What Caught My Eye (no. 71)
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.
Thomas L. Friedman, “Three World Leaders. Three Incredibly Bad Decisions,” The New York Times, July 21, 2026. Friedman argues that Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin share a fatal flaw: each surrounded himself with sycophants and now finds himself trapped in a war he cannot easily exit. On Netanyahu, Friedman draws on NYT reporting to show that the Mossad convinced Trump that killing Iran’s leadership would topple the regime and even floated installing former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a replacement—a plan CIA director John Ratcliffe reportedly dismissed as “farcical.” Friedman traces this misjudgment to a structural flaw in Israeli intelligence: skill at assassination breeds false confidence in political forecasting, since the disgruntled agents Mossad recruits have every incentive to exaggerate a regime’s fragility. He draws a parallel to Putin, who similarly believed his own narrative that Ukrainians were “one people” with Russians and would welcome invasion as liberation. Trump, meanwhile, invaded Iran with no allies and no plan, only to hand Tehran cheap asymmetric leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. Friedman closes by noting Iran’s clerical regime faces an even more implacable adversary than any of these leaders: a worsening water crisis that could force Tehran’s evacuation before any bomb does.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Why I Sought Out a Taliban Commander I Had Fought,” The New York Times, July 23, 2026. Gibbons-Neff, a former Marine sniper team leader who later became a Times war correspondent, returns to Afghanistan to confront a former enemy—and himself—about the toll of the 2010 battle of Marja, a fight where he killed six or seven people. He recounts a tense meeting with Taliban deputy minister Muhajer Farahi, who tells him bluntly that Washington “hasn’t learned” given its involvement in Iran and Gaza, and a phone call with Mullah Abdul Rahim Gulab, the Taliban commander Gibbons-Neff faced in combat and later interviewed without disclosing his own military past. Gulab presses him on why American veterans die by suicide at such high rates, and Gibbons-Neff traces it to a generation raised on World War II mythology only to find their sacrifices met with evasion from commanders who profited afterward on the speaking and defense-contractor circuit. The piece turns on a striking asymmetry: Gulab describes his side’s losses as purposeful and even peaceful, since his fighters believed they’d die for jihad, while Gibbons-Neff still carries what he calls a fog of anger and bitterness. Gulab closes with an unprompted gesture of grace: “I have forgiven you.” Gibbons-Neff is leaving the Times to become an English teacher.
Jared Malsin, “The U.S. and Iran Are Stuck in a Cycle of Military Escalation,” The Wall Street Journal, July 24, 2026. Malsin reports that the five-month-old U.S.-Iran conflict has entered its most intense phase yet, with Washington escalating airstrikes across Iran while Tehran’s allied Houthi militia opens a new front by threatening shipping through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, driving oil above $100 a barrel for the first time in two months. Secretary of State Marco Rubio warns that “the price will continue to get higher every single night” and frames the administration’s posture as “a head for an eye,” even as analysts argue Washington lacks a coherent strategic concept. Malsin lays out the core stalemate: neither side can achieve a decisive military advantage, yet both keep escalating to generate leverage, with Trump’s remaining options—striking Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility, hitting civilian infrastructure, or even a symbolic small nuclear strike—unlikely to change the fundamental equation, according to Iran specialist Hamidreza Azizi. The Houthis’ entry, drawing on their record of downing U.S. Reaper drones and striking the USS Harry S. Truman during last year’s Operation Rough Rider, complicates the Pentagon’s calculus and undercuts Trump’s ability to talk oil prices down. As Eyre puts it, summarizing Tehran’s staying power after decades of sanctions and unrest: “The Iranian regime knows how to take a punch.”
Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Maggie Haberman, “Inside the Rushed Effort to Get Trump His New Air Force One,” The New York Times, July 25, 2026. The Times’ investigation finds that Trump’s insistence on rapidly converting a Qatari-donated 747-8 into a temporary Air Force One led to compressed timelines, ballooning costs, and the omission of security features standard on the plane it replaces. The authors report that Trump personally signed off on the retrofit, which lacks a lower-level emergency exit, a second auxiliary power unit, and the visible infrared missile-countermeasure system found on the older jets—shortfalls Frank Kendall, who as Air Force Secretary oversaw the modernization program under Biden, calls a real added risk. The reporting traces the total cost past $1.2 billion once training aircraft and other add-ons are included, financed in part by diverting funds from a classified nuclear-modernization account in a maneuver Senator Christopher Murphy calls an effort to dodge oversight. The piece culminates in a July 8 episode in Turkey, when U.S. officials identified a credible threat from Iranian proxy forces against Trump, prompting the Secret Service to swap him onto the older, better-defended jet for departure—while Trump’s public explanation, that he flew the old plane “for old time’s sake,” omitted the threat entirely. The White House maintains the Qatari jet is “fully mission-ready and safe for presidential travel today,” though it will be pulled for further “upgrades and enhancements” this fall.
Patrick Foulis, “Trump’s Trade War Shifts from Shakedown to Lock-In,” Financial Times, 2026. Foulis argues that the defining feature of Trump’s second-term economic strategy is no longer tariffs themselves but a deeper campaign to lock in America’s position atop the infrastructure of globalization—its financial markets, tech networks, and defense guarantees—and prevent other countries from building alternatives. He describes a shift from what he calls a shakedown, in which the U.S. charges more for access to its services, to a lock-in strategy aimed at foreclosing competitors entirely, citing the Trump administration’s tariff pressure on Brazil’s homegrown digital payment platform Pix and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s threats to sanction Chinese AI firms like Moonshot as evidence. Foulis notes the strategy has produced real results, with foreign capital inflows hitting record highs and income from U.S. tech, finance, and defense exports rising to 7 percent of GDP. But, he warns, it has also provoked a backlash, pushing allies to invest more aggressively in independent alternatives to U.S. payment systems, air defense, and digital infrastructure. He situates this in historical precedent, comparing it to Britain’s efforts to suppress Germany’s wireless service in the 1900s and America’s campaign against Huawei in the 2010s. Foulis closes with a warning: asking allies to pay more for U.S. protection is one thing, but trying to prohibit them from seeking alternatives entirely would mark a far more consequential and confrontational turn.
Zanny Minton Beddoes, “The World’s Richest Man Sits Down with The Economist,” The Economist, 2026. In a 90-minute interview conducted at a Tesla factory in Texas, Minton Beddoes finds Elon Musk casting himself as a modern Cassandra, confident in predictions that most listeners find hard to credit: that AI will surpass the sum of human intelligence within five years, that robots will usher in an era of “amazing abundance” within ten, and that Britain will descend into civil war within twenty. She presses him on the risks of the technology he’s racing to build, and Musk floats extending Demis Hassabis’s proposal for AI self-regulation to include Chinese labs inspecting each other’s models before release, even suggesting he might reconcile with OpenAI’s Sam Altman “for the good of the world.” Minton Beddoes draws out Musk’s surprisingly sanguine view of Chinese AI competition—he calls China “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem” that currently constrains its chipmaking—and presses him on inflammatory comments about immigration and Europe’s far-right, which he defends as concern for “normal people” wanting safe cities and secure borders. The interview closes on a note of vertigo: asked to make sense of his own contradictions, Musk retreats to a favorite theory, that the universe may be a simulation, admitting “the things I’m doing are so preposterous that it’s hard to believe they’re real.”
David D. Kirkpatrick, “The Biden Administration’s Regrets on Israel, Gaza, and Iran,” The New Yorker, July 20, 2026. Kirkpatrick spent over a year investigating how the Biden administration became so entangled in Israel’s war in Gaza, prompted by the recent collapse of Israel’s once-bipartisan standing in American politics, evidenced by more than a hundred House Democrats voting to cut off military aid. He finds a sharp divide among Biden’s former advisers: some maintain there was no viable alternative that could have freed the hostages and ended the war without such devastation, while others are candid about their regrets, including failing to pressure Israel harder over civilian casualties and accepting Israeli assurances of an imminent endgame that never arrived. Former deputy national security adviser Jon Finer tells Kirkpatrick that for both Hamas and Israel, civilian harm was “not a side effect but part of the strategy,” and that the U.S. should not have tolerated wars fought on those terms. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, offers the piece’s most pointed admission: “We should have put more pressure on Israel to take a different approach.” The reporting also surfaces a deeper structural critique—that Washington’s reflexive backing created a moral hazard, encouraging Netanyahu to provoke Iran knowing the U.S. would ultimately absorb the cost of defending Israel each time tensions escalated.
Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.
This week’s World Review focused on the World Cup, and what it told us about America, Cinderellas and sore losers, and how money is changing the game.
Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.