World Review: Justice in Syria, the Gulf Break-up, and Tensions Across the Atlantic
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 how justice is returning to Syria, the Gulf is divided over Iran, Israel seeks security through destruction, and transatlantic tensions are boiling over. Joining me this week were Deborah Amos of Princeton, Felicia Schwartz of Politico, and Steven Erlanger of 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.
Syria: Justice Starts Here
Syria is an unlikely source of hope in a deeply troubled region, and nowhere is that more visible than in the courtroom. Reporting from Damascus, Deb described the opening of Syria’s first domestic war crimes trials — a striking development in a country that just over a year ago was still under the grip of the Assad dynasty. The defendant in the inaugural proceeding is the official widely regarded as the man who set off the Syrian revolution, the provincial governor who ordered or allowed the torture of teenagers who had scrawled anti-Assad graffiti, and then failed to act when the subsequent public outrage exploded into a national uprising. Families of victims were permitted into the courtroom to confront him directly. The proceedings are imperfect — Syria has only one judge untainted by the old regime, no law yet for crimes against humanity, no parliament to change the legal framework — and critics question whether former jihadists now in power will ultimately face the same scrutiny. But as Deb noted, the pressure for accountability had been building as Syrians watched European courts deliver more than fifty trials of Assad-era perpetrators and asked why their own country had not begun to do the same. Steve raised the broader challenge of transitional justice — whether societies choose truth and reconciliation, criminal prosecution, or something in between — observing that even Germany, decades on, still grapples with its past. The answer Syria is reaching for is clearly its own: no hybrid court, no international jurors, no template borrowed from Iraq. The trials have begun, and for most Syrians, Deb concluded, that alone is something.
Lebanon and the Gulf: A Ceasefire With a Lot of Fire
If Syria offers a fragile story of hope, Lebanon and the broader Gulf offer something considerably darker. Israel continues to strike targets in southern Lebanon despite a nominal ceasefire, and as Felicia pointed out, Netanyahu faces a domestic political imperative that cuts against any real de-escalation: his government is up for election by late October, the ceasefire was deeply unpopular at home, and hundreds of thousands of Israelis still cannot return to their border communities. Deb observed that for the first time in decades there exists a Lebanese government and a broader Lebanese public willing to contemplate disarming Hezbollah — but only if Israel pursues a diplomatic path rather than treating the south as another Gaza. Instead, Israeli forces are mowing through the region with earthmovers, killing civilians alongside any intended targets, and that approach, she warned, is no way to eliminate Hezbollah. Layered on top of this is the unresolved aftermath of the US-Iran war — described pointedly as “a ceasefire with a lot of fire” — and its reverberations across the Gulf. The Saudis, stung again by American inaction after Iranian strikes on a UAE oil facility and haunted by the failure to respond to the 2019 Houthi attacks, are recalibrating toward coexistence with Iran; the UAE, by contrast, is pressing its advantage. As Steve noted, the Iranians now have enough enriched uranium for roughly ten nuclear weapons, and an IRGC-dominated government may be more willing to use that leverage than any of its predecessors. The region, in short, is not trending toward resolution.
US-Europe: The New Normal Is Not Good
The transatlantic relationship is not merely strained — it is, Steve argued, being structurally dismantled in ways that will not simply reverse when this administration ends. Trump’s fury at NATO predates his presidency by decades, but what is different now is the confluence of grievances: his Greenland obsession and the explicit threat to take it from a NATO ally, the unilateral launch of the Iran war without European consultation, the subsequent pressure on NATO to join a Middle East conflict it was never designed to fight, and the punitive troop withdrawal from Germany triggered by Chancellor Merz’s candid but ill-advised observation that the US lacked an exit strategy. Steve noted that a European ambassador captured the mood precisely: Europeans still believe in America but have entirely lost faith in Donald Trump. Felicia added that the absence of meaningful congressional pushback is not accidental — foreign policy is the arena where presidential power is most unchecked, the midterms loom, and many of the figures who genuinely believed in the alliance have retired or are retiring. Deb brought it home from Berlin, where she spent three weeks and found ordinary Germans quietly factoring the possibility of war into personal decisions, already resigned to the fact that US support could no longer be assumed. Europe, Steve concluded, now understands — more widely and more deeply than ever before — that it must build the conventional defense capacity to replace what America may withdraw. That is not a temporary adjustment. It is a new baseline.
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.