World Review: The Phony War, the Turning Tide, and the America-Sized Hole
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. I was traveling this week, so my colleague and frequent World Review contributor Carla Anne Robbins — senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal and New York Times — stepped in to guest host. She was joined by Bobby Ghosh, journalist and author of the Ghosh World Substack; Christopher Miller, the Financial Times’s chief Ukraine correspondent; and Yasmeen Abutaleb, health and politics reporter at Reuters. They covered three stories: the war with Iran and the diplomatic standoff over a potential deal; the shifting battlefield in Ukraine; and the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda and what America’s absence means for the world’s ability to contain it.
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 Phony War
Bobby reached for a striking historical analogy to describe the current state of the conflict with Iran: the “phony war” — that strange interregnum in late 1939 and early 1940 when all the belligerents knew a world war was on, but the bombs had largely stopped falling. Strip away the tweets, the expletive-filled phone calls, and the daily reversals, Bobby argued, and the underlying positions of the two sides are actually quite clear — and quite irreconcilable. Washington wants Iran to surrender its nuclear option and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran wants sanctions relief, reparations, and a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Neither side is willing to move toward the middle, because to do so would require conceding — even privately — that it is in a position of weakness. And neither side believes that to be true.
Yasmeen suggested that the Trump-Netanyahu dynamic was best described as a relationship of mutual dependency operating through mutual performance. The administration keeps declaring the war over — Marco Rubio told the Senate as much this week, only to have Iranian drones strike Kuwait’s airport the following day — partly, she suggested, because the war’s domestic costs are becoming impossible to ignore. And yet the structural support for Israel remains essentially unconditional. Yasmeen noted the familiar pattern: contentious conversations leak to the press, signaling that the US is holding Israel accountable behind closed doors, while in practice the weapons continue to flow and the war aims are left unchallenged.
Bobby added that the political landscape inside Israel is shifting too, ahead of coming elections. The blowback Netanyahu received from both left and right after it appeared he might back down from a full-scale attack on Beirut — following Trump’s pressure — reflects a hardening domestic mood. His rivals are not urging restraint; they are outflanking him on toughness. Whether Trump can actually constrain Netanyahu, or whether the relationship will continue on its current trajectory, remains the question at this moment.
The Turning Tide
Christopher, reporting from inside Ukraine, offered something rare in this war: cautious optimism. Ukraine has survived its hardest winter in decades — not only meteorologically, but militarily, with Russian mass missile and drone attacks pushing Kyiv to the brink of catastrophe. Spring has brought stalled Russian ground offensives in the east, a first net territorial gain for Ukraine since 2023, and — most importantly — a drone program that has fundamentally changed the calculus of the war. Ukraine is not just defending; it is striking oil and gas facilities, military infrastructure, and naval vessels deep inside Russia, even approaching Moscow itself. Zelensky’s open letter to Putin this week, daring him to negotiate one-on-one, was snarky, Christopher acknowledged — but that snark, he said, comes from a place of genuine newfound confidence.
The strategic picture is grueling but telling: Russia is losing an estimated thirty to thirty-five thousand soldiers killed or wounded every month, a number that exceeds what Moscow can recruit. Ukraine’s defense establishment has set a goal of fifty thousand Russian casualties per month, believing that number could change the calculus in the Kremlin. The drones — both the FPV swarms that have made the battlefield transparent and the longer-range strike drones hitting Russian territory — have made every kilometer Russia tries to advance significantly more costly.
Yasmeen and Bobby examined whether any of this might draw Trump back into a more engaged role. The answer was a cautious probably not — at least not yet. Trump, Yasmeen argued, gravitates toward conflicts that promise quick headline wins, and Ukraine’s gains, real as they are, will not produce the dramatic, telegenic resolution he craves. Christopher added that Trump’s deep affinity for Putin has made him consistently more sympathetic to Moscow’s framing of the war than to Kyiv’s.
The America-Sized Hole
The third topic was, in some ways, the most alarming. The WHO has declared the Ebola outbreak in the DRC and Uganda a global health emergency. There are more than 330 confirmed cases and 50 deaths. There is no vaccine for this strain. And the United States — historically the world’s indispensable force in containing exactly these kinds of crises — is effectively absent.
Yasmeen, who covered both the 2014 West African outbreak and the COVID pandemic and holds degrees in both microbiology and journalism, laid out the contrast in vivid terms. In 2014, the White House mobilized immediately — appointing an Ebola czar, deploying more than a thousand CDC personnel to West Africa, fast-tracking vaccine development with the NIH and private companies, and ensuring that American volunteers knew they could come home for treatment if infected. This time, Marco Rubio has said no one with Ebola will be brought to the US. The administration has described the outbreak as “not really a US problem.” The mRNA infrastructure — the same technology that produced the world’s most effective COVID vaccines in under a year — has had its contracts canceled.
Bobby called this new reality an America-sized hole. He noted, without much optimism, that this is precisely the moment you’d expect China or others stepping into the void — but there’s no evidence it is happening. The Chinese don’t have the wherewithal. The Europeans are doing something, Yasmeen confirmed — the French have sent personnel and resources — but nothing approaches the combination of scientific capacity, logistical power, and political will that the US has historically brought to bear. Vaccine experts Yasmeen spoke with believe a vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain could be developed in three to six months — but only if the full force of the US government gets involved. Right now, it isn’t.
Carla closed with a point that stopped the conversation: health workers won’t go to the field if they believe they can’t come home for treatment. Those workers put their lives on the line. Fewer of them willing to do so means the danger grows — not just in the DRC, but everywhere.
Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.