World Review: Is Cuba Next? Taiwan in Trouble. Political Crisis in Britain
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 discussed the Trump administration’s escalating pressure on Cuba, the fallout for Taiwan from the Beijing summit, and the political crisis engulfing Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain. Joining me this week were Karen DeYoung, Associate Editor and Senior National Security Correspondent at the Washington Post; Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor of The Economist; and Philip Stephens, Contributing Editor of the Financial Times and author of the Inside Out newsletter.
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.
Cuba: The Thirteenth President Tries Again
The Trump administration’s escalating pressure on Cuba — oil embargo, expanded sanctions, and nowcharging former president Raúl Castro with the 1996 shoot-down of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft — raised the central question Karen had been tracking for decades: is this time actually different? Her answer: Trump genuinely believes this time is different, that he has a political constituency in southern Florida that demands it, a Secretary of State in Marco Rubio who has staked his career on it, and a Venezuela precedent he thinks he can replicate. But Cuba is not Venezuela. It is not one man at the top of a brittle personalist regime — it is a tightly integrated Communist Party-military apparatus that, as Karen put it, “will fight back.” Anton laid out the strategic logic the White House appears to be working from: the Venezuela model was meant to be a third way between full-scale invasion and a few cruise missiles, a targeted decapitation followed by a compliant successor government — and that logic led them badly astray in Iran, which hardened rather than collapsed. Cuba, he suggested, poses similar risks of a protracted conflict at a moment when the U.S. is already deeply extended. Philip placed the whole enterprise in a wider frame: Venezuela, Cuba, Iran — taken together, these represent something he called “belligerent unilateralism,” a United States that has effectively left the West it created and led and is now simply acting on presidential preference wherever American power can be brought to bear. The Europeans, he noted, think the Cuba policy is “profoundly wrong” — but with Iran on their plate, and Greenland, and NATO, they have decided not to fight this one.
Taiwan: The Supplicant’s Return
Coming out of the Beijing summit, Trump did not merely fail to reassure Taiwan — he appeared, in Anton’s phrase, to have come out “at the more worrying end” of the range of possibilities anyone had anticipated. The litany was striking: Trump called arms sales a “bargaining chip,” echoed Beijing’s language about reunification, suggested Taiwan had “stolen” America’s semiconductor industry, and — pointedly reversing the Biden pattern of insisting the US would defend Taiwan, volunteered unprompted that Taiwan is 9,500 miles from the U.S. and only a few hundred from China, implying it was not a fight he wanted. Beijing’s denial of entry to Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby ahead of a planned Hegseth visit — on the explicit condition that Washington first say no to the pending arms sale to Taiwan — illustrated how thoroughly Beijing had internalized the president’s own framing. Karen observed that Republican China hawks on the Hill will be furious, but that Trump’s hold on the party makes it essentially impossible for Congress to compel a different course; and Anton added a critical military dimension: the Iran campaign has consumed significant stocks of the long-range interceptors and precision munitions that any credible Taiwan contingency would require. Philip summed up the summit’s deeper meaning with characteristic directness: watching the body language, Xi was the man in command, Trump was responding to his initiatives, and the logic of Trump’s own worldview — if America gets to run its hemisphere, why can’t China run its neighborhood? — points in only one direction. This summit may come to be seen as the moment the United States arrived in Beijing for the first time not as the demandeur of the relationship, but as the supplicant — with Xi framing not only the future relationship as on of “constructive strategic stability, but making clear that he would be determining what counted as strategic, stable, and constructive.
Britain: A Comedy of Errors Turned Farce
Keir Starmer arrived in office less than two years ago with a parliamentary majority of over 170 seats — a margin that, under normal assumptions, should have guaranteed a decade in power. Philip, who has watched British politics for forty years, called what has happened since genuinely the most inexplicable moment in that long career. Labour is haemorrhaging support in two directions simultaneously: to Nigel Farage’s Reform on the right, which has done to Labour’s blue-collar base in the deindustrialised Midlands and North what Trump did to Democrats, and to the Greens on the left, which have evolved from an environmentalist party into something closer to a far-left economic force. Starmer himself, Philip argued, is less the cause than the symptom — a poor communicator lacking the emotional intelligence modern politics demands, brought down by unforced errors that are not, in themselves, capital crimes, but which a more gifted politician would not have made. The succession is, if anything, more troubling than the crisis: Andy Burnham, the Manchester mayor and frontrunner, must first win a by-election that Farage’s Reform will contest hard; Wes Streeting is the most impressive figure in the field but mishandled his cabinet resignation and lacks the party base; Ed Miliband may emerge as the compromise candidate if Burnham stumbles. None of them, as Philip put it, has a prospectus that offers Labour a way out — none is proposing to rebuild the coalition between metropolitan progressives and working-class traditionalists that Tony Blair assembled so brilliantly and that has since come apart. Anton noted that Europe has quietly re-entered the conversation — buyer’s remorse over Brexit is now a majority position in polling, and Starmer himself has gestured toward closer alignment, driven partly by the rupture with Washington. But he was skeptical it would move quickly enough to matter, given that a fresh referendum would be required and the issue still divides Labour’s own coalition. Karen drew the parallel that was in the room all along: a centre-left party that knows what it has lost but cannot agree on what to become next — a description, she noted, that fits the Democratic Party just as well.
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.