What Caught My Eye (no. 68)
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.
Jill Lepore, “Was the Declaration of Independence Better Before the Edits?” The New Yorker, May 4, 2026. In an essay drawn from her forthcoming book Declare: A Civic Gospel, Lepore reconstructs the drafting and editing of the Declaration of Independence as a story about what gets said and, more revealingly, what gets cut — arguing that Congress’s most consequential deletion was Jefferson’s twenty-eighth grievance, a passage condemning the slave trade that was struck not only at the insistence of South Carolina and Georgia but because, as historians have noted, its hypocrisy was simply too glaring to survive. Jefferson’s draft also included provisions abolishing slavery entirely in Virginia and granting women equal inheritance rights, both edited out before the document left Williamsburg. Lepore traces the Declaration’s long afterlife through the waves of independence movements it inspired globally, and through the counter-tradition of Black abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and pro-slavery Southerners who each rewrote it to suit their purposes — arguing that the document’s contested editing never really stopped. The piece closes with Lincoln at Independence Hall in February 1861, offering what Lepore frames as the Declaration’s most honest abridgment: the promise that “the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men” — and the question of whether that promise endures left, pointedly, open.
Gordon Rayner, “Simon Case: Burnham will have to be honest or he will go the same way as the last five PMs,”The Telegraph, June 27, 2026. In his first major interview since leaving Whitehall, former Cabinet secretary Lord Simon Case offers a pointed diagnosis of Britain’s revolving-door premiership problem — seven prime ministers in a decade — arguing the common thread has been a failure to be honest with the public about hard choices. Drawing on close-up experience of David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak, and Keir Starmer, Case characterizes the era as one of “cakeism”: politicians telling voters what they want to hear rather than confronting structural realities. He is cautiously optimistic that Andy Burnham could break the cycle, but only if he is prepared to be radical and make genuine choices rather than default to Starmer’s “Ming vase strategy” of cautious incrementalism. On defense, Case argues Britain should be targeting 3.5% of GDP now and 5% within twenty years, given the looming reality of a US-China confrontation. The interview closes on a personal note — Case recounting the moment he told Liz Truss the Queen had died, ending the call with “God Save the King” — a detail that captures both his ringside seat to history and the human weight of it.
Barak Ravid, “Behind the scenes: How shared fear of Iran led to an Israel-Lebanon deal,” Axios, June 28, 2026. Ravid reconstructs four days of bruising negotiations in Washington that produced the most significant political agreement between Israel and Lebanon in four decades — driven less by mutual goodwill than by a shared interest in curbing Iranian and Hezbollah influence. The talks nearly collapsed twice: first when a U.S.-Iran side deal struck in Switzerland appeared to legitimize Iran’s role in Lebanese security, shocking both Israeli and Lebanese delegations; and again when Netanyahu himself hit the brakes, prompting a heated call in which Israeli Ambassador Leiter pressed his prime minister hard to close. The final push came from Rubio, who joined the room Friday morning and personally bridged the remaining gaps, with Trump’s deadline pressure making clear to both sides that delay was not an option. Hezbollah declared the deal “null and void” and a “humiliation,” managed only a few hundred protesters, and had its pro-Iran street posters replaced by Lebanese government banners reading “Lebanon first” — some of which were promptly burned. All parties, Ravid notes, are aware the vision of peace the framework lays out may never materialize.
Yaroslav Trofimov, “Putin Faces a Political Crisis as Fuel Shortages Ripple Through Russia,” The Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2026. Ukraine’s sustained drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure has crossed a threshold: with 28% of Russia’s refining capacity offline following the destruction of Moscow’s main refinery on June 18, the country that was once a major petroleum exporter is now planning to import fuel for the first time in decades. The shortages are nationwide — miles-long queues, overnight waits, portable toilets at Siberian fuel lines, brawls at Krasnodar pumps, black-market gasoline at $25 a gallon in Crimea — and the improvised rationing systems, one analyst notes, carry echoes of Soviet-era privation. Putin’s acknowledgment of the crisis, rather than leaving it to lesser officials, is itself a signal of its severity; as one economist puts it, the problem had become “so widespread that it would be dangerous for Putin not to address it.” The timing is acute: parliamentary elections are scheduled for September, and even in an unfree vote, fuel lines color public mood. The piece closes with a pointed comment from the CEO of one of Ukraine’s main long-range drone manufacturers: “We keep pecking, pecking, pecking at them, and I start to see light at the end of the tunnel.”
Sam Altman, “This is how we can make AI safe for everyone,” Financial Times, July 1, 2026. OpenAI’s chief executive argues that the world cannot safely distribute AI’s benefits without first establishing global safety standards — and that democratic governments, not Silicon Valley labs, must set those rules. Altman proposes a US-led international forum modelled on precedents like the IAEA and aviation safety bodies, in which member countries adhere to agreed standards and companies undergo regular certification in exchange for access to advanced systems. The piece is notable for its self-limiting framing: Altman explicitly warns against power becoming too concentrated and calls for governance mechanisms that guard against “commercial pressures that can lead to unsafe racing” — a pointed acknowledgment that his own industry needs external checks. The most important decisions about how AI is used, he writes, “should be made through democratic processes, not by a small number of companies in San Francisco.”
Edward Wong, “How the Iran War Ignited a Clash Between Trump and the Saudi Crown Prince,” The New York Times, July 1, 2026. Wong reconstructs a US-Saudi relationship under serious strain — most vividly illustrated by the collapse of “Project Freedom,” the Pentagon’s plan to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz, which Riyadh killed within 48 hours by denying American forces use of Saudi airspace, fearing it would reignite the war. The episode triggered a frantic five-way White House lobbying effort — Trump, Vance, Witkoff, Kushner, and Rubio all called Riyadh — and the crown prince stood his ground regardless. Wong traces the deeper dynamic: MBS has spent the year navigating between American aggression and Iranian persistence, at various points urging both escalation and ceasefire, while quietly deepening ties with China and Pakistan and conducting direct talks with Tehran on missiles and militia support — issues Saudi Arabia considers more pressing than the nuclear file that Washington is fixated on. The piece captures a Gulf psychology fundamentally altered by Iran’s seizure of the strait: “Now Iran has this sword of Damocles that they can hold over the Gulf economy and the global economy.” As one analyst puts it, the Saudis feel like Charlie Brown watching Lucy pull away the football — again.
Edward Carr, “The Wrecking-Ball Revolution,” The Economist, July 2, 2026. In a sweeping essay timed to America’s 250th anniversary, The Economist‘s foreign editor argues that the Trump administration is not merely revising the post-war international order but actively demolishing the system America itself built — driven less by ideology than by the opportunism of a leader who “cares nothing for the institutions that were entrusted to him.” Carr frames the revolution through three historical analogies: 1776 (a new social contract that created universal claims America is now abandoning), 1848 (revolutions that stalled without restoring the old order, producing Bismarckian realpolitik in their wake), and 1789 (a reasonable reform movement that ended in the Terror). The essay is most arresting on the second-order effects: a scramble for nuclear weapons among states that no longer trust American security guarantees, chokepoint exploitation by Iran and others, arms races feeding on themselves, and a “doom loop” in which the stabilising force of globalisation is replaced by zero-sum predation. The darkest note is sounded not by Carr but by Francis Fukuyama: “I’m scared.” The piece closes with a warning that, like all the revolutions it invokes, this one has already taken on a logic of its own — and may not stop until the wreckage is complete.
Jonathan Kirshner, “The Strong Do What They Can—and Suffer What They Must,” Foreign Affairs, July 3, 2026. Kirshner argues that the Trump administration’s invocation of Thucydides to justify raw-power realism gets the ancient historian precisely backwards: the Melian Dialogue, far from celebrating Athenian strength, is a carefully constructed prelude to catastrophe, placed immediately before Thucydides’s account of the disastrous Sicilian expedition to make the link between hubris and ruin unmistakable. The piece dismantles the cottage industry of commentators — Niall Ferguson prominent among them — who cite the “strong do what they can” passage as Thucydidean endorsement of might-makes-right, pointing out that Thucydides deploys “extreme narrative deceleration” to instil moral lessons he never states directly. Kirshner shows that the Melians, though militarily crushed, win the debate on the merits: their warning that unchecked brutality turns neutrals into enemies is borne out by Athens’s own eventual isolation and defeat. The real Thucydidean trap, Kirshner concludes, is not the structural collision between rising and established powers, but the self-defeating arrogance that great powers mistake for strength — a lesson the current administration shows no sign of having absorbed.
Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.
I wrote two pieces on this year’s Atlas of Impunity, on whose advisory board I sit—an America Abroad piece on the great divergence in the data on my Politico Europe column on how an increasingly unaccountable America helps explain today’s transatlantic crisis.
This week’s World Review was a special July 4th edition that looks at what the US means to the world. It was an extraordinary conversation, and I urge you to listen to it.
Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.