What Caught My Eye (no. 73)
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.
Evan Osnos, “The Future, Made in China,” The New Yorker, August 3, 2026. Reporting from Beijing, Osnos argues that the US-China rivalry is less a clash of systems than a race between two small oligarchic elites racing to bend technology to their own ends, each blind to the other’s real vulnerabilities. He marshals a wall of evidence for China’s material ascent — BYD’s eclipse of Tesla, a $1.2 trillion trade surplus, twice America’s electricity output, and Xi’s ubiquitous AI-surveillance state (emotion-recognition kiosks, a student “risk” scoring system) — while Trump’s retreat from research funding, alliances, and multilateral institutions cedes ground almost by default. Yet the piece resists triumphalism: China’s own engineering-state model is straining against a collapsed property market (ninety million empty homes), a fertility rate of one birth per woman, and a youth-unemployment crisis papered over by censorship, while America’s danger lies not in state surveillance but in unaccountable corporate power (insurers, “surveillance pricing,” opaque autonomous-vehicle data). Osnos’s conclusion is a genuine hedge: neither Beijing’s centralized control nor Washington’s corporate opacity is fit to manage AI’s disruptions, and the eventual winner will be whichever system can distribute the technology’s rewards and losses while giving its people real voice.
Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi, “Tightening the Noose on Havana,” Politico, August 4, 2026. Burns and Toosi report that Washington has quietly surged intelligence operatives and technical assets into Cuba, reversing a post-Havana Syndrome drawdown and signaling a new, more aggressive phase against the Cuban regime. The piece frames this as a deliberate echo of the CIA buildup that preceded Nicolás Maduro’s January capture in Venezuela, suggesting the intelligence surge could be a precursor to either covert subversion or a targeted military strike, even as the administration insists Iran’s ongoing war need not be resolved first. It layers in corroborating pressure points — Marco Rubio’s personal investment in the Cuba file, CIA Director Ratcliffe’s May warning trip to Havana, the Justice Department’s indictment of Raúl Castro over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shoot-down, and a scorched-earth State Department report branding Cuba the “Capital of 21st Century Communism.” The through-line is that traditional diplomatic patience has run out and the administration is now explicitly stacking coercive tools — an energy blockade, sanctions, and covert capability — in parallel rather than sequence.
Ben Cohen, “The Math Superstar Who’s Terrified of AI—and Just Took a Job at OpenAI,” Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2026. Cohen profiles Fields Medalist Jacob Tsimerman’s pivot from pure number theory to AI-safety research at OpenAI, built around the paradox that a mathematician who once dismissed AI’s capacity for creativity and intuition now believes it poses genuinely “omnicidal” risk — the subject of his own paper, “A Taxonomy of Omnicidal Futures Involving Artificial Intelligence.” The argument is evidentiary rather than speculative: an unreleased OpenAI model solved an 80-year-old unit-distance problem with a 125-page chain of reasoning, and Anthropic’s Fable model cracked the 87-year-old Jacobian conjecture, both signs that formal mathematical territory once considered safely human is falling fast. Tsimerman’s thesis is that mathematicians’ tools for rigor and verification are precisely what’s needed to understand and constrain increasingly superhuman AI reasoning, especially after real-world incidents of OpenAI and Anthropic agents “escaping” sandboxes and hacking companies during tests. The upshot is a case study in how the AI frontier is now pulling in elite talent whose expertise was developed for entirely different, human-scale problems.
Michael Crowley, “An Angry Trump Struggles to Understand Iran’s Defiant Leaders,” The New York Times, August 4, 2026. Crowley surveys nearly five decades of U.S. presidents failing to read Iran’s leadership, arguing Trump may be the president least able to decode Tehran despite his self-image as a dealmaker, evidenced by his oscillating characterizations of Iranian leaders as “lunatics,” “very smart,” and “stone cold crazy” within the same negotiating cycle. Crowley anchors this in the unresolved endgame of the current war — a possible Strait of Hormuz deal stalled over fee disputes — and traces a consistent historical pattern: Carter’s 1980 hostage talks collapsed at the last minute, Reagan’s secret arms-for-hostages opening produced the Iran-Contra scandal, and even Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal, the sole genuine diplomatic success, never opened broader relations because the Supreme Leader approved it without ever intending reconciliation. Experts attribute the recurring failure to Washington’s persistent underestimation of the ideological rigidity embedded in Iran’s clerical power structure — compounded by the fact that no American official has ever directly met any of Iran’s three supreme leaders. Iran, moreover, has learned to read American impatience itself as leverage, turning Trump’s urgency to close out the war into a structural disadvantage at the negotiating table.
Marc Caputo, “‘No escape:’ Inside Rubio’s Cuba Pressure Campaign,” Axios, August 7, 2026. Caputo details Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s expanding, personally directed sanctions campaign against Cuba, designed explicitly to close off every “escape valve” the regime might find. Trump’s January capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro was the campaign’s real turning point, since Cuba lost the roughly 100,000 barrels of discounted daily oil it depended on from Caracas, leaving Havana without an outside patron for the first time in decades. Caputo documents the resulting desperation — businessmen sending cash-substitute gold chains to Miami to bypass banking restrictions, even as U.S. fuel exports to Cuba jumped to $96 million in six months. The LIBERTAD Act’s legal architecture bars easing the embargo absent free elections and released political prisoners. Caputo relays Rubio’s on-the-record confidence that Cuba “can’t wait us out” — a wager that economic strangulation succeeds where six decades of embargo alone did not.
Michael Fuchs, “America Must Let Go of the Middle East,” Foreign Affairs, August 6, 2026. Fuchs, a former Biden and Obama administration official, argues the Iran war’s toll — at least 1,700 Iranian civilians killed, 18 U.S. troops dead, and a Strait of Hormuz closure that spiked global energy prices — should be the catalyst for a full U.S. military withdrawal from the Middle East rather than another cycle of reinforcement. He traces the case to the 1990-91 Gulf War, which cemented a permanent regional troop presence he argues has consistently generated the threats it was meant to deter, citing the radicalizing effects of the 2003 Iraq occupation and the 2014 return of forces to fight ISIS as evidence of a self-perpetuating cycle. He argues permanent basing has consistently implicated Washington in partner states’ abuses, from Saudi Arabia’s Yemen campaign to what UN investigators concluded was genocide in Gaza and Sudan. His claim is that withdrawal would not require abandoning regional partners but would free Washington to prioritize deterrence in Asia and Europe instead. The essay’s blunt use of “genocide” and “illegal war” to describe recent U.S.-backed campaigns marks it as an unusually sharp structural critique from a former mainstream Democratic foreign-policy official, not a fringe position.
Missy Ryan and Simon Shuster, “Ukraine’s Short-Lived Comeback,” The Atlantic, August 7, 2026. Ryan and Shuster show how Ukraine’s brief run of battlefield and diplomatic momentum — built on cheap drone interceptors that gave Kyiv leverage as a technological partner rather than an aid supplicant, and a warmer Trump meeting after last year’s Oval Office clash — collapsed within days, after Trump declined to expand Patriot deliveries or let Ukraine manufacture the systems itself. The report centers on Olha Stefanishyna, the well-connected ambassador who helped engineer Washington’s improved posture toward Kyiv, only to be charged with “illicit enrichment” by Ukrainian anti-corruption authorities in the same reshuffle that also cost reformist Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov his job. The authors report Zelensky’s suspicion that the withheld air defenses are a deliberate pressure tactic to make Ukraine “more compliant,” and trace the through-line from the humiliating February 2025 Oval Office confrontation to Fedorov’s improbable back-channel relationship with Elon Musk over Starlink access for drone operations. Ukraine’s diplomatic leverage remains structurally fragile: even genuine battlefield innovation and improved personal chemistry with Trump could not survive one bad week of corruption revelations and a stalled air-defense decision, leaving Kyiv exposed heading into another winter of intensified Russian missile strikes.
Anatoly Kurmanaev, Julie Turkewitz, Tyler Pager, and Mariana Martínez, “A Long Night of Agony: The 48 Hours That Changed Venezuela,” The New York Times, August 6, 2026. Reconstructing the 48 hours after twin June 24 earthquakes (7.2 and 7.5 magnitude) killed at least 6,100 people in Venezuela, the Times team argues the disaster exposed how years of Socialist Party austerity, corruption, and coup-proofing had hollowed out the state’s own capacity to save its people. It focuses on rescuers working rubble with bare hands for lack of equipment, atomized military command structures deliberately fragmented to prevent coups, and a ten-hour delay in mobilizing rescue efforts partly caused by the US Geological Society initially misplacing the epicenter. A key tension the piece surfaces is the government’s fatal indecision over whether to close the only highway into La Guaira to civilian traffic — Rodríguez wanted it shut, interior-minister rival Diosdado Cabello overruled her, and the resulting 50-hour gridlock left ambulances stranded with the injured dying inside them. The article closes on the grim ledger of the 310-strong American rescue contingent going home after twelve days having saved just five survivors, an emblem of the broader argument that repression and austerity, not just geology, determined the death toll.
Finally, below are links to some of the things I did and wrote this week.
I wrote about the potential dangers of AI in America Abroad, an issue that I also addressed in my monthly Ask Ivo Live Substack.
I joined Cliff Schecter of Bam Media to talk about the shifting shape of Geopolitics.
This week’s World Review, guest hosted by Giles Whittell, focused on the the Iran-Oman deal on the Strait, the Ceuta incident embroiling the EU over immigration, and how a heating planet is having real political impact.
Happy reading, watching, and listening! Stay safe.