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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

Subscribe now

• Maria Abi-Habib and Lazaro Gamio, “The Secretive Conglomerate That Controls Cuba’s Economy,” The New York Times, May 16, 2026. GAESA, the Cuban military’s sprawling business conglomerate, controls an estimated three times the revenue of Cuba’s entire state budget — yet its finances are so opaque that when the government’s own comptroller admitted she had no insight into them in 2024, she was fired after 14 years on the job. Born out of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when Raúl Castro convinced Fidel to let the military take over key sectors to keep the country afloat, GAESA has metastasized under family control into a self-serving monopoly: Raúl installed his son-in-law to run it in 2011, and his son remains closely tied to current leadership. The conglomerate’s strategic failures are stark: betting heavily on tourism after the Obama-era opening, GAESA built 121 hotels by 2025 — nearly doubling capacity — even as American tourists were barred again and the pandemic crushed arrivals, leaving occupancy rates at a dismal 30% while Cuba spent 11 times more on tourism and hospitality than on education and healthcare combined.

• Lingling Wei, “The Hidden Chinese Influence in AI,” The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2026. A peer-reviewed study by researchers from five universities has found the first hard evidence that Chinese state media has infiltrated AI training data. When datasets are filtered for content mentioning Xi Jinping or key Chinese Communist Party institutions, state-media content accounts for roughly one in four documents, making it 41 times more abundant than Chinese-language Wikipedia. The practical effect is measurable: major chatbots answer politically sensitive questions about China more favorably in Chinese than in English, and the pattern repeats for Russia and North Korea. No one had to do anything sinister — propaganda is simply free on the open web while serious journalism sits behind paywalls, structurally advantaging authoritarian state media. The question of whether Beijing is shaping what your chatbot says has now been answered; what to do about it has not.

• Jeffrey Gettleman, Maya Tekeli, Anton Troianovski, and Eric Schmitt, “In Closed-Door Talks, U.S. Demands a Major Role in Greenland,” The New York Times, May 18, 2026. While the Iran war has pushed Greenland off the front pages, secret negotiations between the U.S., Denmark, and Greenland have been quietly underway in Washington for four months — and Greenlandic officials are alarmed by what’s being demanded. The U.S. wants permanent basing rights that would survive even Greenland’s independence, effective veto power over major foreign investment deals, and cooperation on natural resource extraction — terms that Greenland parliament member Justus Hansen says would mean never achieving “real independence.” Greenlanders have little leverage, and some are already marking their calendars: they fear Trump will refocus on the island once the Iran conflict winds down, with his birthday on June 14 and the Fourth of July seen as potential flashpoints.

• Elbridge Colby, Remarks at the National War College, May 19, 2026. In his most comprehensive public statement of the Trump administration’s military strategy, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby laid out a framework built around three core concepts: denial defense (preventing an adversary from seizing and holding key allied territory), favorable escalation management (placing the burden of escalation on the opponent), and a binding strategy (structuring conflicts so that adversary escalation strengthens rather than fractures the U.S. coalition). The through-line is Clausewitzian discipline — military force must always remain proportionate to Americans’ concrete interests, ruling out both strategies aimed at total victory over nuclear-armed powers and purely punitive cost-imposition that invites retaliation without achieving political objectives. Colby was notably direct that allies must do far more for their own defense, and that American strategy depends on leveraging their capabilities and resolve rather than shouldering burdens alone. The ultimate goal, he said, is a “decent peace” — but one that requires being credibly prepared to fight for it. If only Colby’s theory matched the administration’s strategic reality in Iran and elsewhere.

• Peter S. Goodman, “Catastrophe Is Emerging in the World’s Most Vulnerable Places,” The New York Times, May 18, 2026. The Iran war has delivered a devastating second blow to the world’s most vulnerable populations: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz has doubled food, fuel, and fertilizer prices in import-dependent countries like Somalia, compounding the damage already done by the dismantling of USAID and sweeping cuts to global humanitarian funding. The World Food Program warns that if hostilities continue past June, the number facing acute hunger will swell to 363 million — 45 million more than before the war — yet the agency’s Somalia operation has funding only through July, and twelve of its thirteen warehouse tents there are already empty. Aid workers now describe a grim “hyper-prioritization,” allocating what remains only to those on the immediate verge of death — “literally, it’s who dies first, and who dies next,” as the WFP’s Somalia director puts it. Somalia is the case study, but the story is global.

• Laurence Norman and Michael R. Gordon, “How Iran Got to the Nuclear Threshold on the Watch of Three U.S. Presidents,” The Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2026. Iran’s path to the nuclear threshold was paved by a cascade of failures across three administrations: Trump withdrew from the 2015 deal in 2018, triggering Iran’s gradual then rapid expansion of its program; Biden failed to revive the accord or apply sufficient pressure; and Trump’s return brought maximalist demands — a permanent end to all enrichment — that Iran predictably rejected. By the time U.S. and Israeli strikes hit Iran’s enrichment sites last June, Tehran had accumulated enough near-weapons-grade uranium for nearly 11 nuclear weapons, and despite the strikes it retains the material, the centrifuges, and the know-how to resume. The core dilemma now is that Iran’s new post-war leadership may be even less disposed to compromise than its predecessors — and with Trump signaling openness to a deal while few experts share his optimism, the nuclear question remains as unresolved as ever.

• Andrew R.C. Marshall, Humeyra Pamuk, John Shiffman, Gram Slattery, John Irish, Tim Kelly, and Andrea Shalal, “Inside the Unraveling of U.S. Diplomacy Under Trump,” Reuters, May 21, 2026. Based on interviews with more than 50 diplomats and officials, Reuters documents a historic breakdown in American diplomacy: 109 of 195 ambassadorial posts are vacant, the NSC has been gutted to a few dozen staff, and career diplomats — who historically filled 57-74% of ambassador roles — now account for just 9% of Trump’s appointees. The practical consequences are stark: when Trump threatened to wipe out Iranian civilization, European allies sought clarification through the State Department and were told it didn’t know what the president meant; five of the seven countries bordering Iran have no U.S. ambassador. Foreign governments have adapted by rewiring their diplomacy around informal back channels — South Korea through White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Japan through Trump’s golfing buddy Masayoshi Son — while learning to treat Trump’s most alarming statements as background noise rather than policy. The result, as one European diplomat summarizes, is a superpower whose signals have grown so erratic that allies now regard silence as the safest response.

• Robert Kagan, “Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender,” The Atlantic, May 21, 2026. Kagan argues that Trump’s reported “letter of intent” with Iran — launching a 30-day negotiation period — is a tacit admission of defeat, since Iran has made no concessions despite 37 days of strikes and is now demanding war reparations, no limits on enrichment, and recognized control of the Strait of Hormuz. The cease-fire has given Iran time to “normalize” its control of the strait, with nations including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq already negotiating transit agreements — a stampede Kagan says will only accelerate now that Trump has signaled he won’t resume full-scale war. The strategic consequences are severe: Iran emerges stronger and more influential, international sanctions collapse, Israel is left more isolated than at any point in its history, and the Abraham Accords effectively die as Gulf states make their own peace with Tehran. “That’s what happens,” Kagan concludes, “when the hegemon cedes hegemony.”

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

• I assessed the long-term impact of the Beijing Summit on US-China relations for Notus.

• On America Abroad, I examined the long-term damage of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement and how the likely deal to end the Iran War confirm the US Lost

• This week’s World Review focused on Cuba, Taiwan, and the crisis in British politics.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

Subscribe now

• John Thornhill, “AI Desperately Needs More Adult Supervision”, Financial Times, May 14, 2026. The Musk-Altman legal battle in Oakland — with its accusations of broken promises, self-enrichment, and truth challenges — has laid bare just how poorly governed the world’s most powerful AI labs really are. While the Trump administration has embraced “permissionless innovation” as its AI mantra, leaving frontier AI companies subject to fewer regulations than nail salons, Anthropic’s controlled release of Mythos — a model capable of identifying thousands of cybersecurity vulnerabilities — has forced even AI regulation skeptics to acknowledge that catastrophic risks can no longer be ignored. The core dilemma, as policy analyst Dean Ball frames it, is a double danger: unregulated AI companies pose existential risks, but a state monopoly over frontier AI would be an unprecedented instrument of tyranny. Drawing on a paper by Christoph Winter and Charlie Bullock, Thornhill argues that the answer lies in building independent, well-funded expert institutions — with whistleblower protections, information-sharing channels, and legal monitoring authorities — that can provide oversight without capture by either tech giants or governments.

• “Russia Is Stumbling on the Battlefield,” The Economist, May 10, 2026. Russia’s diminished Victory Day parade — stripped of tanks and armored vehicles for fear of Ukrainian drone strikes, with mobile internet cut in Moscow and St. Petersburg — served as an unintentional symbol of the Kremlin’s growing battlefield vulnerability. For the first time since August 2024, Russian forces suffered a net loss of territory in April, as Ukraine’s increasingly effective drone campaign has created a 20km “kill zone” along the front and extended deep-strike operations to targets nearly 2,000km inside Russia, now bringing 70% of the Russian population within range. Casualties are mounting at roughly 35,000 per month — faster than Russia can replace them — and the ratio of killed to wounded has dramatically worsened, with up to 80% of casualties now caused by drones that also impede medical evacuation. Ukraine has meanwhile hit Russia with long-range drone attacks, hitting oil infrastructure, airfields, and ports with enough frequency to force production cuts of up to 400,000 barrels a day in April.

• Brian Spegele, “Xi’s China: Dazzling Technology, Military Muscle—and an Economic Mess,” The Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2026. Under Xi Jinping, China has dramatically increased spending on AI, semiconductors, electric vehicles, and military hardware — defense spending has more than doubled since Xi took power — while holding back on the consumer stimulus and social safety net investments that would generate jobs and lift living standards. The strategy reflects Xi’s conviction that security is a prerequisite for development, but the numbers tell a damaging story: strategic sectors like batteries and robotics grew from 5.5% to only 6.3% of GDP, nowhere near enough to offset the collapse of the property sector, which fell from 16% to 11% of GDP in just two years. The human cost is visible in cities like Foshan, once a booming manufacturing hub, where factories stand vacant, youth unemployment is rampant, and workers like 60-year-old Liang Youjun are willing to accept 50% pay cuts just to stay employed. China’s per capita GDP remains less than one-third that of the United States, and IMF researchers estimate that state distortions from subsidies and tax breaks have reduced China’s GDP by as much as 2%.

• Ishaan Tharoor, “How the Iran War Is Shifting Power Toward China,” The New Yorker, May 6, 2026. The fragile ceasefire in the Iran war has exposed deep fractures in the Western alliance, most visibly when German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called the U.S. negotiating posture humiliating and Trump retaliated by ordering the withdrawal of American forces from Germany. China, which has stayed out of the fight entirely, is the quiet beneficiary: where the Ukraine war left Beijing awkwardly aligned with Russia and viewed with suspicion by the West, the Iran conflict has given Xi Jinping diplomatic room to reposition China as a responsible global actor, contrasting its restraint with American unpredictability. For years, Beijing’s efforts to brand the U.S. as a hegemonic power with a “Cold War mentality” fell largely flat, but Trump’s behavior — punishing allies for perceived slights, ignoring broader fallout — is now doing China’s messaging work for it, and a majority of Americans, for the first time in over two decades of Pew polling, believe their country largely ignores the interests of others. The war is accelerating a shift in the geopolitical landscape that Beijing has long sought but could never quite engineer on its own.

• Clara Murray, “How AI Mania Is Disguising Big Companies’ Hit from Iran War — in Charts,” Financial Times, May 10, 2026. Two months into the Iran war, the world’s largest companies have collectively added $5.4 trillion in market value — a 4.2% increase — but the headline figure masks a deeply uneven picture, with AI-driven semiconductor gains doing most of the heavy lifting while airlines, consumer goods companies, and carmakers suffer. The combined value of semiconductor firms with market caps above $10 billion has surged 26%, or $3.7 trillion, since the conflict began, and close to two-thirds of large-cap companies discussed AI on their first-quarter earnings calls — roughly twice as many as mentioned the Middle East conflict. Energy companies have split along geographic lines, with those outside the Gulf like Norway’s Equinor up 24%, while ExxonMobil and Shell face multibillion-dollar repair bills from missile damage at Qatar’s Ras Laffan and have seen their valuations fall. Consumer sector companies are among the worst hit, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz drives up costs and squeezes household budgets, with Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark warning of price rises and Volvo’s CEO citing a broader chilling effect on consumer confidence. The AI boom has produced a market rebound notably swifter than during either the Ukraine invasion or Covid — but as one strategist put it, investors are seeking the “certainty of earnings delivery” in tech precisely because so much else remains deeply uncertain.

• Nick Paton Walsh, Natalie Wright, Pau Mosquera, Anna Chernova, and Zachary Cohen, “A Russian Ship Sank in Mysterious Circumstances. It May Have Been Carrying Submarine Nuclear Reactors to North Korea,” CNN, May 11, 2026. A CNN investigation found that the Ursa Major, a Russian cargo ship that sank off the coast of Spain on December 23, 2024, was likely carrying two submarine nuclear reactors possibly destined for North Korea — and may have been deliberately sunk by a Western military to prevent the transfer. The ship’s Russian captain confirmed to Spanish investigators that the cargo included “components for two nuclear reactors similar to those used in submarines,” and a source familiar with the Spanish investigation believes the vessel was diverted toward the North Korean port of Rason, with cranes aboard specifically to assist delivery — making a mockery of the ship’s official manifest listing only empty containers and manhole covers bound for Vladivostok. The initial breach of the hull — a precisely shaped 50cm by 50cm hole with metal facing inward — may have been caused by a rare supercavitating torpedo, though other experts suggest a limpet mine; a Russian military escort ship then arrived on scene, fired red flares, and four more explosions followed before the Ursa Major sank entirely. Further deepening the mystery, the suspected Russian spy ship Yantar returned to the wreckage a week later and triggered four additional underwater explosions, while the U.S. Air Force twice dispatched a specialized nuclear “sniffer” aircraft over the site.

• John Hudson, “China Gains Major Edge on U.S. Amid Iran War, Intelligence Report Finds,” The Washington Post, May 14, 2026. A U.S. intelligence assessment produced for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dan Caine, finds that China is systematically exploiting the Iran war to expand its advantage over the United States. On the military side, the war has drained American stocks of critical munitions — including Patriot interceptors, THAAD systems, and Tomahawk cruise missiles — while giving Beijing an unobstructed opportunity to observe how the U.S. fights and plan accordingly, raising acute concerns among Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea about American readiness. Economically, China has proven far more insulated from the Strait of Hormuz closure than Washington anticipated, thanks to its renewable energy development and vast oil reserves, and is now positioning itself as a “solutions provider” — supplying jet fuel and green energy technology to countries like Thailand, Australia, and the Philippines to drive wedges between them and Washington. Diplomatically, Beijing has branded the conflict “illegal” and is leveraging widespread global dissatisfaction with the war to reinforce its long-running narrative of the U.S. as a reckless, unilateralist power — a message that is now landing with unusual credibility.

• River Akira Davis, “In Qatar, Energy Sector Damage Is Severe, and the Way Back Will Be Long,” The New York Times, May 14, 2026. Iranian drone and missile strikes on Ras Laffan, Qatar’s LNG production hub, combined with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have crippled one of the world’s largest natural gas exporters. The core problem is technical: three strikes penetrated Qatar’s air defenses and hit the cryogenic heat exchangers at the heart of two LNG liquefaction trains — precision machines manufactured almost exclusively by a Honeywell subsidiary that can take four to five years to replace. Unlike the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, Qatar has no alternative maritime route to open water, leaving some 1,600 vessels trapped near the strait, and shipping companies are unlikely to return quickly even if the waterway reopens. The bottleneck is circular and dangerous: Qatar cannot restart production until shippers commit to returning, but if gas keeps accumulating with nowhere to go, storage tanks risk overflowing and causing permanent damage. As Eurasia Group’s Henning Gloystein puts it, “we’re talking reduced production until the end of the decade” — and the crisis is accelerating serious discussion of bypass infrastructure, including pipelines across the Arabian Peninsula to the Red Sea or south to Oman, that could permanently redraw the Middle East’s energy map.

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

• I joined Bloomberg’s Balance of Power to talk about the Iran and Ukraine conflicts.

• This week’s World Review focused on the Trump-Xi Summit, Russia’s troubles, and the stalemate in the Strait.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• This week’s World Review focused on the stalemate between Iran and the United States, the opportunity for peace in Lebanon, and the vibe shift in Ukraine.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

Subscribe now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

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

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• Patrick Foulis, “What the Iran war teaches America’s adversaries,” Financial Times, March 27, 2026. Foulis argues that the war reveals both American weakness and strength: attacking Iran has drained munitions, strained alliances, raised costs, and pulled attention and resources away from Asia. But it has also demonstrated astonishing military reach, precision, and economic resilience. For America’s adversaries, this creates a complex picture. Smaller adversarial regimes may conclude they need chokepoints or weapons of mass destruction to avoid interference or decapitation. While Xi Jinping likely welcomes America’s focus shifting elsewhere, China is confronted with its own vulnerability to economic shocks in a broader war.

• Paul Sonne, Valerie Hopkins, and Oleg Matsnev, “Putin’s Internet Blackout: A Chaotic Drive to Cut Off Russians From the World,” The New York Times, March 31, 2026. The piece argues that the Kremlin is taking its boldest steps yet to bring Russian communications under tighter state control, using war and security justifications to normalize outages and platform restrictions. Using Ukrainian drone attacks as the pretext, the government is building tools it could use against domestic unrest. Telegram has become both a daily utility and one of the last relatively open spaces for news, dissent, and communication in Russia. The crackdown is not only political but also socially disruptive, causing problems with payments, transport, medical monitoring, and everyday life. Russians are finding workarounds, yet many seem to believe they have little real power to stop the tightening system controlling the flow of information.

• Tej Parikh, “The Iran war will cement China’s superpower status,” Financial Times, March 29, 2026. Parikh, the economics leader writer for the Financial Times, argues that although China depends on energy supplies from the Middle East, it has spent years preparing for exactly this kind of shock through stockpiles, diversified supply routes, and a far more electrified economy than its rivals. The war may also strengthen China in the long run by increasing demand for green technologies, rare earths, refined fuels, and industrial inputs in which the country already dominates. The conflict may hurt China in the short term, but it is far more likely to reinforce the impression that China is the steadier, more strategically prepared power and increase its global influence.

• Robert Kagan, “America Is Now a Rogue Superpower,” The Atlantic, March 30, 2026. Kagan, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that the Iran war is accelerating the breakdown of the alliance system that has underwritten American power since World War II. The war has hurt Ukraine, unnerved Europe and Asia, diverted forces from the Pacific, and strengthened Russia and China by driving a wedge between Washington and its allies. Trump treats allies less as partners than as dependents to be threatened, bullied, or coerced, which pushes them to hedge and search for alternatives. Kagan concludes that as confidence in American reliability collapses, more countries will hedge, drift away, or align against the United States, ushering in a lonelier and more dangerous era of a rogue superpower.

• Janan Ganesh, “Trump learns that not everyone has a price,” Financial Times, April 1, 2026. Ganesh’s core claim is that Trump misreads the world because he assumes that everyone is ultimately transactional, when in fact states and leaders are often driven by ideology, nationalism, or belief. That is why Iran’s willingness to absorb punishment and Ukraine’s refusal to accept a settlement seem baffling to the President. The problem is compounded by the people around him, many of whom are themselves opportunists rather than true believers capable of explaining how conviction shapes foreign policy. The result is an administration poorly equipped to deal with regimes such as Iran, Russia, or China because the President follows what Ganesh calls a right-wing Marxist ideology that mistakes deeply held commitments for bargaining positions.

• Neri Zilber, “One battle after another: Netanyahu’s new security doctrine,” Financial Times, April 1, 2026. Zilber’s argument is that Netanyahu has moved away from the language of decisive victory toward a doctrine of permanent pre-emption: strike first, hold buffer zones, and accept open-ended conflicts. October 7 marks a turning point for Israeli strategy in the region. While Netanyahu’s supporters argue that his sequence of wars has weakened Israel’s enemies and improved its regional position, critics see it as a post-traumatic reflex rather than a coherent grand strategy that is already straining the IDF. Zilber argues that Netanyahu may be winning battles, but he is leaving the country trapped in a costly and potentially unsustainable state of endless war. I found this map particurlarly striking:

  

• Bret Stephens, “Yes, This Is Your War, Too,” The New York Times, March 31, 2026. Stephens argues that, however understandable the distaste for Trump’s handling of the war may be, America’s allies, Democrats, and the wider public still have a direct stake in an outcome that leaves Iran weaker and less able to cause disruption in the region. He contends that ending the conflict before reopening the Strait of Hormuz would amount to a strategic failure, because Tehran would read it as vindication, Gulf partners would feel abandoned, and Europe lacks the will and means to pick up the burden. His preferred approach is not immediate occupation but coercive pressure, including stopping Iranian oil exports until Iran allows energy flows to resume. Indifference is a luxury no one really has: an emboldened Iran would make the next round of American and allied choices much harder, no matter who is in office.

Finally, this was a very busy week, with America appearing increasingly stuck in Iran with no easy way out, and President Trump repeatedly threatening to leave NATO due to his displeasure with allies. Below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• My POLITICO column explained the shortcomings of President Trump’s tendency to go with his guts and relying on negotiators without the diplomatic skills and knowledge necessary to deal with adversaries like Iran. I delved deeper on how Steve Witkoff likely didn’t understand the deal Iran was offering before the war in America Abroad.

• I argued that the current crisis in NATO is the worst ever in its 77-year history in America Abroad. The piece and argument generated a lot of interest. I spoke to The Guardian, New York Times, The Telegraph, NBC News, Axios, CNN News.

• NATO and Trump’s threats to leave were also major topics of interviews I did this week on MSNOW’s 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, CNN News Central, CNN International, Fox News Rundown Podcast, As It Happens, and All Things Considered.

• I spoke with France24 and Al Jazeera about the President’s speech on the war in Iran.

• I joined Diane Rehm to discuss how Steve Witcoff and Jared Kushner failed to understand Iran's serious proposals.

• Finally, this week’s World Review focused on the implications of the Strait of Hormuz closing, Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon, and Trump’s speech on his objectives in Iran.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Before diving into this week’s read, a couple of things that struck me about the Iran War this week (for my own analysis and perspective, please see links at the end).

• The administration, from the president on down, has made much of how effective the bombing campaign has been – notably with respect to destroying the ballistic missile threat, which was one of the principal reasons for going to war. We’re told, repeatedly, that Iran’s ballistic missile launches are down 90 percent. True. But largely irrelevant. The big question is what does Iran have left, and how much damage it can do. And on this, the news is not good. A report by Reuters cites five intelligence sources to argue the US can confirm that about a third of Iran’s missile arsenal has been destroyed, and perhaps another third buried deep underground and possibly destroyed. That still leaves a third of its arsenal intact. As a result, the rate of Iranian missile and drone fire has remained remarkably consistent – and their effectiveness, the New York Times reports, has steadily increased. Dmitri Alperovitz has tracked Iranian drone and missile strikes and his daily graphs are instructive.

• Iran’s control of the Strait of the Hormuz is a bigger deal than much of the analysis to date appears to assume. Iran is controlling access through the Gulf, making money by sending its own oil and gas through the Strait, and charging others $2 million or more per tanker to cross the Strait. The Trump administration appears to assume that Iran will continue to control access even after the war ends, and isn’t taking the lead in trying to prevent it. “One of the immediate challenges that we are going to face is an Iran that may want to set up a tolling system in the Strait of Hormuz,” Marc Rubio said on Friday. “It is important that the world have a plan to confront it. The U.S. is prepared to be a part of that plan. We don’t have to lead that plan, but we are happy to be a part of it. But these countries have a lot at stake, not just the G7 countries but countries in Asia and all over the world have a lot at stake and should contribute greatly to that effort.”

• Finally, the first US Marines arrived in the region–a month after the war started. Nothing underscores the lack of planning and the best-case assumptions behind “Operation Epic Fury” is the fact that ground forces were not in place in case those assumptions didn’t pan out. All the talk of ground forces – of delivering the “final blow” as Axios reported this week – just underscores how unprepared the administration was when the president decided to go to war. As Lawry Freedman put it in a perceptive take on the state of the war: “Talk of ‘final blows’ should come with flashing warning signs. The language, reflected even more in Hegseth’s hyperbolically belligerent rhetoric, almost as if shouting at the enemy will cause it to surrender, assumes that the enemy’s pain threshold will soon be reached or vital capabilities are about to be lost. None of this reflects any sense of what it takes to defeat a regime fighting for its survival.”

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

• Phil Klay, “Trump Has Made a Fundamental Miscalculation about Iran,” The New York Times, March 22, 2026. Klay, Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq war and author of the book Redeployment, argues that the administration’s case for war is not just incoherent but morally questionable. The stated objectives keep shifting, and the administration seems driven less by strategy than by a fascination with violence, domination, and spectacle. This marks a break with an American tradition of treating war as a grave instrument tied to clear political ends. Using force without clear ends is both strategically foolish and morally corrupting, and may end up strengthening the very regime it seeks to weaken.

• Kim Ghattas, “History is tragically repeating itself in Lebanon,” Financial Times, March 21, 2026. Ghattas, Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute of Global Politics, draws parallels to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which contributed to the creation of Hezbollah and set Lebanon on the path to becoming a recurring battleground. But what is different is the Lebanese government’s response. Ghattas argues the West should be supporting Lebanon in its efforts to counter Hizbollah, rather than sitting on the sidelines for another Israeli occupation that would embolden the militia.

• Lisa Baertlein and Jonathan Saul, “Western powers were unable to secure shipping in the Red Sea. Hormuz will be harder,” Reuters, March 25, 2026. The West struggled to secure shipping against the Houthis despite billions of dollars and a major military effort. Given Iran has better capabilities, a more favorable geography, and more ways to threaten ships than the Houthis did, reopening the Strait of Hormuz will be significantly more difficult. Baertlein and Saul emphasize the scale of the economic stakes and the military reality that even a few mines or drones could keep insurers and shippers away, which is all Tehran may need.

• David French, “‘Everything After This Will Be Harder’: Gen. Stanley McChrystal on Iran,” The New York Times, March 23, 2026. In this podcast, General Stanley McChrystal argues that Americans repeatedly fall for the illusion that covert action, special operations, and air power can produce clean political outcomes. The easy part is the opening bombardment, but the hard part begins once grievances, economic costs, and rising casualties turn the war into a more equal struggle than Washington imagines.

• Nahal Toosi, “Why Marco Rubio Is Escaping the Brunt of Fury Over Iran,” POLITICO, March 24, 2026. Despite his role in reducing the size of the NSC and weakening interagency coordination, Marco Rubio has largely managed to escape criticism over the war against Iran. Toosi argues that this may be a sign that Washington still views Rubio more as Secretary of State than as the man running the National Security Council.

• Marc Daalder, “What I’ve learned (and saved) in my first year owning an EV,” Newsroom, March 24, 2026. As gas prices are going through the roof, some may be thinking about switching to an electric vehicle and abandoning the gas-guzzling internal combustion engine. If you are one of these people, Marc Daalder (yes, we are related) reports on his 10-month experience of owning an EV. Yes, he lives in New Zealand (and therefore his driving habits are more comparable to those in Europe than in the US), but the math (or maths, as they would say down there) is still instructive. And please excuse the shameless plug!

• Nancy A. Youssef and Missy Ryan, “The U.S. and Iran Are Fighting a Massively Asymmetrical War,” The Atlantic, March 25, 2026. Although the US and Israel dominate in conventional military terms, Iran has managed to shift the balance of power in their favor by using low-cost drones and strategic disruption to global trade. The regime does not need to win. It only needs to keep the Strait of Hormuz dangerous and energy markets unstable enough to turn American tactical victories into a war of attrition and frustration.

• Victoria Guida, “Carney’s Grand Ambition On Trade Does Not Include Trump,” POLITICO, March 26, 2026. Guida, Economics correspondent at POLITICIO, describes an emerging effort by Mark Carney and other middle powers to build a trade alignment around the EU and CPTPP that would reduce their exposure to US tariff politics and preserve some version of a rules-based order without Washington at the center. This marks a clear shift in their response. America’s allies are no longer merely complaining about Trump’s trade policy but beginning to organize around the possibility that the US can no longer be relied on to lead.

• Martin Wolf, “We must not underestimate the peril for democracy,” Financial Times, March 25, 2026. Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times, argues that the US has turned into a prime example of democratic deterioration, a global crisis that risks deepening into a democratic depression. His warning is that the real danger is not just bad leadership or polarization but a rapid executive assault on the institutional constraints, legal norms and civic freedoms that make liberal democracy possible in the first place.

• “A Conversation with Antony J. Blinken, 71st U.S. Secretary of State,” Institute of Politics Harvard Kennedy School, March 25, 2026. In this conversation with David Sanger, former Secretary of State Blinken criticizes the Trump administration for failing to make a clear case to the American public for war with Iran. He argues that the old postwar divide between democracy and autocracy is giving way to a messier world of issue-specific coalitions that must still operate by shared rules

Finally, in case you missed it, here are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I spoke to Bloomberg about the strategic implications of the Strait of Hormuz and shared my detailed assessment in America Abroad.

• I wrote in POLITICO and spoke to abcNews about why the war with Iran will have far greater strategic consequences than the war in Iraq in 2003.

• I spoke with Lev Parnas about Iran, Ukraine, North Korea, nuclear proliferation, and Russia.

• I responded to President Trump’s most recent criticisms of NATO in America Abroad.

• Finally, this week’s World Review focused on escalation with Iran, Trump’s criticism of NATO, and recent elections in Europe.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.

Here’s this week’s edition of articles I thought worth reading and sharing. I’m in New Zealand, trying to focus on what these wonderful islands have to offer, so fewer items than normal.

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• Joel Schectman, Christopher M. Matthews, and Vera Bergengruen, “He Was Chevron’s Man in Venezuela—and a CIA Informant,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2026. The Wall Street Journal reports that former Chevron executive Ali Moshir advised the CIA to pursue a managed transition through Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, rather than to install the democratic opposition led by María Corina Machado. Chevron’s continued presence in Venezuela gave it unusual leverage because it was the only major U.S. company still embedded in the country’s oil sector. It now stands to benefit from the development of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

• Kelsey Davenport, “U.S. Negotiators Were Ill-Prepared for Serious Nuclear Negotiations with Iran,” Arms Control Association, March 11, 2026. Davenport, Director of Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Association, argues that the Trump administration never seriously tested whether diplomacy could work because its lead negotiators did not understand the technical components of the negotiation. She takes apart Steve Witkoff’s public claims about the Tehran Research Reactor, arguing that its 20 percent fuel stock was known to the IAEA, stored in fuel assemblies rather than the form needed for easy further enrichment, and did not amount to evidence of covert weapons activity. It was technical ignorance and political impatience that turned a difficult negotiation into a war.

• Muhanad Seloom, “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why,” Al Jazeera, March 16, 2026. Seloom, Assistant Professor of International Politics and Security at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, notes that critics are measuring the war by its immediate costs rather than by its strategic effects. In his view, Iran’s military capabilities, nuclear infrastructure, and proxy networks are all being steadily degraded, serving a clear strategic goal even if the administration’s rhetoric may not sound coherent. While I think Seloom makes an interesting case, I recommend reading Ilan Goldenberg’s response, who argues that these short-term victories are unlikely to translate into long-term strategic benefits.

• Vaughn Hillyard, David Rohde, and Ian Sherwood, “Nuclear experts undercut White House claims about Iran reactor at heart of case for war,” MS NOW, March 9, 2026. The Trump administration made the Tehran Research Reactor central to its public justification for strikes, yet experts interviewed for this article argue the reactor cannot do what officials implied, and there is no public evidence it was being used as a facility to build a nuclear weapon. Witkoff and Kushner reportedly participated in the negotiations without nuclear specialists, skipped the technical follow-up talks, and went to war before demonstrating that the reactor posed the urgent threat the White House claimed.

• Lawrence Freedman, “The Split-Screen War,” March 15, 2026. Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, masterfully dissects the total lack of US strategy in Iran. The war must be watched on two screens at once: on one, the US and Israel dominate Iranian airspace; on the other, Iran is still managing to threaten shipping routes, energy production, and the wider regional economy. His point is that Tehran planned for regime survival and regional disruption, while Washington and Jerusalem seem to have assumed the regime would crack quickly under pressure. The issue is not that Iran is plainly “winning,” but that US-Israeli airpower has not produced the political collapse it was hoping for. As the fighting continues, the economic consequences of the war are increasing the pressure on Washington to find a way out.

Finally, in case you missed it, here are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I was interviewed by Yannis Palaiologos for the Greek newspaper Kathimerini on the war against Iran.

• Finally, this week’s World Review focused on the ongoing war in Iran, shifting US-China relations, and the evolving situation in Cuba. The episode will also be streamed on WBEZ on Sunday morning.

Happy reading, watching, and listening!

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

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• Jacob Judah, Bob Haslett and Alan Smith, “The hunt for Iran’s ballistic missile crews,” Financial Times, March 8, 2026. The piece describes the challenge Iranian missile crews face as they seek to avoid detection by US and Israeli forces. Crews often only have minutes after a launch to hide their vehicle under nearby bridges or in tunnels. Given the importance of the launch vehicles to the Iranian effort, they have been one of the primary targets of air strikes on the country. The failure of Iranian air defenses means this cat-and-mouse game is stacked heavily against Iran.

• Richard Haass, “America chose this war — and must now choose how to end it,” Financial Times, March 8, 2026. Haass, President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, describes the current war against Iran as a textbook war of choice, arguing this raises the pressure on President Trump to demonstrate results that justify the costs. With mounting costs of dead US service members, spiking energy prices, and attacks on allies in the region, and poor prospects of regime change leading to a democratic Iran, the administration must decide when and how to end this war. But Haass notes ending the war may be more difficult than starting it, requiring the US, Israel and Iran to agree to an end of hostilities.

• Chrystia Freeland, “The Great Capitulation Is Over. What Will Take Its Place?,” The New York Times, February 25, 2026. Freeland, the former Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Finance of Canada, describes 2025 as the year of the great capitulation by media organization, law firms and universities to the Trump administration. Self-doubt risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy and everyone who choses to appease President Trump’s maximalist demands makes it more difficult for others to stand firm, but courage can also be contagious. She argues that we should resist accepting this right-wing populism as the new normal: President Trump’s narrow win over Harris was not a sign of a global shift toward the extreme right, but rather a post-Covid pushback against incumbents.

• Francis Fukuyama, “What ‘Western Civilization’ Really Means,” March 3, 2026. Fukuyama, Senior Fellow at Stanford University and author of The End of History, looks at Marco Rubio’s use of the term “Western Civilization” in his speech at the Munich Security Conference. Fukuyama argues that abolishing classes on Western civilization has left students vulnerable to arguments defining it in terms of religion, heritage or ancestry, rather than the liberal values like openness, tolerance and skepticism that have long been at the core of what is truly western.

• Sophia Yan, “In the scarred border mountains of Iran, hopes of an uprising fade,” The Telegraph, March 11, 2026. Yan, Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Telegraph, reports from the Iraq-Ian border that the idea of the CIA or others arming Kurdish militias for a possible ground invasion of Iran do not match the lived experience of Kurdish communities living on the border. Repeated fighting has left a permanent scar on the region and hopes of an uprising on the other side of the border are slim.

• Isaac Chotiner, “The Lawlessness of Trump’s War in Iran,” The New Yorker, March 10, 2026. In this interview with Oona Hathaway, Professor at Yale Law School and president-elect of the American Society of International Law, Chotiner unpacks the war against Iran from from an international law perspective. Most worrying are the ongoing efforts by DoD to dismantle some of the international protections limiting how force is to be used, which may result in a greater number of civilian casualties.

• Alec Russell, “Middle East War Explained: US and Israeli Attacks on Iran and the Global Fallout,” Financial Times Webinar, March 11, 2026. In this webinar, FT Foreign Editor Alec Russell is joined by FT columnists Gideon Rachman, Kim Ghattas, Edward Luce and Katie Martin to examine the political, military and economic calculations of the war against Iran. They argue the conflict could fundamentally reshape regional power dynamics, with consequences well beyond the Middle East.

Finally, in case you missed it, here are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I wrote in NOTUS about what Iran might look like in a year.

• I argued that hubris is the best explanation for President Trump’s decision to go to war in Iran in America Abroad.

• Finally, this week’s World Review focused on the war in Iran, implications for global security, and the shifting dynamics in international alliances amidst chaos in the Middle East.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe and stay warm.

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

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• Nahal Toosi, “Forget Regime Change. How About Behavior Change?,” POLITICO, March 3, 2026. Toosi, POLITICO’s Senior Foreign Affairs Correspondent, argues that President Trump’s aim in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba is not traditional regime change but rather behaviour change, forcing the regimes to engage with the US on his terms. Ending Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs and support for terrorist groups may suffice for Trump to declare victory. But the administration has shown no willingness to commit to the messy state-building process that would need to follow a regime change. How the conflict in Iran evolves may have have implications for how leaders in Venezuela and Cuba choose to respond to his demands.

• Dana Stroul, “America and Israel’s War to Remake the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, March 4, 2026. Stroul, Director of Research at the Washington Institute and former Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, reports that over the past six years the US-Israeli military relationship has evolved into a true operational partnership, accelerated when Trump in 2020 ordered Israel’s inclusion in CENTCOM. She describes a relationship increasingly defined by shared intelligence, shared operational experience, and a deeper integration of planning and execution than in earlier eras of the alliance. But she warns that this military convergence is colliding with growing political divergence: Israelis remain broadly supportive of the war while American support is far weaker, producing the widest gap in public opinion between the two societies in memory. This combination of military integration and political distancing raises risks for both countries and for the current war effort.

• Laura Rozen, “Was diplomacy with Iran really doomed to fail?,” March 4, 2026. Rozen, the Al-Monitor’s diplomatic correspondent, suggests that diplomacy with Iran wasn’t inherently “doomed to fail” and that the Trump administration’s claim that Iran flatly rejected a reasonable deal is not supported by what Trump’s own negotiators have since described. It looks like the administration abandoned diplomacy prematurely because the President’s chief negotiatior Steve Witkoff fundamentally misunderstood the Iranian positions and was operating under an artificial, rushed timetable that pushed Trump toward backing Israel’s move to war before negotiations were exhausted.

• Dasha Burns, “Trump says he’ll help pick Iran’s leader, predicts regime change in Cuba,” POLITICO, March 5, 2026. Burns, White House Bureau Chief for POLITICO, writes about a combative phone interview with President Trump in which he brushed off domestic blowback over the Iran war. The President still seems to think that Iran is like Venezuela and he will be able to pick the Ayatollah’s successor. Just like 12 of his predecessors, he seems to think that regime change in Cuba is a foregone conclusion. He went on to blame Zelenskyy for failing to end a war Trump had promised to end within 24 hours, while asking Ukrainians to support defending US forces from Iranian drones. The President continues to boast about the military strength he has built, but to what ends remains unclear.

• Henry Mance, “Did Britain need to strike the Chagos deal?,” Financial Times, February 28, 2026. Mance, the FT’s Chief Features Writer, argues that the agreement with Mauritius was necessary to reduce the risk to a key US-UK joint military asset. The war against Iran has once again raised the strategic value of the Chagos islands on the political agenda. President Trump has changed his position on the Chagos deal several times, increasing the pressure on Starmer who faces criticism from the Reform Party for “giving up” the islands. The debate over the islands raises larger questions about the global role of the United Kingdom and its empire in the current geopolitical environment.

• Jane Perlez and Rana Mitter, “The Black Box: Inside China’s Military Mind,” Face-Off: The U.S. vs China Podcast, March 3, 2026. In this episode with Colonel Zhou, a Retired Senior Colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, Perlez and Mitter ask him about Xi Jinping’s sweeping purge of senior generals in the Chinese military and China’s perspective on recent geopolitical developments, from Ukraine, to Greenland and Venezuela.

• Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, “Iran After Khamenei & Pentagon vs. Anthropic,” The Long Game Podcast, March 5, 2026. In this episode with Karim Sadjadpour, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and Contributing Writer for The Atlantic, Sullivan and Finer unpack the strikes that killed Ayatollah Khamenei and what comes next in Iran, warning that we should not expect a democratic opening anytime soon.

Finally, in case you missed it, here are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I wrote in POLITICO on how the Iran War contradicts all six criteria for the use of force known as rhetorical “Weinberger Doctrine.”

• I joined the POLITICO Brussels Playbook Podcast last week to discuss how the role of US ambassadors has evolved under the Trump administration.

• I sat down with Diane Rehm to discuss the U.S. strike on Iran, the underlying motivations and what happens next.

• I appeared on Bloomberg with Katie Greifeld and Romaine Bostick to discuss how the war in Iran could evolve.

• Finally, this week’s World Review focused on the war in Iran, the economic and political shockwave it has caused around the world, and the Pentagon’s ongoing war with Anthropic.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe and stay warm.