What Caught My Eye (no. 65)
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.
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.