What Caught My Eye (no. 60)
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.
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.