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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. This Fourth of July, rather than our usual roundup of three global stories, I devoted the entire episode to the single question America’s 250th birthday forces upon us: What has America meant for the world — and what does it mean today? I can think of no better panel to take it on: Zanny Minton Beddoes, Editor-in-Chief of The Economist; James Harding, Editor-in-Chief of The Observer; and Sylvie Kauffmann, foreign affairs columnist and former editorial director of Le Monde.

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.

Born on an Idea

Zanny set the tone with the observation that “America is the only country really founded on the pursuit of an idea.” That idea — that government derives its legitimacy from the governed, that certain rights are self-evident — was radical in 1776. And it traveled. Sylvie reminded us that the Declaration was quickly translated and spread, inspiring not only the French Revolution of 1789 but Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam declaration of 1945 and the peaceful revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe. James noted that The Observer itself was founded in 1791, just fifteen years after the Declaration, “with a promise to share all species of knowledge that conduces to the happiness of society” — a newspaper born, in spirit, from the same impulse.

But what about today? The Declaration, James observed, was meant as “an expression of the American mind.” Now, he said, we look across at America and see “a mind that feels so divided, so fractured, so at odds with itself.” The idea is still there. It still inspires. But can a country this fragmented express it?

Zanny pushed back on the gloom — though not entirely. America, she argued, has always lived in the gap between its ideals and its practice, slavery being the most searing example. That gap is not a refutation of the idea. It is integral to it. America is “an aspirational country” — and the aspiration is the point. She added a useful corrective: when she travels in the United States, she doesn’t find a country that thinks it has arrived. She finds “a country that is deeply polarized, deeply unhappy... a long way away from what they imagine to be the ideal of America.”

A System the World Holds More Dear

The second segment produced the richest debate of the episode. Was the post-1945 order America built — the UN, NATO, Bretton Woods, the nuclear umbrella — genuinely global? Or, as James provocatively suggested, something that worked rather well “for Europeans talking about the benefits of a transatlantic relationship” rather than for the wider world?

Zanny went straight at it. The system was far bigger than Europe, she argued. It underwrote freedom of navigation, created the IMF and World Bank, and produced — after 1989 — a wave of democratization and economic opening that ran from Eastern Europe to Africa to Asia. She should know: her first job after Harvard was as an adviser to Poland’s first post-communist finance minister. “I really, really disagree with the idea that this was just something for the benefit of Europe.”

Sylvie offered the more ambivalent verdict. America was “victim of its success.” It brought lasting peace and prosperity to Europe, built democratic Germany, helped bring down the Soviet empire. Then came hubris — the assumption that everyone would follow the same path, that free markets would deliver democracy everywhere. They didn’t. The democratic recession we now see globally is, in part, a consequence of that failure of imagination.

James returned to his opening argument. “The United States has created a system that the rest of the world currently holds more dear than it sometimes feels the United States does itself.”

The Country of the Second Chance

I asked Sylvie, who hails from America’s oldest ally and most consistent critic, whether this was the moment de Gaulle had been waiting for? Her answer was disarming: France is not bragging. “The situation is so complicated and so difficult even for France.” Strategic autonomy sounds appealing until you reckon, as Zanny put it, with the prospect of Europe becoming “a vassal to America in AI terms” unless it builds real leverage of its own.

Zanny’s diagnosis was unsparing: “The old post-war order is over, and I think we should stop clutching our pearls for it.” The Economist has a piece out this week called “The Wrecking Ball Revolution.” She does not think America is in decline — quite the opposite. She expects it to dominate the 21st century economically, especially in AI. But it will play a different kind of role. The question — open, urgent — is whether a US-dominated world without US-led institutions can be as stable and prosperous as the one we are leaving behind.

Then came the birthday wishes. Sylvie, rightly, called America “the country of the second chance.” After the Iraq War debacle, she recalled, officials in Southeast Asia told her they thought America was finished. “And then they elected a Black president, and we realized that America was able to start all over again.”

James closed with Ellis Island — the moment when a nation, at its best, “takes people who have nothing and who have nothing but fear, and enables them to build a life.” As an immigrant to the United States myself, I couldn’t have said it better.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed the Trump administration’s escalating pressure on Cuba, the fallout for Taiwan from the Beijing summit, and the political crisis engulfing Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain. Joining me this week were Karen DeYoung, Associate Editor and Senior National Security Correspondent at the Washington Post; Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor of The Economist; and Philip Stephens, Contributing Editor of the Financial Times and author of the Inside Out newsletter.

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.

Cuba: The Thirteenth President Tries Again

The Trump administration’s escalating pressure on Cuba — oil embargo, expanded sanctions, and nowcharging former president Raúl Castro with the 1996 shoot-down of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft — raised the central question Karen had been tracking for decades: is this time actually different? Her answer: Trump genuinely believes this time is different, that he has a political constituency in southern Florida that demands it, a Secretary of State in Marco Rubio who has staked his career on it, and a Venezuela precedent he thinks he can replicate. But Cuba is not Venezuela. It is not one man at the top of a brittle personalist regime — it is a tightly integrated Communist Party-military apparatus that, as Karen put it, “will fight back.” Anton laid out the strategic logic the White House appears to be working from: the Venezuela model was meant to be a third way between full-scale invasion and a few cruise missiles, a targeted decapitation followed by a compliant successor government — and that logic led them badly astray in Iran, which hardened rather than collapsed. Cuba, he suggested, poses similar risks of a protracted conflict at a moment when the U.S. is already deeply extended. Philip placed the whole enterprise in a wider frame: Venezuela, Cuba, Iran — taken together, these represent something he called “belligerent unilateralism,” a United States that has effectively left the West it created and led and is now simply acting on presidential preference wherever American power can be brought to bear. The Europeans, he noted, think the Cuba policy is “profoundly wrong” — but with Iran on their plate, and Greenland, and NATO, they have decided not to fight this one.

Taiwan: The Supplicant’s Return

Coming out of the Beijing summit, Trump did not merely fail to reassure Taiwan — he appeared, in Anton’s phrase, to have come out “at the more worrying end” of the range of possibilities anyone had anticipated. The litany was striking: Trump called arms sales a “bargaining chip,” echoed Beijing’s language about reunification, suggested Taiwan had “stolen” America’s semiconductor industry, and — pointedly reversing the Biden pattern of insisting the US would defend Taiwan, volunteered unprompted that Taiwan is 9,500 miles from the U.S. and only a few hundred from China, implying it was not a fight he wanted. Beijing’s denial of entry to Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby ahead of a planned Hegseth visit — on the explicit condition that Washington first say no to the pending arms sale to Taiwan — illustrated how thoroughly Beijing had internalized the president’s own framing. Karen observed that Republican China hawks on the Hill will be furious, but that Trump’s hold on the party makes it essentially impossible for Congress to compel a different course; and Anton added a critical military dimension: the Iran campaign has consumed significant stocks of the long-range interceptors and precision munitions that any credible Taiwan contingency would require. Philip summed up the summit’s deeper meaning with characteristic directness: watching the body language, Xi was the man in command, Trump was responding to his initiatives, and the logic of Trump’s own worldview — if America gets to run its hemisphere, why can’t China run its neighborhood? — points in only one direction. This summit may come to be seen as the moment the United States arrived in Beijing for the first time not as the demandeur of the relationship, but as the supplicant — with Xi framing not only the future relationship as on of “constructive strategic stability, but making clear that he would be determining what counted as strategic, stable, and constructive.

Britain: A Comedy of Errors Turned Farce

Keir Starmer arrived in office less than two years ago with a parliamentary majority of over 170 seats — a margin that, under normal assumptions, should have guaranteed a decade in power. Philip, who has watched British politics for forty years, called what has happened since genuinely the most inexplicable moment in that long career. Labour is haemorrhaging support in two directions simultaneously: to Nigel Farage’s Reform on the right, which has done to Labour’s blue-collar base in the deindustrialised Midlands and North what Trump did to Democrats, and to the Greens on the left, which have evolved from an environmentalist party into something closer to a far-left economic force. Starmer himself, Philip argued, is less the cause than the symptom — a poor communicator lacking the emotional intelligence modern politics demands, brought down by unforced errors that are not, in themselves, capital crimes, but which a more gifted politician would not have made. The succession is, if anything, more troubling than the crisis: Andy Burnham, the Manchester mayor and frontrunner, must first win a by-election that Farage’s Reform will contest hard; Wes Streeting is the most impressive figure in the field but mishandled his cabinet resignation and lacks the party base; Ed Miliband may emerge as the compromise candidate if Burnham stumbles. None of them, as Philip put it, has a prospectus that offers Labour a way out — none is proposing to rebuild the coalition between metropolitan progressives and working-class traditionalists that Tony Blair assembled so brilliantly and that has since come apart. Anton noted that Europe has quietly re-entered the conversation — buyer’s remorse over Brexit is now a majority position in polling, and Starmer himself has gestured toward closer alignment, driven partly by the rupture with Washington. But he was skeptical it would move quickly enough to matter, given that a fresh referendum would be required and the issue still divides Labour’s own coalition. Karen drew the parallel that was in the room all along: a centre-left party that knows what it has lost but cannot agree on what to become next — a description, she noted, that fits the Democratic Party just as well.

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.

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed the Xi-Trump Summit, Russia’s growing troubles, and the stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz. Joining me this week were Carla Anne Robbins, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Deputy Editorial Page Editor of the New York Times; Jamil Anderlini, Regional Director for Europe at Politico and former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times; and Yannis Palaiologos, Correspondent at Large for Kathimerini and “Inside Story.”

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 Beijing Summit: Theater Over Substance

Whatever else one says about the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing this week, it was above all a masterclass in Chinese political theater — and the United States played its assigned role. Jamil, who spent more than two decades reporting from China, put it plainly: the most significant aspect of the meeting was not what was agreed but the optics of an American president arriving in a posture of what he called “obeisance,” creating an unmistakable image, for Asian audiences in particular, of Xi Jinping receiving tribute rather than hosting a peer. “It really showed a shift,” Jamil said. “One of them, which has always been a little less powerful, looks more powerful — not than the United States yet, but more powerful than it did vis-à-vis the United States.” Carla added a substantive manifestation of this shift — Trump signaling a willingness to discuss Taiwan arms sales with the Chinese. On Air Force One on the way home, he confirmed the two leaders had talked about the pending $14 billion weapons deal “in great detail” — raising the alarming possibility that he offered Beijing something close to veto power over US arms sales to Taiwan, a concession Ronald Reagan had explicitly ruled out the so-called “Six Assurances” to Taiwan in 1982. Trump’s dismissal of that commitment — “1982 is such a long time ago” — captured a presidency willing to trade away hard-won strategic commitments for the atmospherics of a deal. Yannis noted the whiplash for Republican China hawks who had followed Trump’s hard line on Beijing only to watch him pivot to what he called “solicitous to the point of obsequiousness” — and wondered whether, as the midterms approach, some of them might finally find the courage to say so.

Russia: Bleeding but Not Breaking

Russia is visibly under strain — economically, militarily, and in its domestic mood — yet none of that appears sufficient to bring the war in Ukraine to an end anytime soon. Carla laid out the numbers in stark detail: roughly 352,000 Russian soldiers dead by the end of 2025; official economic growth forecasts slashed from 1.3 to 0.4 percent despite soaring energy prices; forty percent of national income going to the military; a key interest rate of 14.5 percent; and a state happiness index at a fifteen-year low — all while Russia still falls short of its goal of controlling the full Donbas, which, at the current pace of advancement would take thirty-plus years to achieve. The Victory Day parade on Red Square, stripped of the armor and pageantry Putin has long relied on, was itself a statement, as was the three-day internet shutdown in Moscow — ostensibly to block Ukrainian drones from using mobile signals, but widely read as evidence of a regime unsure of its own population. Yannis added a crucial dimension from the Ukrainian side: the rate of Russian casualties has been extraordinary, running at 30,000 to 35,000 killed or wounded per month in 2026. And yet, as the president of Finland told him in February, Putin is “terrified of what might happen once the war ends,” and will likely keep fighting regardless. Jamil and Yannis both cautioned against premature optimism: Ukraine has gained some territory, Europe is rearming at a remarkable pace , and momentum has shifted — but this is a conflict that all three panelists expected to still be grinding on six months from now, without a decisive turn on the battlefield.

The Gulf Stalemate: A Ceasefire That Isn’t

The ceasefire in the Gulf has now lasted nearly as long as the war that preceded it, but the situation it has frozen is deeply unstable — for global trade, for US credibility, and ultimately for the nuclear question that lurks behind everything else. Yannis described the current arrangement as a double blockade: Iranian de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz on one side, the US Navy on the other, with vessels caught in the middle. A Greek ship owner he spoke with described a tanker carrying Iraqi oil to Vietnam that navigated the Iranian toll system only to be stopped by the Americans — stranded for days while the US military deliberated, with oil-short Southeast Asian countries watching. “The Iranians believe this is developing into a major strategic victory,” Yannis said, “and are very keen not to give up things they’ve won.” Trump, meanwhile, is caught in his own contradiction: desperate to declare victory, unable to accept a deal that structurally resembles the 2015 nuclear deal he spent years denouncing as the worst deal ever, and watching inflation data — driven in no small part by energy prices now roughly 60 percent above pre-war levels — threaten Republican prospects in the midterms. Carla, speaking as a self-described nuclear nerd, offered the most sobering observation of the discussion: even a deal that shipped every gram of enriched uranium out of Iran cannot remove the knowledge from Iranian scientists’ heads, and the core lesson any government in Tehran will draw from this war is that “you are more secure with a nuclear weapon than without one.” Jamil suggested the likely endgame is periodic Israeli and American strikes — “mowing the grass,” as the Israelis call it — which has never actually worked, in Lebanon or in Gaza. As I noted in closing, sometimes diplomacy backed by force is better than no diplomacy and force alone.

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.

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

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

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

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

Syria: Justice Starts Here

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

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

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

US-Europe: The New Normal Is Not Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed the implications of an indefinite ceasefire in the Iran War, prospects for resolving the conflict in Lebanon, and the new vibe in Ukraine. Joining me this week were of the Substack “Cosmopolitics,” Prashant Rao of Semafor, and Matt Kaminski of the Middle East Broadcasting Network

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed Trump’s televised speech on Wednesday night, the global ripples of the closed Strait of Hormuz, and Israel’s 30-month war. Joining me this week were Isabel Coles, Chief International Correspondent at The Observer, Gideon Rachman, the Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator at The Financial Times, and Bobby Ghosh, veteran journalist and host of the Ghoshworld Substack.

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:

• There is a continued lack of clarity on the aims of the ongoing war in Iran and President Trump didn’t do himself any favors during his televised address on Wednesday night. His speech left many questions unanswered, and was mostly a reiteration of the same muddled reasoning that we’ve heard in the previous 31 days. While Trump certainly sought to reassure Americans, there was very little reassurance for the rest of the world, many of whom still fear that the United States will leave the Middle East in chaos. Gideon points out that it’s clear that Trump wanted “another Venezuela” and that he believes the U.S. went to war “out of habit.” But now that he’s stuck, unable to walk away, there is a real risk that Trump falls prey to the attractiveness of high-risk, escalatory military options.

• Global repercussions of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz show that this war isn’t just about Iran. This is already the largest oil disruption in history. Southeast Asian economies that rely on Middle East exports are feeling the impact, with Thais urged to take elevators and other countries shifting to a four-day work week, all in an effort to conserve energy. Europe, which relies less on oil and natural gas but heavily on refined products from the Middle East like diesel and aviation fuel, is already witnessing large price rises. Airlines are reducing service and shipping rates are rising, crushing businesses. One third of all fertilizer ingredients flows through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning the war is also having a seismic effect on world food production and prices. David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, warned of a “slow-motion famine” as fertilizer disruptions come right at the beginning of the spring planting season. Isabel sheds light on the situation in Iraq, where the tenuous coexistence between U.S. and Iranian influence has been shattered as the country comes under attack from both sides. Revenue from oil exports there propped up a teetering economy and created political stability. Now that those are halted, Iraq stands on a political precipice.

• Israel, since the October 7th attacks, has made war on Iranian proxies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. And now it’s involved in a big war with Iran itself. This week, Israel started a new offensive to expand a “security buffer zone” in southern Lebanon. But it’s unclear that an Israel that continues to expand militarily and territorially means one that is safer. There are limits to what military force can achieve and Israel appears stuck in a strategic dilemma where it continues to achieve tactical military successes, while failing to having strategic impact. Bobby argues that Israeli domestic support for the war has begun to slip and, while many still support military operations, fewer than half now want Israel to fight until the regime collapses. After the war, Israelis are likely to face an Iran that is both wounded and emboldened, much as is the case for Iran’s proxies.

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.

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed whether the US is stuck between escalating in Iran or accepting a lesser deal, how Trump’s criticism of NATO is going over in Europe, and what European elections show about the nature of politics in Europe. Joining me this week were Peter Spiegel, Managing Editor at The Washington Post, Stefanie Bolzen, the Washington Correspondent and North America Editor at Die Welt, and Edward Luce, the U.S. National Editor and Columnist for 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:

• The way President Trump conducts policy is uniquely vulnerable to the current direction of the war with Iran. Iran now controls who can transit the Strait of Hormuz, extracting payments and holding out for political concessions. Ed argues that the markets are the primary thing that Trump cares about and this gives Iran a “stranglehold on TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out)” as they can force wild swings in oil and stock markets by controlling who can cross the Strait. With disregard for U.S. Allies and for any deliberate policymaking process, Trump has led the United States into this war alone and without a plan. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Trump looks at every negotiation like its a real-estate deal, but the strategic implications of war are very different, and in this negotiation, Iran holds the cards.

• The Iran War may be causing a seismic shift in America’s diplomatic standing in the world. The war has solidified much of what European leaders already thought about the second Trump Administration—that they can no longer count on the U.S. for their security. Allies and partners in East and South Asia are facing an economic and energy crisis, caused by the actions of their friend, the United States. India and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who coordinated well with Trump during the first administration, saw the United States as a natural ally. But the Iran War has thrown a wrench into the Indian economy and deepened a split that had already been growing over Trump’s embrace of Pakistan and his criticism of Delhi’s purchases of Russian oil. Stefanie points out that while it’s unclear if Europe has taken the actions needed to stand alone, there is now a “common understanding” that they must. While Europeans have disagreed with the U.S. in the past, perhaps the global repercussions of this war signal a truly permanent rupture.

• Recent European elections reflect the increasingly fractured nature of political life in liberal democracies. In Denmark and Germany, the traditional democratic socialist parties lost ground, as they’ve failed to deliver prosperity for younger people. While far-right parties generally failed to pick up support, with a notable exception in Slovenia, the traditional centrist parties aren’t picking it up either. In a recent by-election in the UK, Reform lost, but the Greens, not Labour, picked up the seat. When people feel alienated from the political process, they tend towards revolutionary options. As centrist parties have failed to deliver for European voters, they’ve grown more attracted to the far left and far right. And in the U.S., Peter points out that while discussions within the Trump Administration on the Iran War revolved around building Trump’s “legacy,” many voters are feeling alienated as its only led to higher costs. As our lives become more isolated and in-person politics is replaced by an online version, alienation and the fragmentation it brings will continue to influence liberal democracies.

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.

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed the war in Iran, its effects on the U.S.-China relationship, and Trump’s statements on wanting to “take” Cuba. Joining me this week were Karen DeYoung, Associate Editor and Senior National Security Correspondent at The Washington Post, Robbie Gramer, National Security Correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, and Yaroslav Trofimov, the Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent for 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:

• For the first time in a long time, the United States is looking at a war that’s going to be going on for a good while. Perhaps the best analogy for the war in Iran is not the 2003 Iraq War, but the First Gulf War. There, the United States achieved its objectives, but saw itself drawn deeply into the Middle East for decades. The only way to open the Strait of Hormuz is with either a major ground invasion or a deal. Robbie argued that Iran could keep this war going for a very long time at a “low simmer.” In a deal scenario, Iran would likely seek to require payment from anyone that transits the strait, using extortion to project power. Like it or not, the United States will have to deal with this new state of affairs in the Middle East for years to come—hardly consistent with the pivot to Asia that successive administrations have sought to accomplish.

• A major winner of the conflict in the Middle East may be China. While the Strait of Hormuz is closed to oil shipments to many countries, China is still getting oil, as Iran has allowed some China-bound tankers to transit. The U.S. military is also, once again, bogged down in the Middle East, expending time and precious munitions in this conflict. While China is certainly affected by the global economic shocks, it may not be as bad off as one might think. Yaroslav points out that the more munitions that the U.S. uses in the Middle East, the less there is available for a future contingency in the Indo-Pacific. He also argues that China is learning lessons from Iran. The closer China pulls Iran, the more it can learn about how to counter U.S. technology and munitions.

• While we already knew that this is not a normal presidential administration, the focus on Cuba lays bare how much of Trump’s foreign policy is driven by personality, not process. Cuba is personally important to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and is thus a priority, even amidst the war in Iran. Karen points out that regime change in Cuba is the logical next step for the “Donroe Doctrine,” the idea guiding Trump’s quest for supremacy in the Western Hemisphere. Venezuela was a precursor to Cuba, now, the Trump Administration can either wait and squeeze Cuba economically or try a Venezuela-style regime decapitation. Economic strangulation is the most likely path. Robbie also points out how a normal administration, relying on an inter-agency process might be able to handle a U.S.-China summit at the same time as operations in Iran, but Trump relies only on a set of close, personal advisors. This makes his administration very decisive, but makes it hard to “walk and chew gum” at the same time.

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.

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

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

Now, on to this week’s show. We discussed the war in Iran, how it ends, its global impacts, and Israel’s many wars. Joining me this week were Carla Robbins, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Susan Glasser, Staff Writer at the New Yorker, and Steven Erlanger, the Chief Diplomatic Correspondent for Europe 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:

• “Tell me how this ends.” That was the question then Brigadier-General David Petraeus asked of a journalists shortly after the start of the Iraq War in 2003. As the War in Iran continues to rage, the question is even more apt. Susan argued that the difference this time is a President who feels unencumbered by the need to let the American people know what’s happening. President Trump is going to claim success no matter what happens. As he recently said, “we’ve won but we’re not done yet.” Carla pointed out that the war is costing an extraordinary amount of money. The Department of Defense has clear “red lines” of how low their stockpiles of critical munitions can go, but it’s not revealing where the red lines are. Even more worrisome is the likelihood that the war may leave U.S. unable to deal with new threats in other, potentially more vital regions. “What if Putin decided to invade a Baltic country right now?” Steve pointed out that the U.S. approach to allies and the international community is also entirely different from 2003. In 2003, the Bush Administration made the case to allies and the United Nations. Trump doesn’t care about what allies think. He didn’t consult them and it’s not even clear he told them before the war started.

• As the war drags on, the global impact of the war continue to reverberate. Carla pointed out that allies are feeling the impact of the war. European energy prices are skyrocketing, and the Gulf States may not like the chaos that Trump leaves behind. Susan argued that the U.S. war in Iran is costing billions while putting billions more in Russia’s pocket to fight in Ukraine. Did the U.S. have a plan for dealing with the closure of the Straight of Hormuz? Is the American military actually ready for this new age of drone warfare? Trump rejected Zelensky’s offer for help, but now the U.S. military is rapidly trying to integrate Ukrainian technology and expertise. Steven maintained that the European reaction is less divided as is often portrayed. Their overriding aim is not to participate in this war, because they’ believe it is illegal and a big strategic mistake. Ukraine is the priority for Europe. This is not the “supine Europe” that we’re led to believe exists; they realize that they will bear more of the consequences than Americans will.

• The continuation of the war by Israel is happening within a context of many ongoing wars. Israel is conducting airstrikes in Iran while also engaging in an escalating campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Israel also has an unfinished conflict in Gaza and continues to supported expanded settlements in the West Bank. Steven argued that Bibi Netanyahu brought the United States into this war. Netanyahu has talked a lot about the Iranian nuclear program and more recently the ballistic missile program, which is a threat to Israel but not the United States. Since October 7, 2003, Netanyahu has also been very effective as Prime Minister, reestablishing deterrence, destroying Hezbollah and Hamas, and putting the Iranians on the back foot. Israel is ascendent throughout the Middle East and the Iranian security apparatus is in shambles. This war will create effects across the Middle East similar to how the collapse of the Soviet Union changed Europe. Carla argued that even a shattered Iran could be extremely dangerous, particularly one sitting on a pile of nuclear material. Will Israel be comfortable with a totally unstable Iran? Susan pointed out that the political calendar for Israel matters. Netanyahu is the longest serving PM in Israeli history, this strengthens his hand in elections and distracts from the unfinished war in Gaza. Israel has been able to really penetrate Iranian society, but can it turn that tactical brilliance into strategic success? Israeli and US leadership are telling their public the war is about Iranian strength, but they’re telling themselves it’s about Iranian weakness. There is hubris in thinking tactical and technological prowess can create political change.

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.

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.

BIG NEWS: World Review is going radio!

Starting this Sunday, at 7:00 a.m. central time, World Review can be heard 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 the show. Today, March 6th, we discussed the ongoing War in Iran, the economic and political shockwave it has caused around the world, and the Pentagon’s ongoing war with. Joining me this week were Nahal Toosi, the Senior Foreign Correspondent at Politico, Anton La Guardia, the Diplomatic Editor at The Economist, and Prashant Rao, the Senior Editor at Semafor.

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:

• As the Iran War enters it second week, the political ends of the conflict remain confused. President Trump has been unclear on what his aims are, while Republicans in Congress seem focused on not calling this a war to avoid having to take a vote. Nahal points out that as the conflict continues, Democrats in Congress will have to coordinate on a response as decisions on funding arise. Prashant points out that the operation itself makes the 2003 Iraq War look well-planned, with a complete lack of aligning current ends with the means to accomplish them. Anton frames the mixed aims of the operation as different people within the administration fighting different wars. Secretary of Defense Hegseth are focused on highlighting lethality, while others arms of governments respond within their own narrow purviews. He also sees some of the unclear aims as deliberate, as Trump likes the flexibility to claim victory and avoid responsibility no matter the outcome. Prashant warns that “federalizing power” in another state, creating a weak center and strengthening other actors, can be dangerous and unpredictable.

• While the Iran War continues, economic and political shockwaves reverberate across the region and the world. Prashant points out that despite the remarkably high interception rate of incoming Iranian attacks, there has been a high cost across the Gulf States. The ways in which cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi have fashioned themselves as global cities has been derailed. Globally, the Straight of Hormuz through which 20% of the world’s oil travels, is closed. Fiscal impacts are already being felt in South Korea and other Asian economies. States that rely on importing finished petroleum products, such as Nigeria, face a looming economic catastrophe. Russian efforts in the Ukraine War are already being buoyed by increased energy sales. War is happening in a concentrated space but reverberating economically, politically, and psychologically across the world.

• Anton argues that one way to see this conflict is as the “Third Gulf War.” Past Gulf Wars ended up as defining moments in American world leadership; The First Gulf War in 1991 defined the U.S. as a hegemon. The Second, in 2003, was the beginning of American decline and involvement in the “forever wars.” This war will likely be epoch defining as well. It may be the beginning of driving a wedge into the “axis of autocracy” or of America getting so bogged down that China and others can rise. For now it, is too soon to tell.

• The Pentagon took aim at Anthropic this week, the only AI firm that had a contract with the Pentagon to work with classified systems. The firm raised issues with some of the ways its tools could be used by the government. Secretary Hegseth and President Trump hit back at the firm, declaring it a supply chain risk. Anton reports that as AI is seeping into all forms of life, it is also seeping into war. U.S. military personnel have indicated that AI has been key to strike planning in the war. He asked whether it may have been used in the strike on a girls school in Iran that killed a reported 175 people. Prashant asserts that standing up to the DoD was a wise move by Anthropic, that they recognize that although the Pentagon budget is large, it is not the whole universe for these companies and mass consumption is much bigger. Nahal argues that we have to ask both “is it ok for the government to be telling a company what to do?” but also, “is it ok for a company to dictate what the government can do?” Already, we’ve seen Elon Musk’s decision to cut off Starlink access to Russian troops impact how wars are being fought. Anton agrees that in an ideal world, Congress would be regulating AI and resolving these disputes. However, the technology may be advancing faster than our dysfunctional political moment can regulate.

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.

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.

Each Friday morning, 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.

Yesterday, February 27, ahead of the strikes on Iran, we discussed the anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision on Trump’s tariffs, and recent developments in Cuba. Joining me this week were Felicia Schwartz, Diplomatic Correspondent of Politico, Giles Whittell, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of The Observer, and Michael D. Shear, Chief U.K. Correspondent of The New York Times.

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

• Tuesday marked four years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The stalemate is leaving its mark on the country and its people. Giles described a story from Kherson, where a three-year-old went outside for the first time in his life last December. The front line is a drone-patrolled kill zone stretching some 30 kilometers, where movement in daylight can be a death sentence. The numbers are staggering on both sides, with Russia losing roughly 30,000 soldiers a month and Ukraine paying an even higher price relative to its population. The debate in Washington appears far removed from this reality. Felicia notes that the focus is mostly on the negotiations, while the public’s and the President’s attention wanes. Michael notes Europe has the will but not the means to meaningfully support Ukraine, and continues to defer to and rely on Washington in the negotiations. Giles warned that Russia is the closest to having a plan, to keep grinding forward, and to try to weaken NATO, while Europe struggles with its own internal vetoes and unfinished debates over frozen assets. 2026 will be a test for whether Europe can get organized fast enough, otherwise the talk of standing up for Ukraine risks staying just that, talk.

• The Supreme Court decision that Trump cannot use emergency powers to impose tariffs is a direct hit on his favorite instrument of leverage. Michael framed Trump’s worldview as the fusion of money and power, with tariffs functioning less as trade policy than as a club he can swing at allies and adversaries alike. The ruling produced a global exhale, weakening the threat that every disagreement can be met with economic punishment. But the relief is tempered by the obvious reality that Trump is already looking for workarounds, including temporary across-the-board tariffs under other authorities. Giles argued that the judgment creates a moment of choice for everyone else, whether to keep courting Washington or to start pushing back. The UK has so far chosen deference. The bigger question is whether the European Union, with more economic weight, decides this is the opening to get tougher, even as Michael noted that interconnected dependencies, especially on security, make it hard for capitals to tell Trump no in one arena without worrying about retaliation in another. As Felicia noted, while the Supreme Court may have constrained the President’s power, the underlying dynamic remains: the world is still trying to work out how to deal with an American president who treats tariffs as a form of personal power.

• Cuba returned to the conversation through a bizarre incident that felt like it was from another era: a stolen speedboat run from the Florida Keys and ten would-be infiltrators. But the larger story is that the US has long held the conviction that the project in Cuba is ending. The Trump administration continues the pressure campaign with an oil embargo. Felicia argued that Marco Rubio is the key here, given his long-held fixation on transforming Cuba. He now has real authority to try. The administration appears to have departed from the old dream of toppling the system overnight and is instead pursuing regime change light: exerting economic pressure and trying to find a next-generation insider to open the island up for business. The Obama administration tried to change Cuba with carrots and optimism about markets. Trump’s approach is to use sticks to elicit concessions. Whether that strategy will be more effective remains an open question.

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.

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.

Yesterday, February 20, we discussed the looming risk of war with Iran, the rapid consolidation of power in Syria as the United States pulls out its troops, and the Trump administration’s increasingly explicit effort to champion far-right politics in Europe. Joining me this week were Liz Sly, Correspondent-at-large of The Washington Post, Bobby Ghosh, journalist and editor for Time, Bloomberg, and CNN, and Matt Kaminski, Editorial Chair of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Co-founder of Politico Europe.

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

• Iran feels like a classic game of chicken, except neither side has spelled out what the off-ramp looks like. The administration has assembled the largest naval and air posture in the region since the invasion of Iraq, and as Bobby put it, a gun placed on the mantle in the first act tends to get fired by the third. The temptation for Trump is obvious: he prefers coercion without American boots on the ground, he believes he has already gotten away with limited strikes before, and after a rough political week at home, he has reason to want a distraction or a win. But support for his plans in the region is slim. Liz explained that Gulf states have been quietly drawing red lines, refusing to be used as launch pads and trying to keep themselves out of the blast radius of possible Iranian retaliation. Matt argued that there is more than improvisation here, that parts of the administration see this as one piece of a larger project to remake the Middle East and isolate Tehran, potentially through a strike followed by tighter economic pressure. The problem is that the desired end state is still unclear. Even if the supreme leader were removed, the Revolutionary Guard holds the power, and Liz described the idea that they would calmly bargain their way into a profitable post-revolutionary future as a fantasy. In other words, the United States may be betting that pressure produces pragmatists, while Iran is betting it can wait out until the President’s attention shifts elsewhere.

• In Syria, the new government has managed to consolidate its power significantly. Liz described how Damascus has, for the first time in more than a decade, reasserted control over nearly all Syrian territory, helped by an agreement that integrates the Kurdish-led forces into the Syrian army while allowing local security in a small number of Kurdish majority towns. As US troops withdraw, the biggest near-term risks are familiar: what happens with the detention camps, what happens to escaped militants, and whether ISIS finds the opening it has long been waiting for. While ISIS has failed to consolidate power so far, Matt cautioned that Syria still faces scepticism from neighbouring states in the region, a rising Turkey eager to expand its influence, and an Israel deeply skeptical of the new order. Bobby argued there is more hope now than at any time in years, even if the Kurdish question will not disappear simply because a deal has been signed. If there is a lesson here, it is that the best case is no longer unimaginable, but it is fragile, and the next two months of implementation will tell us whether Syria is becoming a state again or merely entering a new phase of managed instability.

• The Trump administration appears to be increasingly bolstering its support for far-right movements in Europe. Matt captured the mood in Munich, where Marco Rubio received a standing ovation largely because he did not punch Europe in the nose, and because he articulated, in more civilized language, the argument that the Transatlantic alliance still matters for economics, security, and competition with China. But the performance continued after Munich, with Rubio traveling to Slovakia and Hungary and calling Viktor Orbán’s staying in power a vital American interest. Matt called it cognitive dissonance: you cannot claim Europe is essential and then openly meddle in its domestic politics. What the administration may be underestimating is that US support may not actually work in favour of the European far-right. In the UK context, as Liz pointed out, Nigel Farage may be personally close to Trump, but in Europe, association with Trump is often a liability. But Bobby warned that, even though the far-right movement is more aligned with Moscow than Washington, the administration’s actions may still affect tight elections.

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.