and European security would decouple—a situation in which the United States would no longer be willing or able to come to Europe’s defense. The cause of these fears were always Soviet actions—think the launch of the Sputnik satellite, which suggested Moscow would soon have the ability to target the United States directly with nuclear missiles; or the Soviet deployment of the SS-20 nuclear missiles that could reach all of Europe, but not the United States.

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Today, European fears of decoupling are back. But this time, I argue in my latest “From Across the Pond” column, the fears are driven by US actions rather than Russia’s.

When news broke that the Pentagon wouldn’t sell long-range Tomahawk missiles to Germany, it suggested Washington might fear Moscow would view such a capability in Europe’s hands as dangerous escalation.

The move came on the heels of similar signs of U.S. disengagement that had been going on for weeks, including the decision to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, halt the planned deployment of a U.S. battalion equipped with Tomahawk missiles, and make severe reductions in planned U.S. contributions of bombers, fighters, destroyers, submarines and other forces needed to bolster NATO defenses in a crisis or attack.

The Pentagon claims these steps are necessary to rebalance European and U.S. contributions to the continent’s defense, but the decision to halt the Tomahawk sale points to a far more disquieting reality: Not only is Washington no longer deploying deep precision strike systems to Europe, it’s also denying its European allies the capacity to arm themselves with these systems out of fear of Russia’s reaction.

In other words, the U.S. is now actively looking to decouple its security from Europe’s.

Read the entire article at Politico Europe.

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 the on-again, off-again Iran ceasefire and what it tells us about the limits of American leverage; the Pentagon’s retreat from a Tomahawk missile deal with Germany and what it means for NATO’s future; and the staggering SpaceX IPO as a window into AI’s growing—and largely unregulated—hold on the global economy. I was joined by Adam Cancryn, White House reporter for CNN; Stefanie Bolzen, Washington correspondent and North America editor for Die Welt; and James Harding, editor-in-chief 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 Art of the Almost-Deal

By CNN’s count, Donald Trump has now claimed roughly forty times that a deal with Iran is done—or about to be. This week’s version came after a fresh round of strikes between Israel, Iran, and the United States, followed by Trump’s overnight declaration that an agreement had been reached. Adam laid out the problem with that claim: barely a day later, Washington and Tehran couldn’t even agree on what the supposed deal contained. But what is clear, Adam noted, any deal amounts to an agreement to keep talking for another sixty days—not a resolution of the issues that started the war.

Stefanie offered a useful diagnosis from inside the White House press corps: reporters have largely stopped trying to parse Trump’s deal pronouncements in real time, because so little of what he says translates into anything concrete. She also raised a sharper question—whether the decision to strike Iran will be remembered as the turning point of Trump’s presidency, pointing to his visibly fraying temper and sliding approval numbers. James added a journalist’s-eye observation: covering Washington today increasingly resembles covering a government that tells you everything and reveals nothing.

The bigger throughline, though, was substantive rather than stylistic. As James put it, the war has cemented two durable facts: that the United States has no real commitment to the rights of Iranian citizens, and that the Strait of Hormuz has now been normalized as a tool of geopolitical leverage. On the question of who actually has the advantage, the panel converged on an uncomfortable answer—not Washington. Iran, as Stefanie put it, has discovered that squeezing the Strait works, and works to the detriment of the global economy far more than to America’s. James framed it as a question of who has the benefit of time, and concluded that Tehran, facing no midterms and no inflationary clock, can simply wait this out. I suggested that the answer to the question of who holds the cards, is both—but Trump’s are face-up on the table while Iran’s stay folded.

The Quiet Unraveling of NATO

If the Iran story was about the limits of force, our second topic was about the visible retreat of American commitment. Stefanie broke the news that the Pentagon appears set to cancel a Biden-era plan to send Tomahawk cruise missiles to Germany—missiles Berlin had been counting on as a long-range deterrent—reportedly because Washington worries about provoking Moscow and because its own missile stockpiles, drained by the Iran war, need replenishing. But as Stefanie made clear, this is one data point in a much faster-moving pattern. In just the past six weeks, she’s tracked the decision to withdraw 5,000 troops from Germany, the likely cancellation of a Biden-Scholz era agreement to deploy precision-strike missile systems in Germany, and the decision by Washington to pull US forces committed to NATO’s “model force,” which is designed to respond immediately to an attack on the alliance’s eastern flank. The throughline, Stefanie argued, runs straight through America’s own national security strategy: Moscow is no longer viewed in Washington as much of a threat, and the doctrine increasingly amounts to “Europe has to look after herself.”

James connected this to a parallel earthquake in London: the resignation of Defence Secretary John Healey, who quit because the government wouldn’t commit to the defense spending increases he believed were necessary—spending increases driven, in no small part, by the sense that America is walking away. James walked through what he called a genuinely strange moment in British politics: a prime minister who won a landslide two years ago now widely expected to be gone by year’s end, undone by a combination of Iran-driven inflationary pressure, a domestic split between Atlanticists like Tony Blair and a more oppositional left, JD Vance’s interventions in Britain’s culture wars boosting the populist right, and now a defense secretary’s resignation over the affordability of the very commitments Washington is asking for. James’s verdict was blunt: the special relationship, once seen as Britain’s anchor, increasingly looks like the thing rocking the boat.

Adam added the broader frame—an America First foreign policy in which alliances are evaluated in transactional, even tribal terms, where yesterday’s ally can become tomorrow’s afterthought depending on what Washington needs. Stefanie pushed back gently on “transactional,” noting that even when Germany has offered to pay for its own defense systems outright, the U.S. still isn’t interested—suggesting this may be less a negotiation than a genuine decoupling. James offered perhaps the sharpest twist: even as governments pursue political decoupling, their economies and defense systems are becoming more entangled than ever, because weapons systems are now built as much by AI companies as by traditional defense contractors.

A Two Trillion Dollar Question Mark

Our final topic brought us back to the company whose satellites are helping Ukraine survive and whose IPO was, on the day we recorded, on track to value it near two trillion dollars—SpaceX, and the broader AI-driven market mania surrounding it. James noted that his paper ran an editorial some weeks ago pointedly titled “Artificial Stupidity,” arguing that SpaceX’s IPO prospectus rested on the implausible premise that no competitor could ever challenge its dominance of space-based data infrastructure. Whether anyone read it or not, the market seemed poised to shrug it off—for now. James’s instinct was to revisit the question in a month, once the initial retail enthusiasm fades and more sober analysis sets in. His deeper worry was double-edged: if the valuation collapses, it could create systemic risk across the broader economy; but if it doesn’t—if it keeps soaring—the concentration of wealth in a handful of AI companies raises its own destabilizing question about what’s left for anyone else to do.

Adam picked up the politics of that imbalance, describing a real internal debate inside the White House between Silicon Valley voices like David Sacks, who frame AI primarily as a race to stay ahead of China, and others worried about the economic and political fallout of moving too fast. He pointed to a recent executive order on AI oversight that was reportedly watered down at the last minute after Sacks intervened—a small but telling example of who currently holds the pen. Stefanie brought it back to lived experience: in Northern Virginia, residents are already paying more for water and electricity because of data center demand, while a European lawmaker she spoke with described regulation as inevitable even as a young American AI fundraiser told her, flatly, that regulation simply isn’t on the table because “we have to beat China.” James extended the political tensions into a broader observation about a “K-shaped” politics, where one part of the electorate worries about inflation and cost of living and another worries about AI-driven job displacement, leaving politicians with two audiences pulling in opposite directions.

We closed where we’d started, with a touch of skepticism about whether a company generating perhaps thirty billion dollars in annual revenue—however transformative Starlink’s role in Ukraine has been—really justifies a two trillion dollar valuation. As I told the panel, we’ll know more by the end of the month. We always do.

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

The second session of “Ask Ivo” will take place this Wednesday, June 10, at noon ET / 19.00 CET. Here’s the link.

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 can submit questions in advance and I’ll also take questions live from the chat.

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 June 10.

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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• Shashank Joshi, “Easier to Start, Harder to Win,” The Economist, May 28, 2026. The essay by the departing defense editor argues that a “transparency revolution” — driven by drones, sensors, and networked targeting — is reshaping modern warfare in ways that favor defenders and punish attackers who expect quick, decisive victories. Drawing on the grinding stalemate in eastern Ukraine and the unresolved American air campaign against Iran, Joshi shows how even overwhelming technological superiority fails to deliver the knock-out blow that political leaders keep expecting: Iran retains 70% of its pre-war missiles despite 13,000 targets struck, while Russia remains bogged down after four years. The piece demonstrates how cheap FPV drones have created lethal “attrition belts” 30km deep, making large-scale maneuver warfare “unattainable” — while also showing how old platforms like tanks and piloted jets remain indispensable, just differently used. Joshi closes with a warning about nuclear risks and the Taiwan scenario, where two nuclear powers would test the transparency revolution across a vast ocean in ways nobody has modeled. “Despite the evidence around them, [political leaders] seem still in thrall to the dangerous delusion that technology will provide them with the knock-out blow.”

• Caroline Kimeu and Betsy McKay, “Trump Wants Minerals, Health Data for Aid. African Nations Are Pushing Back,” The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2026. While nearly two dozen sub-Saharan countries have accepted Trump’s new transactional foreign-aid framework — which ties health funding to minerals access, preferential treatment for U.S. companies, and the handover of private health data — Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Zambia have refused or stalled, calling the terms a violation of their sovereignty and their citizens’ privacy. The stakes are high: Zambia is being offered $2 billion but risks losing treatment for over a million HIV patients if it won’t open its copper reserves to U.S. businesses, a linkage three Democratic senators called “a disturbing break” from the bipartisan legacy of the PEPFAR program that has been credited with saving 25 million lives. Analysts warn that surrendering pathogen and outbreak data weakens African nations’ negotiating leverage over future vaccines and treatments, potentially handing a competitive advantage to American pharmaceutical companies.

• Karim Sadjadpour, “The War Trump Can’t End,” The Atlantic, May 29, 2026. Sadjadpour argues that the U.S.-Iran deadlock is structural, not tactical: Trump entered a war he expected to last days against a regime that has spent 47 years preparing to resist America. Now neither side can accept a deal the other might take — Iran having lost too much to concede, the U.S. having invested too much to settle on the cheap. Sadjadpour walks through the negotiating logic on both sides, from Iran’s “bazaar style” patience to Washington’s belief that reopening the Strait of Hormuz is a card Tehran can only play once — while Tehran calculates it has established a permanent protection racket and that Trump’s midterm clock runs faster than its own. Sadjadpour notes that Iran has made major compromises only twice in its history — ending the Iran-Iraq War and signing the 2015 nuclear deal — and both times only under overwhelming pressure combined with a viable exit that didn’t require surrendering its revolutionary identity. The Islamic Republic’s foundational problem, he concludes, is not a negotiating position but an existential one: it needs the United States as an enemy in a way the United States does not need Iran.

• Peder Schaefer, “Meet the Trump Official Shaping U.S. Policy on Europe,” The Parliament, June 3, 2026. This profile of Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon’s policy chief and the intellectual architect of Washington’s Euroskeptic turn, details how Colby believes the EU, not just Russia, qualifies as a potential European hegemon worth containing. Colby’s framework treats the transatlantic relationship not as a partnership grounded in shared values but as a strategic liability that diverts resources from the China threat, a worldview that has driven the halt to weapons sales to Ukraine, troop drawdowns, and a National Security Strategy that shocked European capitals with its openly combative language toward Brussels. The piece surfaces a central paradox: Colby simultaneously wants Europe to rearm and fears that a militarily unified Europe would become the very superstate his doctrine requires Washington to resist — meaning his own policy may accelerate the consolidation he’s trying to prevent. EU Defense Commissioner Kubilius, who keeps a signed copy of Colby’s book on his desk, has concluded that the antagonism toward Brussels reflects deep strategic calculation, not mere Trumpian sentiment. “The unaddressed paradox is that Washington pushing the EU to stand on its own two feet militarily may accelerate the very political consolidation that Colby fears is counter to U.S. interests.”

• John Plender, “Trump’s Empire of Debt,” Financial Times, June 3, 2026. Plender argues that the United States may finally be approaching the imperial overstretch that analysts have long predicted but never seen materialize, with the Iran war costing an estimated $2 billion a day, a proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget for 2027, and public debt-to-GDP ratios approaching their post-WWII peak. Pender traces how the post-9/11 pattern of debt-financed warfare has accumulated into roughly $8 trillion in war-related obligations, while political dysfunction makes bipartisan fiscal consolidation essentially impossible. Most consequentially, Plender documents how the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” is eroding: gold has now surpassed U.S. Treasuries as the world’s top central bank reserve asset, hedge funds have replaced monetary authorities as the marginal buyer of U.S. debt, and the Treasury market has become a potential source of systemic risk. The parallel to Rome’s debasement of the denarius under Nero — financing wars and monuments while the currency quietly hollowed out — runs throughout. As Dornbusch’s law warns: “Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and they happen faster than you thought they could.”

• Volodymyr Zelensky, “Full Text of Zelensky’s Open Letter to Putin,” Kyiv Independent, June 4, 2026. Published one day after Ukrainian drones struck St. Petersburg, the letter is a calculated public pressure document that catalogs Russia’s mounting vulnerabilities — over 30,000 killed or seriously wounded in May alone, a 63-37 killed-to-wounded ratio that Zelensky calls unsustainable, deepening dependence on North Korea and China, and growing fatigue among Russia’s own elite — while making the case that the war has permanently failed on its own terms. Zelensky frames the conflict as Putin’s personal choice rather than a defensive necessity, and methodically ticks through each of Putin’s original strategic assumptions — Ukrainian collapse, Western fatigue, sanctions relief — to argue that all have been falsified by events. The letter proposes a bilateral ceasefire, an all-for-all prisoner exchange, and a face-to-face meeting in a neutral country, while explicitly warning that Ukrainian and European security cannot be resolved in Anchorage without European participation. The closing is both an offer and a threat: “If you personally do not agree that it is time to end this war, Ukraine will continue to fight for its existence… But you will also have to fight much more for your existence — not Russia’s, but your own.”

• Nicholas Kristof, “This Is Why You Don’t Slash Humanitarian Aid,” The New York Times, June 3, 2026. Kristof argues that the dismantling of USAID has directly worsened the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is already the third worst on record, by stripping away the early-warning infrastructure that would have caught it sooner. Kristof’s argument rests on a damning timeline — by the time the world began responding this time there were 400-500 cases, versus 40-50 in 2014 — illustrated by Tom Frieden’s axiom that “with Ebola, time is lives.” Kristof identifies three compounding failures: the destruction of USAID, the withdrawal from and effective severance of ties with the WHO (the U.S. didn’t learn of the outbreak until nine days after the WHO did), and the administration’s broader disregard for pandemic preparedness, including ignoring hundreds of pages of transition planning documents left by the Biden administration.

• Adam Tooze, “Wasting China’s Solar Panel Surplus Is Madness,” Financial Times, June 5, 2026. Tooze argues that the world is facing a perverse coordination failure: Chinese manufacturers now have the capacity to produce 1,000 gigawatts of solar panels annually, prices have collapsed to rock bottom, and yet factories sit idle while the Strait of Hormuz closure roils fossil fuel markets — a moment of surplus clean energy capacity meeting peak energy insecurity. He walks through the standard explanations (intermittency, political economy, oversubsidized overcapacity) before rejecting them as insufficient: solar panels are not steel or cement, but a technological breakthrough half a century in the making, and allowing a recession in the industry just as renewables reach escape velocity is irresponsible. The real shock in the piece is the OECD finding that China built the world’s dominant solar industry for less than $18 billion in sectoral support over 15 years — a return on industrial policy that Western governments can only envy. Tooze is ultimately sanguine: the industry will survive, exports are booming outside the U.S., and battery integration is accelerating. But he wants 2026 remembered as the year the world had more than enough solar panels — and shrugged.

• Marcus Christenson, David Hills, Steven Bloor, and Garry Blight, “World Cup 2026: guide to all 1,248 players,” The Guardian, June 4, 2026. With the 2026 World Cup starting this week, here’s the definitive guide: absolutely everything you wanted to know about the World Cup 2026 but didn’t know to ask.

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

• I joined Geert Jan Hahn on his BNR podcast, Hahn in Europa, to talk about US-European relations

• This week’s World Review was hosted by Carl Robbins, and focused on Iran, Ukraine, and the Ebola outbreak.

• Finally, I will host another Ask Ivo on June 10, at noon ET / 18.00 CET — add your questions in the comments.

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. I was traveling this week, so my colleague and frequent World Review contributor Carla Anne Robbins — senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times — stepped in to guest host. She was joined by Bobby Ghosh, journalist and author of the Ghosh World Substack; Christopher Miller, the Financial Times’s chief Ukraine correspondent; and Yasmeen Abutaleb, health and politics reporter at Reuters. They covered three stories: the war with Iran and the diplomatic standoff over a potential deal; the shifting battlefield in Ukraine; and the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda and what America’s absence means for the world’s ability to contain it.

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 Phony War

Bobby reached for a striking historical analogy to describe the current state of the conflict with Iran: the “phony war” — that strange interregnum in late 1939 and early 1940 when all the belligerents knew a world war was on, but the bombs had largely stopped falling. Strip away the tweets, the expletive-filled phone calls, and the daily reversals, Bobby argued, and the underlying positions of the two sides are actually quite clear — and quite irreconcilable. Washington wants Iran to surrender its nuclear option and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran wants sanctions relief, reparations, and a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Neither side is willing to move toward the middle, because to do so would require conceding — even privately — that it is in a position of weakness. And neither side believes that to be true.

Yasmeen suggested that the Trump-Netanyahu dynamic was best described as a relationship of mutual dependency operating through mutual performance. The administration keeps declaring the war over — Marco Rubio told the Senate as much this week, only to have Iranian drones strike Kuwait’s airport the following day — partly, she suggested, because the war’s domestic costs are becoming impossible to ignore. And yet the structural support for Israel remains essentially unconditional. Yasmeen noted the familiar pattern: contentious conversations leak to the press, signaling that the US is holding Israel accountable behind closed doors, while in practice the weapons continue to flow and the war aims are left unchallenged.

Bobby added that the political landscape inside Israel is shifting too, ahead of coming elections. The blowback Netanyahu received from both left and right after it appeared he might back down from a full-scale attack on Beirut — following Trump’s pressure — reflects a hardening domestic mood. His rivals are not urging restraint; they are outflanking him on toughness. Whether Trump can actually constrain Netanyahu, or whether the relationship will continue on its current trajectory, remains the question at this moment.

The Turning Tide

Christopher, reporting from inside Ukraine, offered something rare in this war: cautious optimism. Ukraine has survived its hardest winter in decades — not only meteorologically, but militarily, with Russian mass missile and drone attacks pushing Kyiv to the brink of catastrophe. Spring has brought stalled Russian ground offensives in the east, a first net territorial gain for Ukraine since 2023, and — most importantly — a drone program that has fundamentally changed the calculus of the war. Ukraine is not just defending; it is striking oil and gas facilities, military infrastructure, and naval vessels deep inside Russia, even approaching Moscow itself. Zelensky’s open letter to Putin this week, daring him to negotiate one-on-one, was snarky, Christopher acknowledged — but that snark, he said, comes from a place of genuine newfound confidence.

The strategic picture is grueling but telling: Russia is losing an estimated thirty to thirty-five thousand soldiers killed or wounded every month, a number that exceeds what Moscow can recruit. Ukraine’s defense establishment has set a goal of fifty thousand Russian casualties per month, believing that number could change the calculus in the Kremlin. The drones — both the FPV swarms that have made the battlefield transparent and the longer-range strike drones hitting Russian territory — have made every kilometer Russia tries to advance significantly more costly.

Yasmeen and Bobby examined whether any of this might draw Trump back into a more engaged role. The answer was a cautious probably not — at least not yet. Trump, Yasmeen argued, gravitates toward conflicts that promise quick headline wins, and Ukraine’s gains, real as they are, will not produce the dramatic, telegenic resolution he craves. Christopher added that Trump’s deep affinity for Putin has made him consistently more sympathetic to Moscow’s framing of the war than to Kyiv’s.

The America-Sized Hole

The third topic was, in some ways, the most alarming. The WHO has declared the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda a global health emergency. There are more than 330 confirmed cases and 50 deaths. There is no vaccine for this strain. And the United States — historically the world’s indispensable force in containing exactly these kinds of crises — is effectively absent.

Yasmeen, who covered both the 2014 West African outbreak and the COVID pandemic and holds degrees in both microbiology and journalism, laid out the contrast in vivid terms. In 2014, the White House mobilized immediately — appointing an Ebola czar, deploying more than a thousand CDC personnel to West Africa, fast-tracking vaccine development with the NIH and private companies, and ensuring that American volunteers knew they could come home for treatment if infected. This time, Marco Rubio has said no one with Ebola will be brought to the US. The administration has described the outbreak as “not really a US problem.” The mRNA infrastructure — the same technology that produced the world’s most effective COVID vaccines in under a year — has had its contracts canceled.

Bobby called this new reality an America-sized hole. He noted, without much optimism, that this is precisely the moment you’d expect China or others stepping into the void — but there’s no evidence it is happening. The Chinese don’t have the wherewithal. The Europeans are doing something, Yasmeen confirmed — the French have sent personnel and resources — but nothing approaches the combination of scientific capacity, logistical power, and political will that the US has historically brought to bear. Vaccine experts Yasmeen spoke with believe a vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain could be developed in three to six months — but only if the full force of the US government gets involved. Right now, it isn’t.

Carla closed with a point that stopped the conversation: health workers won’t go to the field if they believe they can’t come home for treatment. Those workers put their lives on the line. Fewer of them willing to do so means the danger grows — not just in the DRC, but everywhere.

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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• Samantha Schmidt, Anthony Faiola, Karen DeYoung, and Samuel Oakford, “Trump’s Unofficial Venezuela Viceroy Shapes U.S. Policy, Raising Oversight Concerns,” The Washington Post, May 25, 2026. Mauricio Claver-Carone, a Florida lawyer with no current official government title, has quietly become the de facto U.S. power broker in post-Maduro Venezuela — relaying instructions from Washington to Caracas, vetting investors, and serving as the primary conduit between the Trump administration and interim president Delcy Rodríguez. The report documents Claver-Carone’s presence on a key post-raid call with Rubio and Rodríguez, his role in steering at least one major financial contract toward a favored firm, and his business partner’s repeated trips to Caracas — all while he and his partner maintain they are unpaid and conflict-free. Critics inside the State Department and beyond argue the arrangement epitomizes the Trump administration’s blurring of private interest and public power, with Venezuela policy concentrated in a tiny White House circle and largely bypassing normal diplomatic channels. As one former U.S. official put it, “For a guy who has no role in government, he plays an oversize role.”

• Robert F. Worth, “The Magician of the Kremlin,” The Atlantic, May 25, 2026. Kirill Dmitriev — the sanctions-laden Russian banker now serving as Putin’s lead negotiator in Ukraine peace talks — is the subject of this deeply reported profile, which traces his arc from would-be reformer to Kremlin illusionist. Worth reconstructs how Dmitriev parlayed his American credentials (Stanford, Harvard Business School, stints at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs) into a role running Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, where he once genuinely courted Western investors and preached transparency — until Putin’s annexation of Crimea made that project untenable, and Dmitriev smoothly pivoted to serving the kleptocracy instead. Worth documents his transformation in granular detail: steering pension funds to oligarch-controlled companies, cultivating Gulf autocrats with opaque investment pledges, leading the troubled Sputnik vaccine rollout, and now shuttling to Mar-a-Lago to pitch Trump-world on Arctic mineral deals and joint Mars missions as sweeteners for abandoning Ukrainian sovereignty. What gives the profile its particular sting is Worth’s reporting from Kyiv, where Dmitriev was born, and his conversations with former classmates — some of whom have fought on the front lines of the war he helps sustain. One former friend, wounded at the front, declined to be interviewed: “I just want to shoot him in the knees.”

• Michael Crowley, Ashley Cai, and Lazaro Gamio, “The War Is Over. The Strait Is Open. We Totally Won. The Iran War According to Donald Trump,” The New York Times, May 26, 2026. This data-driven piece systematically documents the chasm between Trump’s running commentary on the U.S.-Iran war and the actual state of the conflict, showing how his statements have repeatedly moved markets even as the underlying reality failed to follow his script. Since the war began in late February, Trump has oscillated between threats of civilizational destruction and claims of imminent peace deals — sometimes within hours — with each pivot sending oil prices and equity markets lurching accordingly, though markets have grown progressively less responsive as the pattern repeats. The reporters track specific moments where the disconnect was sharpest: a claimed cease-fire mediated by Pakistan that Iran said was immediately violated; a blockade of Iranian ports that prompted Tehran to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed in retaliation; and a Memorial Day weekend in which Trump announced a near-deal before authorizing fresh strikes on southern Iran.

• Shashank Joshi, “A former CIA boss on how to handle America’s adversaries,” The Economist, May 26, 2026. An interview with Bill Burns, an ambassador-turned-spy-chief, is one of America’s most respected diplomats. He initiated the secret talks with Iran which paved the way for Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. He helped to thaw Sino-American relations after the Chinese spy-balloon incident in 2023 had plunged them into a deep freeze. Most recently, he negotiated the extraordinarily difficult ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. But not all talks succeed. Burns was ignored when he warned Vladimir Putin not to invade Ukraine. And much of his work on Iran now appears to have been undone. Burns discusses what he’d do differently with the benefit of hindsight, his approach to handling strongmen and the future of American spycraft.

• Vali Nasr, “Why Iran Fears a Deal Today Means More War Tomorrow,” Financial Times, May 29, 2026. Nasr, a Johns Hopkins professor and author of Iran’s Grand Strategy, offers the clearest explanation yet of why Tehran keeps refusing what looks from Washington like a reasonable off-ramp — and why that refusal is strategically rational rather than simply obstinate. His core argument is that Iran’s leadership, across factional lines, has internalized a single lesson from its history with Trump: any deal that requires Iran to disarm before securing lasting guarantees is not a peace agreement but a trap, designed to strip Tehran of its deterrents so the U.S. can return to war against a weakened adversary. Nasr documents how Iran views control of the Strait of Hormuz and its stockpile of highly enriched uranium not as bargaining chips to be traded away, but as the structural guarantees of survival that no American promise can replace — particularly from a president who already walked away from the 2015 nuclear deal and launched strikes during active negotiations. Nasr captures a damaging feedback loop: the louder American commentators describe the war as a U.S. strategic failure, the more Iran’s Revolutionary Guard concludes that Washington will eventually seek to reverse that outcome with another round of fighting, making deterrence the only rational posture. Any deal that emerges, Nasr warns, should be understood as a pause rather than a resolution — the deeper questions of Hormuz and the nuclear file remain structurally unsolvable under current conditions.

• Simon Romero, “Blowing Up Boats Hasn’t Slowed Cocaine Traffic to U.S., Experts Say,” The New York Times, May 29, 2026. Nearly nine months into the Trump administration’s military campaign against drug-smuggling vessels off South America’s coast — 59 strikes, 196 people killed, $4.7 billion spent — epidemiologists, addiction scientists, and public health researchers say cocaine remains as available, as pure, and as cheap in the United States as it was before the operation began. Romero marshals four distinct empirical measures to make the case: street prices ($60–$100 per gram) are flat, cocaine purity is unchanged, CBP border seizures have actually increased since the strikes began, and overdose data shows no supply shock. Even the general overseeing the operation told the Senate Armed Services Committee that boat strikes are “probably not the most effective” long-term tool. The gap between the campaign’s stated logic and documented reality is captured cleanly by one researcher: “It’s as likely to succeed as bombing a handful of McDonald’s in Dallas, Texas, and claiming that you’ve made America healthy again.”

Finally, it’s been a busy week of writing and interviews. Below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I wrote my bimonthly Politico Europe column about America’s losing ways of war, and spoke to NPR about its implications for Iran.

• In anticipation of a deal to end the Iran war, I argued that we are much worse off than before the war in America Abroad and made the same points on CNN.

• I spoke to CNN about the Russian drone attack on Romania.

• I spoke to the Corriere della Sera about the Iran negotiations (in Italian).

• I joined Dutch TV’s Eenvandag and was interviewed bye NRC Handelsbald about the state of the transatlantic alliance (in Dutch)

• This week’s World Review focused on Iran, Europe’s diplomatic role, and the Pope vs. AI.

• Finally, I will host another Ask Ivo next week — add your questions in the comments.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

The largest, most capable military in the world has consistently lost the wars it starts since Vietnam. Iran is no different. I spoke with NPR’s Scott Simon this weekend about why American war-fighting strategy keeps failing — and why bombing Iran may actually increase, not decrease, the nuclear threat we set out to eliminate.

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

President Trump says some kind of deal to extend the ceasefire with Iran may soon be signed, but he has yet to make any decisions - now, three months after the U.S. and Israel began to bomb the country. And so while many Iranian leaders have been killed, the hard-line regime remains in power, and Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz has increased oil prices, setting off economic crises across the globe. Ivo Daalder is a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, now a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He joins us now. Ambassador, thanks so much for being with us.

IVO DAALDER: Always a pleasure, Scott.

SIMON: You have written recently that America’s war-fighting strategy is wrong and has been, really, since Vietnam. What’s your reasoning?

DAALDER: Well, here is the largest military and the most capable military in the world consistently losing the wars that it starts. And I wanted to figure out, what’s the paradox? How does the paradox get explained? And the reason is that we’ve forgotten to remind ourselves what war is about. War is, as the great Prussian theorist, strategist Karl von Clausewitz said, the continuation of politics by other means. And we tend to look at war as somehow a failure of policy, not its continuity. And so we resort to massive use of force in the hope that somehow the political ends that we seek will magically appear. And we see in Vietnam, of course, but more importantly in Afghanistan and Iraq and now in Iran, that that just doesn’t work.

SIMON: You cite the 1991 Gulf War as maybe the lone U.S. military success in recent history. I covered both of the Iraq wars. Wasn’t President George H.W. Bush criticized then for letting a cruel regime stay in power?

DAALDER: Yeah. He was, but then the goal he had set was not to overthrow a regime. The goal he had set was to restore the status quo that existed before Iraq had invaded Kuwait. He marshaled a global coalition. He received a remarkable degree of global support, including a U.N. Security Council resolution. He got domestic support. And together, they restored the status quo ante.

Yes, a brutal regime remained. But importantly, because of the victory, because of the way in which this war was fought, the United States was able to work with the international community to put in charge a inspection regime to find and destroy the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein possessed. Indeed, it was so successful that when, in 20 - in 2003, the United States went to war because there were these weapons of mass destruction supposedly hidden, we found out that they had all been destroyed.

SIMON: The Trump administration says that this current war is about making certain that Iran doesn’t possess nuclear weapons. Doesn’t the U.S. and the world, for that matter, have a powerful interest in ensuring that Iran is free of nuclear weapons?

DAALDER: Absolutely. And the question is, how do we best achieve that? We had an agreement in 2015, negotiated by President Barack Obama in concert with our European allies, the Russians and the Chinese, that prevented Iran from acquiring the capabilities necessary to build a bomb and, if it were to break out of that agreement, to take more than a year to do so. And look where we are today. If this agreement had still been in force and President Trump had not walked away from it in 2018, today Iran would have had no more than 300 kilograms of enriched uranium enriched to 3.67%, which is sufficient for fueling its research reactor. That would be the case today.

What is in fact the case is that Iran now has 8,500 kilograms of enriched uranium, some of it - 500 kilograms - enriched to 60%, other material enriched to 5% and 20%, sufficient to build not one but perhaps 10 and perhaps even more nuclear bombs. And that’s the situation we find ourselves. This has been created by the president deciding to walk away from an agreement that was working and replacing it with, frankly, nothing other than now the use of force, which still hasn’t fundamentally altered the nature of the Iranian threat - nuclear threat - as it is today.

SIMON: Well, let me ask you about the whole idea of trying to reach some kind of an agreement with the Iranian government. From the Iranian point of view, wouldn’t having nuclear weapons be the best way to guarantee the survival of their regime? To cite the obvious, there have been countries in Europe, for example, who gave up nuclear weapons, and they got invaded.

DAALDER: Yeah, Ukraine being, of course, the obvious example. Indeed, I think the fact that the United States has now launched two wars - one in June and again now this time - against Iran increases the incentive for the Iranians to maintain the capacity, if not the actual building a nuclear weapon. And I think that’s the legacy of this war. Rather than eliminating the nuclear threat, it is more likely to aggravate it over the long run.

SIMON: Former U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder, now at the Belfer Center at Harvard University. Mr. Ambassador, thanks so much for being with us.

DAALDER: Thank you for the opportunity.

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Whether deliberate or not, it doesn’t matter. The drone attack on Romanian territory is a direct consequence of Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. As Russia loses ground on the battlefield — British intelligence now estimates 500,000 Russian casualties — and its economy continues to contract, Putin is looking for ways to distract attention from his failures and test Western resolve.

The US-Europe divide is a gift to Putin. Since 1945, Moscow’s strategic goal has been to get the United States out of Europe. The current level of division between Washington and its European allies — fueled by presidential rhetoric questioning NATO’s value and reduced U.S. military commitments — plays directly into Putin’s hands. He’s testing how NATO responds to these provocations, and crucially, whether Washington reacts at all. So far, the answer has been silence.

Putin appears to have given up on Trump. As former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt also noted, Putin no longer seems to believe Trump can deliver what Russia wants — namely, Ukraine ceding the Donbas territory it currently holds. Having failed to get that through U.S.-mediated negotiations, Putin is now signaling he may prefer European interlocutors. That’s a worrying sign: when Europe negotiated alone before, Putin got a lot of what he wanted then.

The bottom line: Russia is under pressure, but a cornered Putin is a dangerous one. Europe needs to stay united, and Washington needs to decide which side it’s on.

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 Iran nuclear talks and the Strait of Hormuz, Europe’s search for diplomatic agency over Ukraine, and Pope Leo’s encyclical challenging the artificial intelligence industry. Joining me were Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker; Shona Murray, Europe correspondent for Euronews; and Michael Shear, chief UK correspondent for 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.

The Smoke Machine Runs at Full Speed

The week’s dominant story was the near-constant drumbeat of reports suggesting a breakthrough on Iran — a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, an emerging “memorandum of understanding,” the promise of imminent announcement. Susan cut through it with characteristic precision: what Trump has been calling a deal is, in substance, an extension of the ceasefire already in place since April. Nothing more. The sweeping claims, she argued, are a masterclass in what she called Trump’s “smoke machine” — a long-practiced technique of shaping the public space in which negotiations are litigated, getting people to adopt his framing even when they disagree with the content.

The deeper irony, which Michael pressed home, is that whatever emerges will be more lenient toward Iran than the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump spent years denouncing as the worst deal in American history. The numbers tell the story starkly: under the JCPOA, Iran would have been limited to 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to 3.67 percent. It currently holds 8,500 kilograms, including nearly 500 kilograms enriched to 60 percent. The deal Trump walked away from would have been far more constraining than anything now on the table — and his own hawkish allies, from Ted Cruz to Mike Pompeo, have begun saying so loudly, prompting vicious personal attacks from the Trump White House in return.

Susan also observed that Iran’s has discovered its control of the Strait of Hormuz may be a more powerful weapon than a nuclear device — a lever capable of holding the global economy hostage at will. That, she argued, is not a tactical victory for Tehran. It is a strategic one. Meanwhile, Trump finds himself in a box of his own construction — unable to escalate, unable to sign anything defensible, unable to walk away. And so he waits, and the smoke keeps billowing.

Impotence as Foreign Policy

The second segment turned to Europe and Ukraine, and the contrast with the Iran discussion was almost painful. A Russian drone struck a Romanian apartment building the morning we recorded — a reminder that the war’s geography is still expanding. Yet Europe has been preoccupied with discussing the possibility of nominating a diplomatic envoy, with Alexander Stubb of Finland the name most often floated, without agreement, without a mandate, and without any visible reason to believe Putin would engage.

Shona was candid about what she sees: an EU that declared itself a “geopolitical union” a decade ago is now confronting the distance between that ambition and its actual leverage. Trump has engineered a situation, Michael observed, where the cost of stepping out of line — on tariffs, on defense procurement, on Iran — is simply too high for most European governments to bear. The result is a kind of structural paralysis: countries that know what needs to be done but cannot agree on who should do it, who should pay for it, or how long it will take.

Susan reminded us that Europe has led negotiations with Russia before — the Minsk Accords were the result — and that precedent ended in full-scale invasion in 2022. The real question is not whether Alexander Stubb can succeed where Donald Trump has failed, but whether Europe is preparing itself for the scenario Susan considers genuinely plausible: Putin testing NATO’s Article 5, possibly very soon, against an alliance whose American guarantor has already signaled it will not show up.

The Pope and the Broligarchy

The final segment opened turned to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — a sweeping moral indictment of the AI industry, touching on economic inequality, the concentration of power, and what the Pope called the threat to human dignity when technology outpaces accountability. Big tech pushed back, and the White House stepped in on its side, quietly shelving an executive order that had been moving forward on AI regulation.

Michael framed the encyclical as traveling on two tracks simultaneously: the familiar economic argument about inequality and displacement, and a more philosophical claim about what an over-reliance on AI does to human creativity, reasoning, and the texture of inner life. It is the second argument, he suggested, that gets less traction in capitals and legislatures — and yet may prove the more consequential over time.

Susan placed the Pope’s intervention in a broader political frame. What is crystallizing, she argued, is a new populism — not the right-wing grievance variety that has dominated the past decade, but something more volatile and cross-partisan, rooted in visceral public anger at a tech broligarchy that purchased a presidency and now sits in the front row of inaugurations while paying nothing in taxes. The juxtaposition between Leo XIV’s language of human dignity and Jeff Bezos’s recent public remarks about the irrelevance of higher tax bills was, she noted, the stuff of powerful politics — even if we don’t yet know how it resolves.

Shona added the European dimension: AI regulation is one of the areas where polling across the continent shows genuine public demand for oversight, and the Trump administration’s pressure to dismantle those frameworks as part of tariff negotiations has not gone unnoticed. The EU’s instinct toward regulation is sometimes mocked; on AI, she suggested, it may be vindicated. And Michael offered a final note: this is also a generational fight. Young people around the world are watching this technology arrive and wondering what it means for their futures — and that anxiety will not dissipate.

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’m thrilled to be announcing the second session of “Ask Ivo.” While I’d promised to do this the first Wednesday of the month, I will be in the air June 3, so we’re postponing it a week — to June 10, at noon ET / 19.00 CET. Here’s the link.

As before, 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.

Because I am delaying the live session by a week — I’ll do a written Q/A next Wednesday. So ask me anything in the comments — and I will answer them in writing on June 3.

To submit a question for, just leave it in the comments below. I’ll answer all questions received before June 3 in writing, and the rest I will try to answer when we are live on June 10.

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

See you June 10.

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Trump was characteristically blunt: the Strait is international waters, nobody controls it, and we’ll “watch over it.” That sounds reassuring. The reality is more troubling.

Iran Already Controls the Strait

Here’s the hard truth: Iran has effectively controlled traffic through the Strait of Hormuz since it closed it on February 28th, at the outset of the war. Geography is destiny — Iran sits right along the Strait and has the capacity to attack shipping through it. Short of a U.S. military occupation of large parts of Iran, that isn’t going to change. The president can declare the waters international all he wants. The Iranians have a different idea, and so far they have been able to dictate the terms.

The Nuclear Question

On the nuclear front, things are no better. All reporting suggests the memorandum currently being negotiated doesn’t seriously address Iran’s nuclear program — at best it lays down vague parameters for a future negotiation. Secretary Rubio was right when he said you can’t negotiate the end of an Iranian nuclear program in 72 hours on the back of a napkin. It took the Obama administration 16 months. It took the Europeans a decade of negotiations, from 2003 to the final agreement in 2015.

And then Trump walked away from that agreement.

That was strategic folly: if the JCPOA had remained in force, Iran today would have no more than 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to 3.67%. Instead, Iran now has roughly 8,500 kilograms of enriched uranium — some enriched to 60%, some to 20% — enough material, if given time, to potentially build not 1 bomb but closer to 100.

“They Weren’t Complying”? The Record Says Otherwise.

Trump’s standing defense is that Iran wasn’t serious about the deal and would have had a nuclear weapon by now if he hadn’t pulled out. The record simply doesn’t support that. Until the day the United States withdrew, Iran was abiding by the terms of the JCPOA — no serious analyst disputed that at the time.

Yes, the agreement had sunset provisions. Yes, a follow-on negotiation would eventually have been needed. But Trump had years to pursue a better deal from a position of strength, with Iran constrained. Instead, he chose confrontation — and in doing so, gave Iran every reason to conclude that the only real deterrent against American or Israeli military action is a nuclear weapon.

We are not better off. We are substantially worse off. And the window to fix it is narrowing fast.