What Caught My Eye (no. 69)

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.

• Tyler Pager and Anatoly Kurmanaev, “How Marco Rubio Is Running Venezuela From Afar,” The New York Times, July 11, 2026. The piece reveals that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has become the de facto “viceroy” of Venezuela, controlling the country’s finances, natural resources, and government in an arrangement of foreign dominance unseen since the U.S. occupation of Iraq in 2003. Reporting details how the U.S. Treasury collects Venezuela’s export revenue and disburses it back under conditions set by Rubio’s team, giving Washington leverage over interim leader Delcy Rodríguez down to approving her social media posts and cabinet picks. The article traces the arrangement’s origins to Rubio’s post-capture phone call with Rodríguez, in which she agreed to “do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” and follows its evolution through oil deals, the extradition of Maduro associate Alex Saab, and a joint strike that killed a Tren de Aragua leader. It closes on the unresolved question of when elections might finally be held — a decision the piece notes now rests with Rubio, not Rodríguez.

• Yaroslav Trofimov, “Aspiring to Regional Domination, Iran Is Ready to Escalate Over Hormuz,” The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2026. Trofimov argues that Tehran, believing it emerged from February’s 40-day war as a regional hegemon, is now escalating over the Strait of Hormuz to institutionalize control over the waterway and, by extension, the Gulf economies that depend on it. He details how the latest clashes began when Iran attacked vessels transiting via Omani waters to avoid its tolls, prompting Washington to revoke a sanctions waiver and trade further strikes, while analysts note the ambiguity of who truly holds power in Tehran given new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s total public absence since being injured in the strikes that killed his father. The Journal’s chief foreign affairs correspondent traces a broader realignment, with Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar sending funeral delegations to Tehran despite public snubs, concluding that both Washington and Tehran believe they won the war, which is precisely why the brinkmanship continues. As one Iran expert put it, the regime’s takeaway is that concessions come only through coercion, so it will keep pushing until it faces real costs.

• Carlos Lozada, “JD Vance Is Worried,” The New York Times, July 7, 2026. This review of Vance’s new memoir “Communion” argues that beneath the vice president’s account of his religious journey from evangelicalism to Catholicism lies a darker preoccupation: a belief that Western Christian civilization is losing a struggle against “secular global liberalism,” a decline he blames for racial strife and falling birthrates. Lozada traces this theme through Vance’s public record, from his 2024 RNC claim that “America is not just an idea” to his Munich Security Conference warnings about immigration as Europe’s chief internal threat, showing how "Communion" recasts Christianity, rather than America's founding documents, as the country's defining creed. Lozada depicts a vice president prone to conspiratorial “doomer” thinking, including a 2020 pandemic-prep buying spree and a fixation on hidden plots after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Lozada is unsparing on Vance’s blind spots, particularly his refusal to reckon with the Springfield, Ohio pet-eating rumors he spread during the campaign, closing with a dry needle: “It’s just as the hymn says: They’ll know we are Christians by our constant evaluation of trade-offs.”

• David Miliband, “Kings, Priests and Prophets: The Sacks Annual Memorial Lecture 2026,” Rabbi Sacks Legacy, 2026. In this lecture honoring the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee, uses Sacks’s framework of Judaism’s “three crowns” — Kingship, Priesthood, and Prophecy — to argue that unchecked power requires countervailing institutional and moral checks, a balance he says is collapsing worldwide. He marshals data showing global democracy has regressed to 1978 levels and autocracies now outnumber democracies, attributing the “great reversal” to four converging forces: unmanageable global risks, the West’s relative economic decline, surging wealth inequality, and a technological revolution outpacing regulation. Drawing on economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s concept of “countervailing power,” Miliband proposes five renewal areas — devolving UK power from Westminster, defending independent institutions, fixing the broken information ecosystem, expanding deliberative democracy, and electoral reform — framing each as a way to rebuild trust rather than merely defend the status quo. He closes by invoking Sacks’s own words, that society is “a home where we contribute, not just a hotel where we consume,” urging listeners to become leaders who both defend democratic inheritance and innovate to renew it.

• Demis Hassabis, “A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age,” X, July 14, 2026. In this essay, the Google DeepMind CEO argues that AGI is only a few years away and compares its likely impact to the discovery of fire or electricity rather than prior technological revolutions, promising a potential era of abundance through breakthroughs in drug discovery, clean energy, and materials science. He warns that intense commercial and geopolitical competition is pushing capabilities ahead of society’s understanding of the risks, particularly around cybersecurity, bio-threats, and control of increasingly agentic, self-improving systems. As a remedy, Hassabis proposes a U.S.-led “Frontier AI Standards Body,” modeled on FINRA’s public-private structure, that would test models against evolving benchmarks, initially through voluntary pre-release review before likely becoming mandatory, with the aim of seeding a broader international framework. He closes by stressing that even if the technical challenges are solved, society still faces unresolved questions about economic models, values, and meaning in a post-scarcity world — declaring that “resolving these questions obviously cannot and should not be left to technologists alone.

• Alec Russell, Abigail Hauslohner, and Ian Hodgson, “RIP the US State Department,” Financial Times, July 13, 2026. The FT reporters chart the hollowing out of America’s diplomatic corps under Trump’s second term, noting that more than half of US ambassadorships sit vacant and the department’s workforce has shrunk by over 20 percent, with career foreign service officers sidelined in favor of confidants like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. Drawing on interviews with veteran diplomats, they argue the damage exceeds even the McCarthy-era purge of China expertise, with critics tying the fragile U.S.-Iran memorandum’s collapse directly to the absence of seasoned negotiators at the table. It also traces an internal culture war, centered on the conservative Ben Franklin Fellowship, over whether the department had become a liberal echo chamber in need of correction or is simply being gutted for loyalty rather than expertise. The reporters close on a sober note from Bill Burns, who warns that unlike after Trump’s first term, this time the damage may be generational rather than something a future administration can simply reverse.

• Mark Mazzetti, Julian E. Barnes, Farnaz Fassihi, and Ronen Bergman, “Inside Israel’s Secret Operation to Install Ahmadinejad, Iran’s Former President, as Leader,” The New York Times, July 13, 2026. The Times reveals a years long Israeli intelligence effort to groom former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as an asset who could eventually be installed as Iran’s leader, using a Budapest climate conference as cover for meetings with Mossad’s then-chief David Barnea. Reporting details how the plan culminated in late February, when Israeli operatives allegedly extracted Ahmadinejad from Tehran in a black Peugeot following a strike on his compound, only for him to grow disillusioned and vanish, reportedly now held under IRGC house arrest. The article traces Ahmadinejad’s post-presidency reinvention, from shedding his khaki windbreaker for tailored suits to privately telling associates he saw himself as a Yeltsin-style reformer who would normalize ties with Israel, while Iranian officials say his outreach to Trump and Saudi Arabia’s crown prince had already drawn Revolutionary Guards suspicion years earlier. It closes on his lone, masked appearance at Khamenei’s funeral procession, standing silent and flanked by guards, the first time he’d been seen in public since the botched rescue.

• Allegra Mendelson and Mariana Hallal, “This Satellite Imagery Reveals Just How Advanced China’s Military Is,” The Telegraph, July 15, 2026. Drawing on satellite imagery analysis, this astonishing piece of reporting documents an extensive network of full-scale military training replicas in China’s Taklamakan desert and elsewhere, including mock-ups of the USS Gerald Ford, Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, F-22s and F-35s, and Japan’s Yokosuka Naval Base, all bearing damage consistent with live missile tests. It details particularly elaborate replicas of Taiwan’s presidential district in Taipei, connected by a 280km tunnel network built to simulate leaders fleeing underground, which experts say points toward rehearsals for ground troops storming the capital. Geo-intelligence analysts quoted in the piece describe the precision and specificity of the replicas as evidence of deliberate rehearsal against named adversaries rather than generic training, with one calling the scale “unprecedented.” The article closes by framing the imagery itself as a form of deterrent signaling, warning Japan, the U.S., and Taiwan alike of Beijing’s operational intentions should a Taiwan conflict erupt.

• Anthony Lane, “How Worldy Is the World Cup?,” The New Yorker, July 17, 2026. In this wry dispatch on the closing days of the 2026 World Cup, Lane skewers FIFA’s Super Bowl-style halftime spectacle plans for Sunday’s Spain-Argentina final while dissecting France’s shock semifinal collapse against Spain, in which the tournament’s early stars lost their composure just when it mattered most. He argues the tournament’s expansion to forty-eight teams briefly delivered genuine underdog magic, citing Cabo Verde’s stunning run, only for that diversity to evaporate by the quarterfinals, when six of eight remaining teams were European and Asia had no representation at all. Lane contends that modern scouting has eliminated the mythic surprise once embodied by Pelé, since today’s best players are already global commodities long before the World Cup showcases them. He closes on a droll aside about America’s own campaign, ended by a controversial red-card reversal following Trump’s intervention, and an admiring nod to England coach Thomas Tuchel’s blunt post-match candor, joking that the tournament’s real legacy might be inspiring American soccer parents everywhere to stop shouting “good job.”

Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.

• I joined Washington’s Journal to talk about NATO

• This week’s World Review focused on the Iran box Trump finds himself in, the forgotten war in Gaza, and political turmoil in Ukraine.

Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.