What Caught My Eye (no. 53)

Some interesting articles and podcasts that caught my eye this week

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.

• 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.