World Review: Iran--Deal or No Deal? Europe takes the Lead on Ukraine. The Pope takes on AI
A synopsis of this week's edition of World Review
Each week, I host a video podcast called World Review with Ivo Daalder where journalists from major news outlets around the world join me to discuss the latest global news stories of the week.
World Review can now be heard on Sundays, at 7:00 a.m. Central Time, on Chicago’s NPR station, WBEZ, or on the WBEZ app. We’ll still tape the show on Fridays, and post the video on YouTube and the audio version on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Now, on to this week’s show. We covered three stories: the Iran nuclear talks and the Strait of Hormuz, Europe’s search for diplomatic agency over Ukraine, and Pope Leo’s encyclical challenging the artificial intelligence industry. Joining me were Susan Glasser, staff writer at The New Yorker; Shona Murray, Europe correspondent for Euronews; and Michael Shear, chief UK correspondent for The New York Times.
While I encourage you to watch or listen to the episode (and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!), here are a few interesting things I took away from our discussion.
The Smoke Machine Runs at Full Speed
The week’s dominant story was the near-constant drumbeat of reports suggesting a breakthrough on Iran — a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, an emerging “memorandum of understanding,” the promise of imminent announcement. Susan cut through it with characteristic precision: what Trump has been calling a deal is, in substance, an extension of the ceasefire already in place since April. Nothing more. The sweeping claims, she argued, are a masterclass in what she called Trump’s “smoke machine” — a long-practiced technique of shaping the public space in which negotiations are litigated, getting people to adopt his framing even when they disagree with the content.
The deeper irony, which Michael pressed home, is that whatever emerges will be more lenient toward Iran than the 2015 nuclear agreement that Trump spent years denouncing as the worst deal in American history. The numbers tell the story starkly: under the JCPOA, Iran would have been limited to 300 kilograms of uranium enriched to 3.67 percent. It currently holds 8,500 kilograms, including nearly 500 kilograms enriched to 60 percent. The deal Trump walked away from would have been far more constraining than anything now on the table — and his own hawkish allies, from Ted Cruz to Mike Pompeo, have begun saying so loudly, prompting vicious personal attacks from the Trump White House in return.
Susan also observed that Iran’s has discovered its control of the Strait of Hormuz may be a more powerful weapon than a nuclear device — a lever capable of holding the global economy hostage at will. That, she argued, is not a tactical victory for Tehran. It is a strategic one. Meanwhile, Trump finds himself in a box of his own construction — unable to escalate, unable to sign anything defensible, unable to walk away. And so he waits, and the smoke keeps billowing.
Impotence as Foreign Policy
The second segment turned to Europe and Ukraine, and the contrast with the Iran discussion was almost painful. A Russian drone struck a Romanian apartment building the morning we recorded — a reminder that the war’s geography is still expanding. Yet Europe has been preoccupied with discussing the possibility of nominating a diplomatic envoy, with Alexander Stubb of Finland the name most often floated, without agreement, without a mandate, and without any visible reason to believe Putin would engage.
Shona was candid about what she sees: an EU that declared itself a “geopolitical union” a decade ago is now confronting the distance between that ambition and its actual leverage. Trump has engineered a situation, Michael observed, where the cost of stepping out of line — on tariffs, on defense procurement, on Iran — is simply too high for most European governments to bear. The result is a kind of structural paralysis: countries that know what needs to be done but cannot agree on who should do it, who should pay for it, or how long it will take.
Susan reminded us that Europe has led negotiations with Russia before — the Minsk Accords were the result — and that precedent ended in full-scale invasion in 2022. The real question is not whether Alexander Stubb can succeed where Donald Trump has failed, but whether Europe is preparing itself for the scenario Susan considers genuinely plausible: Putin testing NATO’s Article 5, possibly very soon, against an alliance whose American guarantor has already signaled it will not show up.
The Pope and the Broligarchy
The final segment opened turned to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — a sweeping moral indictment of the AI industry, touching on economic inequality, the concentration of power, and what the Pope called the threat to human dignity when technology outpaces accountability. Big tech pushed back, and the White House stepped in on its side, quietly shelving an executive order that had been moving forward on AI regulation.
Michael framed the encyclical as traveling on two tracks simultaneously: the familiar economic argument about inequality and displacement, and a more philosophical claim about what an over-reliance on AI does to human creativity, reasoning, and the texture of inner life. It is the second argument, he suggested, that gets less traction in capitals and legislatures — and yet may prove the more consequential over time.
Susan placed the Pope’s intervention in a broader political frame. What is crystallizing, she argued, is a new populism — not the right-wing grievance variety that has dominated the past decade, but something more volatile and cross-partisan, rooted in visceral public anger at a tech broligarchy that purchased a presidency and now sits in the front row of inaugurations while paying nothing in taxes. The juxtaposition between Leo XIV’s language of human dignity and Jeff Bezos’s recent public remarks about the irrelevance of higher tax bills was, she noted, the stuff of powerful politics — even if we don’t yet know how it resolves.
Shona added the European dimension: AI regulation is one of the areas where polling across the continent shows genuine public demand for oversight, and the Trump administration’s pressure to dismantle those frameworks as part of tariff negotiations has not gone unnoticed. The EU’s instinct toward regulation is sometimes mocked; on AI, she suggested, it may be vindicated. And Michael offered a final note: this is also a generational fight. Young people around the world are watching this technology arrive and wondering what it means for their futures — and that anxiety will not dissipate.
Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode here on World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.