World Review: The Strait is Closed Again. What Happened to Gaza? Ukraine's Internal Division
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 this week: the widening standoff over the Strait of Hormuz and whether Washington is preparing to escalate its war with Iran; the quiet collapse of the “Board of Peace” plan for rebuilding Gaza; and the political earthquake in Kyiv after President Zelensky fired his popular digital transformation minister, the architect of Ukraine’s drone war. Joining me were Alex Ward, national security reporter at the Wall Street Journal; Matt Kaminski, Editorial Chair of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks; and Elise Labott, who writes the Cosmopolitics Substack and founded Zivvy Media.
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 Dice-Move Doctrine
Alex offered the line of the week: Trump’s Iran policy, he said, is best understood through the movie Knocked Up — Seth Rogen’s character has exactly one dance move and keeps repeating it because it’s the only move he’s got. That, Alex argued, is the entirety of this administration’s approach whenever it gets backed into a corner: more strikes, more threats, more escalation, because there’s no other play in the book.
The problem is that the move isn’t working. Trump signed what Matt called the most generous deal Tehran has been offered in 47 years, and they didn’t take it. Now Washington has restored its naval blockade and is weighing whether to strike Kharg Island or even put troops on the ground — an option Alex thinks is too risky to actually happen, but one Trump is nonetheless discussing, which tells you something about how badly the administration believes this war is slipping away.
Matt zoomed out to the region: six days of Iranian strikes on Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain, the Emirates, and now Syria for the first time, testing whether the Gulf states will finally build a real coalition or keep issuing statements and hoping it passes. Elise’s read was blunter — Trump’s usual playbook of bluster and threats has simply stopped working on Tehran. “The Iranians are like, bring it,” she said. I pushed the group on a pattern I think runs through this whole presidency: Trump doesn’t know how to handle strongmen. North Korea, Russia, China, now Iran — in each case the fire-and-fury approach produced meetings, headlines, and very little else. As Matt put it, leverage in diplomacy comes from the alliances you build, and trust, once spent, is expensive to rebuild.
The Riviera That Wasn’t
A year ago this administration was promising a “Trump Riviera” on the Gaza coast — AI-powered trains, luxury resorts, the Palestinians, in the president’s words, as the luckiest people in the world. This week the actual news was a single small pilot project, backed by exactly two countries willing to send troops: Morocco and Kosovo.
Matt’s diagnosis was structural: Israel never wanted a credible international stabilization force in Gaza because it would cut into its own leverage, aid has stalled because no one can verify where it’s going, and Israeli domestic politics — an election looming in October, a prime minister who may be on his way out but rarely lacks for a next move — has crowded out follow-through. Elise added the piece that made the puzzle click: Hamas won’t disarm while Israeli airstrikes continue, and Israel won’t credibly commit to withdrawal, so the whole plan deadlocks on a single unresolved question. The Board of Peace, she suggested, has quietly become less a reconstruction vehicle than a placeholder for a political process that may not arrive for years.
Alex traced it back to bandwidth: Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, the deal’s chief architects, got pulled into Iran and Ukraine and left Gaza to a deputy who has since departed government entirely. “That’s who’s running, quote unquote, Gaza,” he said. The pattern across all three of this week’s stories, really — big declarations, thin execution. As Matt put it of the administration generally, the ideas aren’t crazy; the follow-through is where it keeps getting tripped up.
The Golden Goose, Grounded
The most personal story of the week was Ukraine’s. Mykhailo Fedorov, the young minister who built the country’s drone industry from nothing and became the face of a leaner, tech-driven way of fighting, was fired by Zelensky — and thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets in protest.
Elise laid out the fault line: an infantry-minded military establishment, led by a commander nicknamed “the Butcher,” clashing with a innovation-first faction that Fedorov personified, at the exact moment drone warfare is what’s stabilizing the front. Matt saw something more personal than strategic in the decision — a recurring pattern under Zelensky of talented, popular subordinates getting sidelined once they build a following of their own. He drew an unflattering parallel to Trump himself: both men, he argued, are gifted communicators with an outsized sense of their own indispensability, and both tend to keep the loyal close while easing out the merely competent.
Alex’s contribution was the sharpest: whatever the politics, Zelensky just pushed out the person who engineered the very capability — cheap, homegrown drone warfare — that Ukraine could eventually export to its European allies. “You just kind of threw out the golden goose,” he said. My own view is that Zelensky would serve himself and his country better by taking a Churchill-style off-ramp — commit to winning the war rather than to a fourth term — though I doubt he’ll take that advice any time soon.
Those are my quick takes on this week’s episode of World Review. To get the full story, please listen to the episode itself.