World Review: Iran, Ukraine, and Cuba. Failure? Success? Or Stalemate?
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.
“World Review is always fascinating. I love the fact that you can get journalists from around the world to participate since zoom is the medium.”
— A Subscriber to America Abroad
Now, on to this week's show. We tackled a stalemate in Iran that increasingly looks like it's working in Tehran's favor, a Washington that can't stop whiplashing Ukraine just when Kyiv needs steadiness most, and a secret new CIA task force aimed at finally cracking Cuba after 65 years of trying. Joining me were Steve Erlanger of The New York Times, Christopher Miller of the Financial Times, and Carla Anne Robbins of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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.
Zugzwang
Six months into what Donald Trump and Israel thought would be a three-day operation to decapitate Iran’s regime, Steve reached for the chess term that best describes where we are: zugzwang. Nobody knows which way to move, because every move is bad. Trump has threatened military escalation thirteen times and stood down thirteen times; he’s now, Steve said, counting on the midterms to make everyone forget. But the underlying story is stark — the Pentagon has burned through more than half its Patriot stock, a third of its Tomahawks, and a large share of its THAAD interceptors, and air wars, Carla reminded us, simply don’t win wars. Trump went in expecting a Venezuela-style sugar high; instead he found a regime that survived, hardened, and is now, if anything, stronger regionally than before the war began.
That regional strength is showing up in unexpected places. The new Mecca Accord, binding Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey in a NATO-style mutual-defense pact, was signed partly because Gulf states no longer trust Washington to protect them — and Steve argued its deepest significance isn’t the pact itself but what it reveals: Iran retaining effective control over the Strait of Hormuz is now seen as a more durable deterrent than even a nuclear weapon. Carla’s closer was more unsettling still — the real audience for America’s depleted stockpiles isn’t Tehran. It’s Moscow and Beijing, watching to see whether the world’s most powerful military can sustain a long, technologically sophisticated fight.
No One Left to Call
If Iran is a stalemate, Ukraine is a whiplash. Washington offered Kyiv a license to build its own Patriot interceptors, then Trump reversed himself days later, calling the technology “a hard thing to give away.” Days later, Vice President Vance quietly asked Ukraine to stop striking tankers moving Russian oil through a key Black Sea port — even as Zelensky says air-defense deliveries have dropped two-thirds year over year. Chris, reporting from Kyiv, said Ukrainians have stopped expecting consistency from this White House; the closest thing to encouragement on the Patriot request was that the Oval Office answer was no answer at all, rather than an outright no. His read on the war: many things are true at once. Ukraine’s long-range strikes have triggered Russia’s worst fuel crisis since the Soviet collapse — but Kyiv’s own missile batteries increasingly sit empty, and Zelensky’s advisers don’t expect serious negotiations before next spring, at the earliest.
Carla, notably, ran out of patience. Europe, she argued, is hoarding its own Patriot inventories against a hypothetical war with Russia three years from now, while the real war — the one killing Ukrainians daily — goes underdefended in the present. Where, she asked, is the European leader willing to make the case for Ukraine as loudly as Zelensky makes it himself?
Looking for Another Delcy Rodriguez
The CIA has quietly stood up its first dedicated Cuba task force since the one that ran the Bay of Pigs — pairing case officers with cyber and covert-influence specialists to pry open fractures in Havana’s ruling elite. Secretary Rubio has told Axios the regime’s collapse is now “irreversible.” Carla was withering: nobody — not the Cubans, not outside analysts, possibly not the administration itself — can articulate what Washington actually wants. Full regime collapse? A Venezuela-style snatch of Raúl Castro in search of the next compliant strongman? The policy, as she put it, is a fantasy in search of another Delcy Rodriguez who doesn’t seem to exist.
Meanwhile, the human cost is mounting: rolling blackouts of up to a day and a half in central Havana, hospitals without medicine, a humanitarian crisis compounded by the same oil blockade and secondary sanctions driving out the Spanish hotel chains and Canadian nickel firms whose investment Havana’s own new reform package is supposed to attract. Steve offered a theory — that Trump sees himself as a kind of hemispheric emperor, and the real prize isn’t regime change for its own sake but severing Cuba’s ties to Russia and China. Carla’s closing question is the one worth sitting with: does Washington actually want to own what happens next in Cuba, the way it now owns Venezuela? Unlike Caracas, Havana is ninety miles away — and walking away from it, if this goes wrong, will be much harder.
Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.