What Caught My Eye (no. 67)
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.
Rosa Brooks, “How the War on Terror Primed America for Autocracy,” The Economist, June 2. Brooks argues that the September 11 attacks did not themselves threaten American democracy — al-Qaeda posed no existential danger to a nation of America’s size and wealth — but that the self-inflicted overreaction did: two decades of forever wars, expanded surveillance, executive overreach, and normalized due-process violations hollowed out the republic from within. Brooks traces a direct line from the PATRIOT Act and Abu Ghraib through Obama-era drone strikes and the steady militarisation of domestic policing, showing how emergency powers quietly became permanent fixtures of American governance. The psychological toll ran alongside the institutional one — a nation jolted out of its sense of invulnerability turned inward, fuelling Islamophobia, conspiracy theories, and accelerating political polarisation. By the time Trump arrived, Brooks argues, the groundwork had already been laid: a populace habituated to executive dominance and a Congress that had long since ceded its authority. She closes with a sharp historical sting: “it’s hard not to imagine Mad King George gazing out at Donald Trump’s America — and laughing.”
John F. Harris, “The Generational Disaster of Trump, Bush and Clinton,” Politico, June 14. With all three men turning 80 this summer, POLITICO’s founding editor argues that Clinton, Bush, and Trump — born within months of each other in 1946 — share a collective responsibility for the degradation of American political life, even as they differ sharply in temperament and culpability. Harris’s case is not the standard boomer critique: he credits the generation with genuine cultural and technological creativity, but singles out its political legacy as uniquely corrosive, defined by a moralistic “which side are you on” tribalism that took root on Vietnam-era campuses and never let go. Each president intensified the pathology in his own way — Clinton and Gingrich turning governance into morality theatre, Bush making national security a partisan battleground, Trump weaponising social media grievance into a self-sustaining political movement. A distinctive signature of this generation’s politics, Harris argues, is that the argument itself has become the point — untethered from policy substance and therefore immune to compromise or resolution. The epitaph he offers is bleak: the cohort “will keep demanding to know ‘which side are you on’ until the answer is ‘the side that is six feet underground.’”
Daniel B. Shapiro, “What Did You Expect?,” The Atlantic, June 17. Shapiro argues that Trump’s abrupt reversal on Iran — from “maximum pressure” warmonger to dealmaker offering sanctions relief, asset releases, and a $300 billion reconstruction fund — is not an aberration but the predictable result of Trump’s character playing out on a high-stakes national security matter. He walks through the gap between stated war aims and outcome on four fronts: the nuclear program’s enrichment and verification questions are merely punted rather than resolved, sanctions relief flows to the regime with no behavioral change, Israel was sidelined from the ceasefire negotiations and pressured to restrain operations against Hezbollah, and the same regime Trump once called uniquely evil is now flattered as reasonable. Shapiro traces the collapse to recognizable Trump traits — overconfidence in his own power to bend reality, susceptibility to strongman flattery, and a tendency to bail at the first sign of political cost once the war grew unpopular at the pump. The piece closes on a grim assessment that this outcome makes the JCPOA, the deal Trump once scorned, look ironclad by comparison.
Max Seddon, Fabrice Deprez, “Vladimir Putin’s War Machine Sputters in Drone Age,” Financial Times, June 21. Seddon and Deprez document a decisive shift in the war’s character: Ukraine’s mid- and long-range drone strikes have hit refineries, air bases, and convoys deep inside Russia, while Moscow’s territorial gains have collapsed from 1,151 sq km a year ago to just 164 sq km between February and May. The reporting traces this to a structural change in warfare itself — “robotification” means Ukraine now needs thousands of drone operators rather than hundreds of thousands of infantry, eroding Russia’s traditional manpower advantage at a moment when Russian recruitment is already falling short of battlefield losses. Russia’s elite Rubikon drone unit has failed to close the gap, hampered by a defense sector running near capacity and an economy with record-low unemployment, while Putin himself appears insulated by military briefings that keep him convinced victory is just a matter of time. The authors don’t underestimate the challenges facing Ukraine, though — Russian gliding-bomb strikes continue grinding forward in Donbas, a problem Kyiv “hasn’t managed to find a solution for,” underscoring that technological asymmetry cuts in different directions depending on the front.
Winston Ma, “Trump is Taking a Page Out of China’s Sovereign AI Playbook,” Financial Times, June 18. Ma argues that the US and China have independently arrived at the same conclusion — that frontier AI is too strategically important to leave to private markets — and are both moving state capital into the AI stack, from chips upward to models. The proximate evidence: Trump’s proposal that the US government take equity stakes in OpenAI and xAI, and China’s sovereign AI fund becoming the sole investor with direct ownership and voting rights in DeepSeek’s first external funding round, valuing it at over $50bn. Ma frames this through Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s five-layer infrastructure stack — energy, chips, cloud, models, applications — and shows that both governments are climbing it in parallel, with China a decade ahead at the chip layer and now extending into models. The distinction between subsidy and ownership matters enormously, he argues: once governments become shareholders in frontier AI labs, those companies face irresolvable tensions between commercial returns, national security objectives, and global market ambitions. The next frontier, Ma warns, may be the ownership and governance of intelligence itself.
Ernest Moniz, “Ex-Energy Secretary Moniz Breaks Down Challenges of Nuclear Negotiations with Iran,” PBS NewsHour, June 23. In this interview with anchor Amna Nawaz, the chief architect and lead technical negotiator of the 2015 JCPOA delivers a pointed assessment of where the current US-Iran nuclear talks fall dangerously short. Moniz’s core concern is verification: the existing memorandum of understanding promises IAEA access to declared nuclear sites, but the JCPOA’s real teeth lay in inspector access to undeclared, potentially covert sites — with a 24-day window to prevent cleanup before inspection — and he sees no evidence the current framework replicates that. On enriched uranium, he flags Iran’s stockpile of 60-percent-enriched material as the first-order problem, noting that while it falls short of the 90-percent weapons-grade threshold, it is more than sufficient to build a bomb with slightly more material. He is openly skeptical that the 60-day negotiating timeline is adequate for the kind of detailed, loophole-closing agreement that actually constrains a nuclear program, warning that “ambiguity is something that can be manipulated.” His implicit verdict on the current team: competent technical assets exist in the national laboratories, but using them effectively requires knowing which questions to ask.
Joyu Wang, “China’s Assertions of Authority Over Foreign Ships Near Taiwan Draw U.S. Rebuke,” The Wall Street Journal, June 24. Wang reports on a five-day Chinese coast guard operation earlier this month in waters east of Taiwan, during which Beijing issued direct commands to foreign commercial vessels — demanding port entry details and asserting jurisdiction — in what US, UK, French, and German officials have collectively condemned as destabilizing to regional stability and freedom of navigation. The operation, which China justified on procedural grounds related to Japan-Philippines maritime negotiations, is being read by analysts as something more ominous: a rehearsal for a naval quarantine of Taiwan, advancing incrementally to avoid triggering a decisive response. Stanford’s Raymond Powell describes the strategy as a boa constrictor rather than a viper — “each squeeze is incremental enough to explain away, but the pressure grows ever tighter” — and warns that radio challenges today lay the groundwork for boarding and redirecting ships tomorrow.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, “Behind the Curtain: America’s Great Political Implosion,” Axios, June 25. VandeHei and Allen survey a political landscape in simultaneous meltdown on multiple fronts: MAGA fracturing between Trump loyalists and true “America First” believers over the Iran war, democratic socialists backed by New York’s Zohran Mamdani winning primaries and terrifying establishment Democrats, and a generational collapse in support for Israel remaking both parties as Pew finds 60 percent of Americans now view Israel unfavorably. The throughline is a cross-partisan populist fury — over endless war, soaring prices, and elite impunity — that is consuming incumbents and party establishments alike, with AI emerging as the next accelerant as young voters across party lines increasingly see it as a machine for enriching billionaires at the expense of ordinary workers. The electoral picture that results is one of radical uncertainty: House control a toss-up, the Senate potentially splitting 50-50, and the 2028 presidential field wide open on both sides. The closing data point lands with force: in a new Gallup poll timed to the nation’s 250th anniversary, more than three-quarters of Americans said the founders would be disappointed with how the country has turned out.
Rachel Sylvester, “Burnham Has Been Sphinxlike on Foreign Policy. That Is About to Change,” The Observer, June 25. With Andy Burnham set to succeed Keir Starmer as UK prime minister, Sylvester offers the first serious attempt to map his foreign policy instincts — and finds a leader who is more political, more economically focused, and less reflexively Atlanticist than his predecessor. Where Starmer is a human rights lawyer, Burnham is a self-described realist shaped by Iraq: he backed the war, regrets it, and has absorbed the lesson that civilian casualties breed radicalization — an instinct that put him ahead of Starmer on Gaza ceasefire calls and will inform how he handles the Middle East. On Europe, Burnham is privately more committed to the EU than Starmer ever was, and allies believe the political logic is clear — the voters Labour has lost to the Greens and Lib Dems are overwhelmingly pro-rejoin. On Trump, Burnham will neither play whisperer nor engineer a confrontation, betting instead that personal charm and a reputation as a winner will be sufficient currency. The organizing principle of the whole approach is what Sylvester calls the “Makerfield test”: every foreign relationship will be judged by whether it drives down the cost of living, cuts energy bills, or reduces Channel crossings.
Yaroslav Trofimov, Thomas Grove, “Ukrainian Strikes Turn Crimea From Prize Asset to Liability for Putin,”The Wall Street Journal, June 26. Trofimov and Grove report that Ukraine’s campaign of over 100 drone strikes daily has pushed Crimea into a state of emergency — fuel banned from civilian sale, power outages spreading, tourists fleeing, and some 2,500 vehicles queued to escape via the Kerch Bridge — turning Putin’s signature 2014 acquisition from a strategic rear base into an isolated liability. The reporting traces a methodical isolation operation: Kyiv has destroyed bridges, railway tracks, fuel depots, ferries, and port facilities while targeting supply trucks on the Novorossiya highway, with one Kyiv defense analyst describing it as “a classic isolation operation” that typically precedes offensive action. The strategic reversal is compounding at a politically sensitive moment — Russian parliamentary elections loom, public discontent over fuel shortages is mounting, and Putin’s generals have been feeding him overly optimistic battlefield assessments that left him blindsided by Crimea’s vulnerability. The reporters close on a pointed human detail: with panic spreading on the ground, residents report buying black-market gasoline from soldiers at several times the normal price, while one Sevastopol woman says she has been taking sedatives for six weeks to manage panic attacks amid the strikes, outages, and water cuts.
Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.
I discussed how the White House’s effort to spin the Iran MoU into a win was unserious and would convince no one on America Abroad.
I was interviewed by the BBC on the G7 Summit’s statement on Ukraine.
I spoke to Bloomberg’s Balance of Power about NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s visit with President Trump.
This week’s World Review focused on Iran, Ukraine, and Brexit. Last week’s World Review discussed the geopolitics of the World Cup.
Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.