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Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. Happily for us, he is also a contributor to News Items. — John Ellis

By Jerry Seib:

Democrats could conceive of a variety of strategies to improve their chances in this year’s midterm elections, or in the general election coming in 2028, but the most potent strategy might be the simplest of all: a voter registration drive.

That thought emerges from a look inside a fascinating new Wall Street Journal poll, which makes it possible to contrast the views of Americans who are registered to vote and those who aren’t. In a nutshell, the unregistered are remarkably more downbeat in their views of President Trump and the Republican party overall than are their voting counterparts.

For example: When people who are registered to vote were asked which party they support in this year’s elections, 48% said the Democrats, 40% Republicans. That’s a comfortable but not overwhelming eight-point advantage for the Democrats. But among those who aren’t registered to vote, the gap is yawning. Among non-registered Americans, 60% said they prefer the Democrats, and just 19% the Republicans. That’s an enormous 41-point advantage for the Democrats.

Other data points are just as striking. A whopping 81% of those not registered to vote say they disapprove of the job President Trump is doing, compared to 57% among registered voters. Just 13% of these non-voters say they consider themselves Republicans, compared to 32% among registered voters.

Those who aren’t registered to vote have an almost shockingly downbeat view of the country’s path; 84% say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

This appears to represent a turnaround from the state of affairs in 2024, when some post-election analyses suggested that President Trump would have won by an even wider margin if more Americans had registered to vote and shown up at the polls. Now, it seems that if Democrats could just get more folks registered, and corral some of their dissatisfaction into action at the polls, the job of ousting the Republicans who now are in charge of both houses of Congress would be easier.

Indeed, one Democratic activist says such numbers show why Republicans want to make it harder for Americans to register to vote, which Democrats assert is the goal of the SAVE Act, the voting reform legislation President Trump is pushing congressional Republicans to pass.

Still, as in most matters in today’s politics, things aren’t as simple as they might seem. There are some significant reasons these non-voters aren’t registered and showing up at the polls: They are markedly downbeat, even cynical, about the political system, and activating them to participate in a process they mistrust is a tall order.

“It’s pessimism and maybe more than that,” says Adam Geller, a Republican pollster who conducts the Wall Street Journal poll along with Democrat John Anzalone. “They have virtually no confidence in the political and economic system.”

These non-voters have the power to produce “close to a revolution” if they got engaged, says Anzalone. But their belief that the system is broken stands in the way: “Everyone’s let them down, so they think that even if they did participate nothing would change.”

Indeed, fully 85% of them agree with the statement: “The economic and political systems in this country are stacked against people like me.” Among registered voters, that figure is 73%. The unregistered are more likely than registered voters to say their economic situation has gotten worse in the last year.

The population of non-registered voters skews younger and Latino, two demographic groups notoriously difficult to get engaged in politics. They sit lower on the education scale—46% of them have only a high school diploma or less, compared to just 16% among registered voters—meaning many fall into another category of Americans who are traditionally more difficult to get registered.

And while they look as if they are sympathetic to the Democrats now, and call themselves more liberal than does the population overall, they also have a wider streak of independence than do Americans generally. That means they are less likely to get firmly attached to either party over time. They are, in short, a tough crowd to capture, for the Democrats or anybody else.

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From The American Academy of Arts & Scienes:

Professor David Gordon Blackbourn is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He taught for twenty years at Harvard University (1992-2012), where he was Coolidge Professor of History, and before that was on the faculty of London University (1976-1992). He has produced significant work in many different areas of modern German history. An early work co-written with Geoff Eley helped to undermine the then dominant historical paradigm of Germany’s special path, or Sonderweg. His six books include works on modern mass politics, a microhistory of popular religiosity, and a work of synthesis on Germany in the long nineteenth century. One of his best-known books, “The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany,” won the George Mosse Prize for Cultural History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Prize for Best Book in Forest and Conservation History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others. His work has appeared in 11 languages. His most recent book is “Germany in the World,1500-2000”.

In two years time (1989-1990), the Berlin Wall fell, East and West Germany re-united, and the Soviet Union collapsed. For Germany and for Europe generally, more than two decades of relative stability and frequent success followed.

The three pillars of Germany’s business/political model came to be known as “Gas from Russia, Cars to China, Security from the United States”. Close enough. The important thing about the model was that it worked.

It no longer does.

If it’s true that “as Germany goes, so goes the European Union” then we may be at a (truly) pivotal moment in German and European history. Who better to talk to about this than David Blackbourn? As noted above, David is one of the world’s most eminent and widely respected historians of modern Germany and Europe. Germany in the World: A Global History, 1500-2000 is an extraordinary and magnificent work of history. If you had to pick one person to talk about Germany’s history and its present moment, it would probably be David.

So I called his agent, Robin Straus, and she set it up.

(News Items Podcast with David Blackbourn. Recorded June18, 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.

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Dear Subscribers —

News Items will be off the grid beginning Sunday, 28 June.

We return on Monday, 6 July.

That said, we will be posting two News Items Podcasts (today and next Friday) and a contributor “column” or two.

Thank you for your support. We are a “going concern” because of paid subscriptions. Without you, the business fails. So “thank you for your support” doesn’t really capture the extent of our gratitude. It’s more like “thank you again and again (and again).”

All best —John Ellis and the News Items team.

1. For decades, the tech industry has relied on the ability of semiconductor companies to wring more power out of computer chips, making the smartphones that fit in a hand today more capable than the computers that filled entire rooms 40 years ago. While some experts worry that era of increased miniaturization is ending, IBM is saying not so fast. The big tech company on Thursday released details of its next advance in chip manufacturing technology, which it says could keep that innovation going for another 10 years. Using a novel approach to making smaller transistors that act as tiny switches in microprocessors and other chips, IBM said, the new production process can squeeze nearly twice as many transistors on a fingernail-size chip as the last technology it introduced in 2021. That will offer 50 percent greater computing performance and 70 percent better energy efficiency, the company said. Both attributes are in hot demand, particularly in the race to build data centers for artificial intelligence. (Sources: research.ibm.com, nytimes.com)

2. World Models:

Many researchers are now convinced that humanlike AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI), will require more than mastering language and images. It will require AIs that can reason about space, causality, and the consequences of actions—especially if they are to control humanoid robots, operate factories, and explore other planets.

Few people have argued for this need more forcefully than AI pioneer Yann LeCun. “I joke that the smartest systems we have today are not as smart as a house cat,” he says. A cat can’t code like an LLM, but it can survive by its wits. The notion that simply scaling an LLM will get to AGI is “complete nonsense,” he says. “It’s like saying you’re going to get into orbit by scaling airplanes. There’s a very powerful delusion circulating in Silicon Valley that this is the case.”

LeCun left a top job at Meta to co-found one of a growing number of labs and startups developing “world models”—systems that build representations of how the world works—and agents that operate within them to learn or plan. Ultimately, these researchers hope that more closely mimicking how the human mind learns will give AI stunning new powers. (Sources: science.org, spectrum.ieee.org, amturing.acm.org)

3. Two weeks ago, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic shut down its two most powerful A.I. systems after an unexpected demand from the U.S. government to cut access to it. Days later, a Chinese start-up, Z.ai, released an A.I. model that is nearly as powerful as Anthropic’s models, Fable and Mythos. But Z.ai’s new technology costs much less to use, and no one in the United States was putting restrictions on it. It quickly landed on a closely watched leaderboard of the world’s 10 most popular models. Z.ai is on the cutting edge of a wave of powerful but inexpensive A.I. from China that is challenging the lock that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have had on the industry. Six of the models now on the A.I. leaderboard were developed in China. Z.ai’s new model, GLM-5.2, arrived just as U.S. businesses realized that they had to find ways to cut down on how much they were spending on A.I. It also landed when executives in Silicon Valley were becoming worried that the Trump administration was leaning toward regulating the technology. “With Fable restricted, the gap between the U.S. and China is very slim,” said Rehaan Ahmad, a co-founder of the Silicon Valley start-up alphaXiv, who has been using Z.ai’s new model for more than a week. The Chinese models still face two big hurdles to widespread use in the United States: concerns about their ties to the Chinese government and complaints that Chinese companies have unfairly used American technology to build these cheaper models. But their low cost is winning converts. (Sources: nytimes.com, openrouter.ai)

4. The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to limit the release of its next model, GPT-5.6, to only a small set of government-approved partners before any wider release, citing security concerns, according to a source familiar with the matter. This marks the first time the U.S. government has preemptively asked an American AI company to restrict the launch of a model before release. The White House's Office of the National Cyber Director and the Office of Science and Technology Policy asked OpenAI to limit the rollout of GPT-5.6 as the administration builds a framework for testing and evaluating the security of new models, per the source. The source told Axios that OpenAI has been proactively working with the administration on the model release since before Anthropic revoked access to its frontier models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, over a rare Commerce Department directive. The White House has been looped in on the capabilities of OpenAI's new model and has been able to preview its abilities. (Source: axios.com)

5. AI and Public Opinion (in the U.S.):

Three-quarters of Americans think AI should be more regulated, according to YouGov, a pollster, with Republicans nearly as keen as Democrats. Almost two-thirds of Americans think the technology is advancing too quickly, versus only 2% who say “too slowly”, according to the Pew Research Centre. Policy is struggling to keep up with the pace of change.

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1. Two major earthquakes struck central Venezuela on Wednesday evening, causing buildings to collapse in the capital and people to swarm into the streets. The stronger quake was the largest to hit the country since 1900. Venezuela’s president, Delcy Rodríguez, declared a state of emergency. “For those who have unfortunately suffered the loss of a family member, we extend our immediate condolences,” she said in a televised address. She gave no numbers of deaths or injuries, but with fears of a widespread disaster high, called on doctors and nurses to report to their jobs to care for the injured. The first earthquake hit just after 6 p.m. Eastern time with a magnitude of 7.2, and was followed less than a minute later by a 7.5-magnitude earthquake, according to U.S. monitoring agencies. The epicenter was near San Felipe, a city of about 220,000 in the state of Yaracuy, about 200 miles west of Caracas. As seismologists review available data, they may revise the reported magnitudes of the earthquakes. The U.S. Geological Survey released a preliminary analysis that described a “severe seismic doublet sequence.” A seismologist with the agency, Paul Earle, called the earthquakes “devastating.” The earthquakes are the latest blow to a country that has experienced extraordinary political and economic turmoil in recent years. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. Key parts of the oil market are suddenly awash in supply, as a stream of cargoes out of the Strait of Hormuz accelerates after the US-Iran agreement to open the waterway. Even before the deal, a combination of strategic inventory releases, a collapse in demand from top buyer China, and a substantial number of tankers sneaking “dark” out of the Persian Gulf had contributed to a small oversupply in some key markets, traders say. Now, markets are weakening across Europe and Asia as buyers find themselves inundated with offers for cargo. In one of the most dramatic examples, Angolan crude — a grade that is typically snapped up by China — has been selling at the biggest discounts in more than a decade, at times changing hands at nearly $10 a barrel below the global Dated Brent benchmark. More broadly, traders say that some Chinese refiners have actually been offering oil cargoes for sale, in a stark reversal of normal flows. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. President Trump’s trade wars have waned. The price of gas is finally falling. But inflation has a new catalyst: America’s massive artificial-intelligence build-out is beginning to push up prices on everything from smartphones to electricity. The question now is how widely that build-out might ripple through the economy, and how long it could keep inflation elevated. The answers will have big consequences for the economy. The data centers used for AI require sophisticated computing equipment, cooling systems to keep that equipment from overheating, electric and fiber-optic cables and backup generators to prevent power disruptions. Based on announced and planned developments, Columbia University economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh estimates that spending on the AI build-out through 2032 could come to about $8 trillion—nearly five times the market value of the entire New York City property market. With so much demand, prices are rising for many of the things that go into the AI build-out. And because those things are used for more than just AI, those price increases are spilling over into the broader economy. (Source: wsj.com)

4. The Trump administration asked Congress on Wednesday for $87.6 billion in supplemental funding, most of it to cover costs related to the Iran war. The request is likely to intensify debate over presidential war powers as lawmakers in both parties question whether Congress should have authorized military action against Iran. $67 billion of the request would go to the Defense Department, including $21 billion for munitions, $17.3 billion for operational costs and $12.1 billion for classified programs, according to the letter. $11.1 billion would go to farmers, and $1.4 billion would fund the response to the Ebola outbreak in Central Africa. (Source: axios.com)

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1. Good news: The cost of diesel in the US fell below $5 a gallon for the first time since mid-March, offering some relief for one of the global economy’s most important fuels. The national average retail price declined to $4.98 a gallon on Wednesday, according to the American Automobile Association. That’s down from a peak of $5.69 a gallon in April, though still well above the $3.76 a gallon recorded on the eve of the US-Iran war. Diesel prices surged at the outset of the conflict, partly because the Strait of Hormuz is a critical transit route for fuel produced at refineries across the Gulf region. The increase raised costs for businesses and consumers worldwide, who rely on diesel for freight transportation, power generation and heating. (Sources: bloomberg.com, gasprices.aaa.com)

2. Congress passed a major housing bill in a rare bipartisan moment as Republicans and Democrats scramble to show voters they are serious about addressing affordability concerns ahead of the midterms. The House approved the legislation Tuesday 358-32, sending it to President Donald Trump’s desk. The Senate on Monday voted 85-5 in favor of the bill, which is aimed at increasing housing supply and lowering costs, and represents the most significant piece of housing legislation since the financial crisis. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

3. The top 20% of income earners in the U.S. hold about 87% of stocks and mutual funds — that amounts to $55 trillion as of June, up from $45 trillion a year ago, per RSM’s analysis of data from the Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts overview. The bottom 80% holds about $8 trillion and has seen less of a gain in dollars — up from $7 trillion last year. (Source: axios.com)

4. ISW/CTP Iran Update, 23 June 2026:

> Iran is taking steps to establish a joint mechanism with Oman to try to exercise long-term authority over the Strait of Hormuz. Such a mechanism would enable Iran to regulate transit through the strait and decide to restrict passage at its discretion. Recent increased vessel traffic through the strait does not eliminate the threats that Iranian control over the strait poses to US interests and global commerce.

> Iranian regime officials have continued to deny that the United States could control how the regime spends any funds it obtains from the US-Iran memorandum of understanding (MoU). Any economic relief that the regime obtains could support Iranian efforts to reconstitute its military capabilities and the Axis of Resistance.

> Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei’s Telegram channel reiterated the primary objectives that Iran seeks to achieve in the current conflict. These objectives include ending US military operations against Iran, making the United States lift its naval blockade on Iranian ports, consolidating Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz, receiving US compensation for Iranian reconstruction, the lifting of all sanctions, “the resolution of nuclear issues,” and Iranian access to frozen assets. (Source: understandingwar.org)

5. Iranian officials said they have no plans to allow international inspectors access to their country’s damaged nuclear facilities, just a day after Vice President JD Vance said Iran had agreed to allow such inspections, which would restore a safeguard from President Barack Obama’s deal with Tehran that President Donald Trump threw out. Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said Tuesday that there was no plan for the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect Iran’s nuclear facilities damaged by the war and that officials had not met with the director general of the nuclear watchdog. “There is simply no established procedure for this matter,” Baqaei said in comments reported by state media, adding that Iran would “adhere to the standard procedures, which are already well-defined and transparent.” (Source: washingtonpost.com)

6. Russia’s closest ally, Belarus, has emerged as a potential new front in the Kremlin’s confrontation with the West, as Moscow seeks to strengthen its military union with the country and Ukraine threatens strikes on its territory. Earlier this year, Moscow started a pressure campaign on Belarus in hopes of using it as a springboard to expand Russia’s war in Ukraine or to launch nonconventional operations against members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said former and current Russian and European officials. The move signals that Moscow might be weighing a risky escalation in the war as its army struggles to advance in eastern Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin faces faltering domestic support more than four years into the conflict. (Source: wsj.com)

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1. Anthropic’s flagship Mythos AI model reportedly infiltrated nearly all of the National Security Agency (NSA) ‘s classified systems within a few hours during an authorized red-team evaluation on June 11. This incident now seems to be the main reason for a broad U.S. government directive on export controls issued the following day. Senator Mark Warner, Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, disclosed that General Joshua Rudd, who simultaneously leads the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, told him directly that Anthropic’s Mythos model “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” The statement, first reported by The Economist, has not been formally confirmed by any government agency, but has rapidly reshaped the narrative around Washington’s decision to pull Anthropic’s two most advanced models from public access. (Source: cybersecuritynews.com. Italics mine.)

2. The west’s artificial intelligence-armed adversaries may succeed within months in developing attacks that could overwhelm the defenses of governments and companies, the cyber chiefs of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership have warned. For now, the west has an advantage — advances in commercial AI and their integration into their militaries and spying capabilities appear to have outpaced those of Russia, China and others. But that lead may not last for long, the rare joint warning by the US-led alliance, which also includes the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, said. “The timeline is not years, it is months,” the joint communiqué said. (Source: ft.com)

3. As fears about AI hacking capabilities grow, OpenAI on Monday made a slew of cybersecurity-focused announcements, including an improved version of its limited-access security-specialized model GPT-5.5-Cyber, expanded international work with governments and other institutions to give them “trusted access” to the company's latest cybersecurity-focused models, and releasing its Codex Security scanner as an app plug-in. As advances across the AI industry leave critical open-source projects at increasing risk of falling behind, though, the company also said on Monday that it is launching an effort known as Patch the Planet, founded with the prominent research-focused security firm Trail of Bits and in collaboration with vulnerability management firms HackerOne and Calif. The project has already begun its work offering free security consulting services to open source maintainers to not only help them find and patch vulnerabilities, but also support them in strengthening their code bases and incorporating AI security tools into their development process. (Sources: wired.com, trailofbits.com, hackerone.com, calif.io)

4. President Trump accelerated his efforts to boost the burgeoning quantum-computing industry, signing a pair of executive orders aimed at speeding the development of advanced quantum computers and mitigating the security threats they present. One of the orders the president signed Monday directs federal agencies, including the Energy Department, to work with the private sector and academics to deploy a quantum computer powerful enough to conduct scientific research by 2028. Such benchmarks are seen as crucial to showing that the technology has real-world applications. Quantum computers are capable of solving problems much faster than traditional supercomputers, making them a growing priority for countries around the world. Mr. Trump signed a second executive order directing agencies and government security experts to prepare for quantum systems that can evade standard encryption more quickly than previously anticipated. The goal is to bolster security systems across the government and private sector so that advanced quantum hackers can’t take down critical infrastructure. The orders coincide with billions of dollars in funding for quantum companies being awarded by the Commerce Department and a private-sector investment frenzy from companies including International Business Machines, Microsoft and Google. (Source: wsj.com)

5. Robert Shiller:

Moments after ChatGPT was released in 2022, its emergence swiftly unleashed a flood of alarming prognostications, including the possibility of enormous job losses. Many of those warnings were emanating from the leaders of the technology themselves. Little wonder that Americans are now highly worried about the impact A.I. will have on their futures, with a recent poll finding that 70 percent believe that the technology will reduce employment opportunities. Like many others, I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating. Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality. (Source: nytimes.com. Professor Shiller’s most recent book is entitled “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events”)

6. Morgan Stanley research note:

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1. The Economist:

America’s lead over China in artificial intelligence may be at its smallest in over a year. When China disrupted the AI race in January 2025 with the release of DeepSeek r1, it erased $1 trillion from America’s capital markets. Nvidia, a chip firm, briefly shed 17% of its value; the Nasdaq sank by 3.1% in a day. American investors were troubled not only because Chinese AI was good, but because it was being given away for free. The uproar soon faded. Since then market valuations around the world have hinged ever more on the promise that AI will be both revolutionary and profitable.

Now Chinese labs are unsettling their American rivals anew in the race to monopolize the market for models. On June 13th a Beijing-based lab called Zhipu, or Z.ai, announced its latest system, GLM 5.2, promising “a step closer to frontier intelligence for everyone”. It is the most capable Chinese-trained model to date and runs at less than a tenth of the price of Anthropic’s latest release, Fable 5. And as with other Chinese models the weights, or parameters, that enable GLM 5.2 to function have been publicly released. (Sources: economist.com, chat.z.ai)

2. The Wall Street Journal:

In a matter of weeks, Microsoft has rolled out a suite of low-cost models meant to drive prices down for customers bracing from the sticker shock of skyrocketing AI bills. The company released Copilot Cowork, an autonomous AI “agent” allowing users to choose various AI models, including cheaper ones, as they complete long-running tasks.

Microsoft is weighing whether to host a version of DeepSeek, an ultralow-cost AI provider based in China that OpenAI and Anthropic have called out for distilling, or copying, their top models. Such a step would likely lead to a dramatic rise in use for the Chinese model-maker, one that could come at the expense of OpenAI and Anthropic, which are facing the prospect of a prolonged price war.

It is a striking step for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has long played the part of elder statesman in the trillion-dollar AI race, to join a growing effort to shift the race away from the development of top models with ever-expanding capabilities. (Source: wsj.com)

3. MIT Technology Review:

Miami-based AI startup Subquadratic came out of stealth mode last month with a huge claim. It announced that it had solved a mathematical bottleneck that had been holding back large language models for almost a decade.

The details were thin, and many people were unconvinced. But Subquadratic has started to bring the receipts, sharing the results of an independent evaluation of its new tech. The results suggest that the company’s claims might be worth paying attention to.

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1. Iran’s military command said Saturday it is closing the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, according to state media, testing a fragile ceasefire agreement intended to lead to a broader peace with the United States. After the announcement of the closure, Iranian and U.S. officials, including Vice President JD Vance, set off for Switzerland for more high-level talks, which are scheduled to resume on Sunday. Stranded vessels had cautiously begun to transit the Strait of Hormuz after a preliminary agreement between the U.S. and Iran in which the countries agreed to lift all restrictions on movement through the strategic maritime corridor. U.S. Central Command said movement continued through Saturday, stating that 55 merchant ships and 17 million barrels of oil passed through and denying that the strait is closed. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

2. Washington Post:

Vice President JD Vance arrived in Switzerland on Sunday for high-stakes talks with Iran on its nuclear program, hoping to bring a 60-day sprint from loosely defined agreement to full peace deal back on track.

The day before, Iran’s military said it was closing the Strait of Hormuz in response to Israeli strikes on Lebanon, a move that tested the strength of recent U.S. diplomatic efforts and underscored how uncertain the war’s endgame remains.

Vance said his top priorities are establishing the structure of the talks, making progress on the nuclear issues and ensuring a ceasefire in Lebanon, where Israel continues to exchange fire with Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group, threatening the tentative deal.

“We’re going to have a principal level of political leadership at the top, and then obviously the technical team is going to stay on the ground,” Vance told journalists at Joint Base Andrews before departing for Switzerland.

The U.S. negotiating team includes White House envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, who arrived in Switzerland on Saturday. The Iranian delegation, led by Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, arrived later that day. Pakistani and Qatari officials are mediating the talks.

A memorandum of understanding — which President Donald Trump signed at the Palace of Versailles in France last week — puts the onus on the United States to deliver early, including by lifting sanctions, freeing billions in frozen assets and dismantling a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. The two sides established a two-month timeline to flesh out the details and settle issues that have plagued negotiators for years. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

3. The Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. is working with Qatar on a plan to make billions of dollars in frozen funds available to Iran for humanitarian spending, another early financial incentive under the recently signed deal to end the war, people familiar with the matter said.

The plan, which isn’t yet completed, is aimed at giving Iran access to the spending power of some of its estimated $100 billion in cash frozen worldwide, beginning with $6 billion held in Qatar. Under the deal, Qatar would allow purchases of food, medicine and other humanitarian goods ordered by Iran’s central bank with money drawn from frozen Iranian assets, mainly cash from oil sales that has been locked up overseas by sanctions, the people said.

The facility could provide a template for dealing with other pools of frozen Iranian cash around the world and a start on the first tranche of the $24 billion in blocked funds that Tehran wants released as soon as possible, some of the people said. (Source: wsj.com)

4. Times of Israel:

Israelis overwhelmingly view the war with Iran and subsequent deal with the United States in a negative way, with 92.1 precent of respondents to a poll believing Tehran is the winner.

According to the Hebrew University survey, 82.9% say the campaign weakened Israel’s long-term security and 86.0% have a negative attitude toward the outcome.

Furthermore, 72.5% do not believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel achieved significant gains and removed an existential threat, with 87.8% of Israelis believing the country failed to achieve its objectives or fulfilled only some of them.

With regards to Netanyahu’s performance, 56.4% say the premier’s management of the campaign was poor or failed.

Meanwhile, the poll finds 48.2% of Israelis support renewed major military action against the Hezbollah terror group, even at the risk of a clash with US President Donald Trump. (Source: times of israel.com)

5. President Trump said Thursday on “The Axios Show“ that “it’s possible” a potential Cuba invasion would resemble the swift capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January. Trump wants to project U.S. military power across the Western Hemisphere, fitting a second term defined by blunt force and expansionist ambition. Trump also acknowledged the Iran conflict is taking longer to resolve because Iran has a “more powerful“ military and and is far away. He suggested Cuba could be easier to overpower. (Source: axios.com)

6. Ukraine is pounding Russian oil refineries with long-range drone strikes, leading to restrictions on fuel sales, surging gasoline prices and huge lines of cars outside gas stations hundreds of miles from the front lines. This week, drones repeatedly hit a refinery in Moscow that produces more than one-third of the fuel supply for the Russian capital and the surrounding region. Videos of the latest attack posted to social media on Thursday showed a massive fireball erupting from a storage-tank explosion and several other fires raging across the complex. It was the latest in more than two dozen strikes on Russian refineries since March, a growing headache for the Kremlin’s efforts to maintain economic normality and shield its citizens from the consequences of the brutal four-year-old war. (Source: wsj.com)

7. Of all the fields AI is upending, few have deeper ramifications for humanity than its role in warfare. Advanced algorithms have quickly swung from playing a supporting intelligence role to acting as agents of death. “Future combat will be largely robotic. It will be automated,” former Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, who now invests in military-drone companies, said recently on stage at an expo. “It will be controlled by the laws of war.” Schmidt’s robot prediction draws little dispute. Less certain is whether last century’s rules can handle warfare’s future. (Source: wsj.com)

8. The Wall Street Journal:

America’s economic anxiety is rising up the income ladder.

A new Wall Street Journal poll finds that even those who consider themselves among the wealthiest classes in America carry high levels of concern about their current finances, the years ahead and the prospects for their children.

More than 40% of Americans who call themselves upper class or upper-middle class say they haven’t saved enough money to retire comfortably. Only about 40% say their financial security is where they thought it would be at this point in their lives. Nearly three in five say they are strained by high gasoline prices.

Those in the wealthiest classes have lost faith that an economy that has benefited them can lift future generations. Some 86% of people who call themselves upper class or upper-middle class say they lack confidence that life for their children will be better than theirs has been. That’s up from 64% in a 2019 survey and shows a level of pessimism that matches the views of less-fortunate groups. (Source: wsj.com)

9. For many Americans, the math of homeownership doesn’t add up any more. A home buyer in 2019 could expect to spend about $20,000 a year on basic homeownership expenses: mortgage payments, property taxes, insurance, maintenance and repairs, according to data from Intercontinental Exchange and home-services marketplace Angi. By 2025, that annual bill had soared above $28,500, outpacing inflation and keeping many would-be buyers out of the market. Homeowners who wish they could sell and move elsewhere are also staying put, turned off by the cost of purchasing today. The affordability challenges are keeping the housing market in a slump for a fourth straight year. (Source: wsj.com)

10. Gillian Tett:

Moody’s calculates that insurance groups now hold $807 billion of illiquid and opaque credit instruments, accounting for 20 per cent of their $4 trillion-worth of fixed-income holdings. Meanwhile, private capital firms have been buying insurance companies too, creating the appearance (if not the reality) of circular ties. More striking still, those insurance companies are increasingly turning to private credit ratings to evaluate those opaque, illiquid assets. These are often commissioned from agencies such as Morningstar, Egan-Jones and Kroll, instead of the bigger traditional players like Moody’s, S&P and Fitch.

Why are they doing this? A key reason may be, as the Bank for International Settlements recently warned, that private ratings seem to be “systematically” inflated compared with public ratings, creating a flattering aura of safety that permits insurance companies to cut their capital reserves. That boosts current profits but also reduces their future resilience to shocks.

A trio of economists — Xuelin Li, Sangmin Oh and Giacomo Ricciardi — has just quantified this in startling new research. They note “a 10-fold increase in the use of private ratings since 2018, predominantly in opaque securities and concentrated among large and PE-owned insurers”. Indeed, privately rated assets now represent 12 per cent of all US life insurance groups’ portfolios — but a whopping 36 per cent at Everlake (owned by Blackstone), 28 per cent at NZC Capital (owned by Eldridge) and 24 per cent at Athene (owned by Apollo).

The trio calculate that “eliminating this gap [between public and private ratings] would increase the required capital charges on insurers’ bond holdings by $4.5 billion per year”. In plain English: they think insurers are undercapitalized by that amount. (Source: ft.com)

11. Keir Starmer is preparing to set out a timetable for his departure from No 10 this week after Andy Burnham’s triumphant return to Westminster in the Makerfield byelection. The prime minister is understood to have reached the conclusion that his position is no longer tenable after conversations in recent days with cabinet ministers, Downing Street advisers, trade union leaders, and party donors. Although Mr. Starmer is spending the weekend talking his future over with his wife, Victoria, at Chequers before making a final decision, senior Labour figures believe a “clear statement” could come as early as Monday. (Source: observer.co.uk)

12. Wyndham Clark will enter the final round of the U.S. Open with the largest lead since 2011, but the world’s No. 1 player is in the final group with him. Clark shot an even-par 70 on Saturday at Shinnecock Hills and is six strokes ahead of four competitors with 18 holes to play. It is the largest 54-hole lead at this major since Rory McIlroy led by eight strokes in 2011. But it’s Scottie Scheffler in the final group with him, playing on his 30th birthday and only needing a U.S. Open win to complete the career Grand Slam. Mr. Clark is — understatement — not well-liked, so the golf world will be rooting for Mr. Scheffler, who is well-liked and much-admired. The leaderboard is here. (Sources: nytimes.com/athletic, usopen.com)

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Quick Links: Mon Dieu! Europe swelters under heatwave, France restricts alcohol consumption. Politico seems surprised to learn that Canada’s prime minister is shrewd. Prime Minister Meloni is shrewd, lambasting President Trump at the G-7 meeting. According to YouGov’s monthly European tracker, only 7% of Italians have a favorable opinion of Trump, while 86% have an unfavorable opinion. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is also shrewd, but finds himself in a political Trump-jam.

(You Tube! ‘Alternate Shots’. Episode #31. Co-hosted by Richard Haass and John Ellis. Recorded 19 June 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger.)

(Audio only)

There are 14 points in the Memorandum of Understanding agreed by Iran and the United States. Richard summed them up in the headline of his most recent ‘Home and Away” Substack newsletter: “Defeat”.

It’s hard to argue with his assessment. There are few people left trying to do so. The question now is: what happens next? “Resolving” the 14 points to the mutual satisfaction of both parties seems fraught. Resolving them to the satisfaction of the GCC states and Israel seems unlikely.

How the Taiwan “issue” gets resolved, in the near term or eventually, is another open question. Richard and East Asia expert David Sacks address it in an upcoming Foreign Affairs essay, due out Monday (22 June).

In the podcast, Richard previews the essay in some detail. The short, oversimplified “takeaway”: President Xi is maneuvering to “acquire” Taiwan without firing a shot. The U.S.’s willingness to prevent him from doing so seems uncertain.

And for good reason. This from The New York Times on Thursday:

President Lai Ching-te of Taiwan voiced “high hopes” on Thursday that President Trump would approve $14 billion in arms orders for the island, downplaying concerns raised last month when Mr. Trump suggested U.S. military support for Taiwan was negotiable, unsettling longstanding American policy.

Moving right along, we discuss the U.S. Open golf championship and the New York Knicks. Both are reminders that great athletes sometimes produce “transitory enchanted moments.”

There’s nothing quite like U.S. Open golf at Shinnecock Hills, one of the nation’s greatest golf courses, especially so when the wind is up. The wind has been up. And it’s impossible to convey in words what the Knicks mean to millions of people in New York City. It’s the city’s game and the city’s team, at long last, triumphed. Joy paraded in lower Manhattan on Thursday. More than 2 million people showed up to share it.

If you prefer, you can listen to this episode (and all previous episodes) by clicking on these hyperlinks: Apple, Amazon, and Spotify. We’re on a number of other podcast platforms as well. And now, YouTube!

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1. The Pentagon needs $80 billion to cover costs from the Iran war as well as other non-war-related bills, Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg told lawmakers in phone calls this week, according to people familiar with the discussions. Lawmakers have been pressing the Trump administration to provide a comprehensive price tag for the war, which started Feb. 28. Among lawmakers’ concerns is that the military depleted valuable munitions that might be needed to confront threats elsewhere around the world. Pentagon leaders have said they could start running out of money for operations this summer unless Congress passes a new wartime spending bill, warning that the services will have to cut back on training exercises and other priorities because of the war in Iran and troop deployments along the U.S. southern border. (Source: wsj.com)

2. Deadly fighting between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon has derailed scheduled peace talks between the US and Iran after President Trump warned Israel against escalating the war with the Shia militia. Iran pulled out of the talks in Switzerland on Thursday, citing the ongoing Israeli operation in Lebanon as violating the agreement it signed with US this week to end the regional war on all fronts. In response, JD Vance, the US vice-president, postponed traveling to Switzerland as the Swiss foreign ministry said that it would not host the talks as scheduled. (Source: thetimes.com)

3. Institute for the Study of War:

Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-affiliated media has made Iranian implementation of the US-Iran agreement, particularly provisions concerning the Strait of Hormuz, contingent on an end to Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran is likely connecting these two clauses to compel the United States to pressure Israel to cease operations in Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces has continued operations against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, despite Iranian insistence that Israel must halt its campaign in Lebanon as part of the MoU. Hezbollah seriously affects northern Israeli security, and its attacks have displaced Israeli citizens there. Israel is not a signatory to the MoU, even though the signatories added language that implied that Israel and Hezbollah were signatories. (Source: understandingwar.org)

4. The deal to end the conflict between the U.S. and Iran doesn’t address key reasons President Trump gave for going to war: the Islamic Republic’s missiles, drones and support for militias. That triple threat remains one of the biggest concerns for Tehran’s Gulf neighbors. The agreement, a memorandum of understanding that Trump signed Wednesday, places no limits on Tehran’s stockpile of the weapons that it used to menace international shipping, nor on the powerful regional network of armed militias that helped it attack Arab Gulf nations. “The MOU doesn’t address any of Iran’s core power-projection capabilities,” said Hasan Alhasan, a former foreign-policy analyst on the staff of the crown prince of Bahrain. (Sources: wsj.com, iiss.org)

5. Israel awoke to a frightening new reality on Thursday as it absorbed, with disbelief and largely in silence, the terms of President Trump’s preliminary agreement to end the war with Iran. It accomplishes none of Israel’s war aims, analysts and officials said, and arguably leaves the country in worse shape on each of them….“It’s a bad agreement in which the Americans are paying with cash, and got, at the maximum, a letter of intent,” Yaakov Amidror, a hawkish former national security adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, said in an interview. David Horovitz, the editor of The Times of Israel, called it “a catastrophic capitulation,” in the headline of a fiery opinion column. (Sources: nytimes.com, timesofisrael.com)

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1. President Trump on Wednesday defended his agreement to end the Iran war, saying he wanted to avoid an “economic catastrophe” that could have resulted if the conflict the U.S. launched had continued. Mr. Trump—who in an unexpected move signed the deal yesterday in Versailles—said he was influenced by the stock market’s rise as he worked toward a resolution of the conflict. He said he didn’t want to be compared with former President Herbert Hoover, who was president during the 1929 market crash that led to the Great Depression. “He was always the one I didn’t want to be,” Trump told reporters at the Hôtel Royal where he and other world leaders gathered for the Group of Seven meeting. “I didn’t want to see an economic catastrophe.” (Source: wsj.com)

2. Niall Ferguson:

Right now, Trump’s 14 Points look as wretched as Wilson’s 14 Points looked splendid in 1918. But who can be sure what lies ahead? What if the most perilous time for Iran’s horrible regime is not when it is under intense bombardment, but when it makes peace and smells the approach of boatloads of money? What if, at the same time, it turns out that the IRGC’s equally blood-soaked confederate, Vladimir Putin, is in deeper trouble than we realize with his war in Ukraine? And what if the reason oil prices didn’t go even higher than they did in the past four months is that China’s domestic economy is in free fall, as some numbers indicate?

What if, in short, President Trump’s luck holds—as it has held so often throughout his 80 years of often reckless risk-taking?

In the end, the wording of this lousy memorandum of understanding may matter less than the second- and third-order consequences of Trump’s Iran war. The economic consequences to date have certainly been far less damaging than I foresaw earlier in the conflict. Maybe, just maybe, the same will turn out to be true of the geopolitical consequences. (Source: thefp.com, axios.com, reuters.com)

3. Robert Pape:

The official memorandum released by the Trump administration contains one important provision absent from the earlier Bloomberg version.

The key sentence reads:

“Upon the signing of this MOU, the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days”.

That language transforms the agreement from a permanent settlement into a temporary armistice.

Assuming no other crises emerge—a large assumption—the next sixty days could bring a period of relative stability. Oil flows would resume. Insurance costs would ease. Markets would respond positively.

But the agreement itself creates a new deadline.

Once the sixty-day period expires, Iran and the Gulf states are scheduled to negotiate the future administration and maritime services of the Strait of Hormuz. The original crisis centered on the closure of Hormuz. The next crisis may center on who governs Hormuz. (Source: political-science.uchicago.edu, escalationtrap.substack.com, axios.com)

4. President Trump on Wednesday said that he would “rather not have” the North American trade agreement that was negotiated during his first term. The free trade pact that binds North America is up for review next month. The risk of the deal collapsing now appears greater than before. “I’m thinking about maybe we won’t be able to make a deal. I would rather not have the USMCA,” Trump told reporters in Paris, referring to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. “I’d rather leave it unsigned, I’d rather have it terminated,” the president said — though he added that he “may” sign it. “We do better as a country if we don’t have an agreement.” (Source: axios.com)

5. The U.S. government’s latest battle with Anthropic has revived long-simmering concerns throughout the AI industry that the White House has placed a bullseye on their reliance on foreign AI talent. The Trump administration appears to have targeted only Anthropic so far, warning the company on Friday in a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick that it would need a license to make its latest models available to “foreign persons,” including its own employees. But Anthropic’s biggest rival, OpenAI, has flagged its concerns about the issue. (Source: theinformation.com)

6. Paul Kedrosky:

I have written here many times (see here. here, here, etc.) about the sharply growing role of AI capex in US GDP growth, but it is now becoming material in GDP outright. As (this) Epoch figure shows, the ongoing AI infrastructure buildout has compressed a decade of capital spending into about two years. Computing infrastructure's share of nominal US GDP sat near 0.5% for most of the 2015–2022 period, with a gentle upward trend. Then it broke sharply upward around 2023, nearly tripling to approach 1.6% of GDP by 2026. This was driven almost entirely by AI-related compute hardware, data center construction, and networking layered on a non-AI compute data center base that never moved. (Source: paulkedrosky.com)

7. Two AI medical tools matched or surpassed doctors across a range of diagnostic and treatment decisions, in the latest sign that specialist health large language models are moving closer to demonstrating clinical value. Mira, developed by researchers in Germany, outperformed physicians in analyses of diseases including pancreatic cancer and pneumonia, while Google’s Amie produced more precise treatments and investigation plans than humans, according to results published in Nature (yesterday). The studies suggest specialist health AI tools can give better medical advice than general consumer AI models. But their inventors and independent experts warned that the tests were conducted in controlled simulations and did not mean the tools were ready for real-world clinical use. (Sources: ft.com, nature.com)

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1. Yikes: The San Andreas and San Jacinto fault systems are at their highest levels of tectonic stress in 1,000 years, raising the threat of a major, imminent earthquake that could devastate Southern California, a new study finds. The faults could rupture separately or together, thanks to an “earthquake gate” between them at Cajon Pass, where the San Jacinto fault splits from the main trace of the San Andreas fault. Researchers discovered that the Cajon Pass can prevent or facilitate earthquakes moving between the faults, depending on how similar their stress levels are at the time of rupture. And right now, the San Andreas and San Jacinto faults appear to have comparable, extremely elevated stress levels, potentially spelling trouble for Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside and the Coachella Valley, the team warned. (Source: livescience.com)

2. Monash University researchers have found in laboratory experiments that a drug which delivers copper to the brain significantly reduces toxic Alzheimer’s proteins and improves long-term spatial memory. The study, published today in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, shows the compound Cu(ATSM) repairs a vital waste-clearing pump at the blood-brain barrier – unlocking a potential new avenue of therapeutics targeting neuro-vascular dysfunction, caused by one of the world’s leading causes of death. (Source: monash.edu. Monash is a leading university based in Melbourne, Australia.)

3. Iran is set to receive broad financial incentives as part of its agreement with the US, including the right to sell oil immediately, tap a $300 billion development fund and get eventual access to its frozen assets, according to a final draft of the deal. While the contours of the memorandum of understanding have been circulating for days, the latest document — a copy of which was seen by Bloomberg News — offers the most complete accounting yet of the economic boost Iran is set to receive for ending its chokehold on the Strait of Hormuz and reiterating its commitment never to seek a nuclear weapon. (Source: bloomberg.com)

4. You can read the full text of the 14-Point Draft Memorandum of Understanding between the US and Iran by clicking on this link (no paywall). (Source: bloomberg.com, finance.yahoo.com)

5. Here’s point #6:

The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, While ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days. (Source: bloomberg.com. Italics mine.)

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1. Bloomberg:

The White House sought to make the case that its interim deal with Iran will end a global energy crisis and achieve the administration’s wartime goals, even as the two adversaries diverged on what the agreement will look like.

World leaders welcomed the agreement and markets responded positively. But the US and Iran have yet to release a text of the memorandum of understanding, and doubts remained on when it will go into effect — or how exactly it will lead to the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz.

President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters at the Group of Seven summit in France, insisted that the strait would be clear for traffic. “We have a lot of lanes right now already,” he said sitting alongside French President Emmanuel Macron.

Vice President JD Vance also sought to defend the deal Monday, making the rounds on television, claiming that any pact with Iran would be built around a verification system to ensure Tehran followed through on the terms. The two sides are expected to hold a formal signing ceremony on June 19.

And senior administration officials, speaking to reporters on condition of anonymity, described a hoped-for outcome that echoed sentiments expressed by administrations dating back to President Barack Obama — that the US wanted to extend a hand to Iran, and if it met a series of demands it would get relief from economic sanctions and win other financial incentives. (Source: bloomberg.com)

2. Vice President JD Vance yesterday said the US’s memorandum of understanding with Iran is “a very general document” with specifics of the deal to be worked out during further negotiations. “The MOU…is about a page and half so it is a very general document,” Vance said on CNN’s The Lead with Jake Tapper. “On a number of issues, we are going to have to figure this stuff out during the technical negotiation phase.” (Sources: timesofisrael.com, cnn.com. CNN video here.)

3. The Trump administration is prepared to allow the establishment of a $300 billion investment fund for Iran if Tehran agrees to a final settlement to end the war that includes a nuclear deal. A senior US official said Washington had discussed the possibility of sanctions relief and “a big $300 billion fund to rebuild their country”. The incentives would be connected to Iran’s “performance” adhering to the memorandum of understanding that is to be formally signed in Switzerland on Friday. A person briefed on the talks said the establishment of the fund would be contingent on a final settlement that is part of the MoU and would follow an extension of the ceasefire by 60 days, the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and further negotiations on a nuclear deal. (Source: ft.com. David Ignatius column on this adds more detail.)

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1. Iran War:

The United States and Iran reached an agreement on Sunday that paved the way for further talks to ultimately end a months-long war that has killed thousands of people, roiled the Middle East and rattled the global economy.

The announcement led to relief in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. It also sent oil prices tumbling, in part because the deal is expected to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for the world’s energy supplies.

But critical issues — including the fate of Iran’s nuclear program, the linchpin of the U.S.-Israeli attacks that started the war — have been pushed back to a later round of negotiations. And the economic shock waves of a war that has crippled supply chains and sent inflation soaring will keep rippling through the global economy for months.

The text of the agreement, which is scheduled to be signed by leaders from the two countries on Friday in Geneva, was not immediately released. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. Bloomberg analysis:

The US and Iran needed more than two months of fitful, strained negotiations to agree on a deal to halt their fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Now comes the hard part.

The provisional agreement announced by the two sides on Sunday night — President Donald Trump’s 80th birthday — leaves a narrow window of 60 days to negotiate issues around Iran’s nuclear program that bedeviled his predecessors for years. The memorandum of understanding, which has yet to be released, will be formally signed on June 19.

That gap raised the possibility that details on the text remained unresolved and the signing could be derailed. Already, differences were emerging between the two sides in what may have actually been achieved, while the simmering conflict between Israel and Lebanon could also still lead to a breakdown.

Trump says this initial deal amounts to the start of a process that will lead to peace in the region. Skeptics argue it may end up being nothing more than a temporary reprieve given it’s not clear either side is ready to compromise on the thorniest issues — how much economic relief to give Iran, what to do about its nuclear program and how to address its ballistic missile program. (Source: bloomberg.com)

3. President Trump’s deal with Iran is set to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but how quickly it can arrest a steep decline in oil stockpiles will determine the trajectory of energy prices in the coming weeks. For more than 15 weeks, the U.S. and other countries around the world have had to dip into oil tanks, salt caverns and strategic reserves to make up for the millions of barrels of oil trapped behind the strait. Now, the stocks are nearing critical levels, and energy executives say without an influx of more oil, prices will have to surge to stop the run on supplies….Relief could be on the way. (Source: wsj.com)

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My partner in the ‘Night Owls’ podcast, Joe Klein, first introduced me to Rye Barcott eight years ago. I was impressed because he’s impressive. In a recent post, Joe described him as follows:

Rye is an optimist, an activist. While he was still in college, at the University of North Carolina, he started a charity in a Kenyan slum, Kibera, that has blossomed, more than twenty years later, into a health facility, an education and sports program. He then served in the Marines, in Iraq, Djibouti and elsewhere. Afterward, Rye went on to get joint masters degrees in Public Policy and Business from Harvard. With his mentor Gergen and fellow veteran (Peter) Dixon, Rye co-founded With Honor—which funds the campaigns of Democrats and Republican veterans, but only if they sign a pledge to work together. There are now 37 With Honor members in the House, 11 in the Senate and three Governors. These are among the most admirable Americans I know; there are future Presidents among them.

Rye’s new book Courage Can Save Us, offers profiles of ten House caucus members, 5 Democrats and 5 Republicans who are members of the cross-partisan caucus. It is not like other books too frequently celebrated these days: it’s not about how awful everything is in America. It is the opposite: a hopeful look at some of our emerging national leaders, without being a hagiography. Working across party lines isn’t easy, these days. It begs death threats from freak constituents and primaries from extremists (on both sides). Three of Rye’s 10 subjects are leaving Congress. But more are on the way! The caucus persists and is an antidote to the despair so many feel about American politics these days.

Rye’s new book has now launched. He’s on the trail promoting it. Joe and I talked with him about the book, his work leading With Honor, and his belief that more productive, less performative politics is still possible.

(‘Night Owls” podcast with Rye Barcott. Recorded 27 May 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. If you prefer to listen to podcasts on the major podcast platforms, you can find this and all the other ‘Night Owls’ podcasts at Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and iHeart.)

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1. President Trump has vowed to “assume total control” of Iran’s main oil and gas markets in a dramatic escalation of his threats as he tries to pressure Tehran into agreeing to a deal that would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump said the US would hit Iran “very hard tonight”, adding that he intended to seize the key oil export hub of Kharg Island and other parts of the country’s oil infrastructure. The president has previously mooted the possibility of the US seizing Kharg, but analysts have warned it would represent a huge escalation, require putting boots on the ground and risk American casualties. (Source: ft.com)

2. Mr. Trump yesterday insisted the U.S. was nearing a deal on peace talks with Iran, pulling back from his threats just hours earlier to launch more military strikes and seize Iran’s oil infrastructure. Trump said Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei had signed off on the plan, which he said would be completed in coming days, paving the way for additional talks on Iran’s nuclear program. Tehran said it hadn’t decided. “Iran hasn’t reached a final conclusion about the agreement,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said, according to state media. “We will announce it when we reach a conclusion.” (Source: wsj.com)

3. Eurointelligence:

Western economic institutions and market observers are still basing their forecasts on a scenario that the war in Iran will be short and that the geopolitical situation will return to normal soon. But the signals we are getting from Iran suggests a more unsettling scenario, that of a long drawn-out war. The problem the media has is that there has been no written official document from the Iranian regime so far, just a few statements here and there. Yesterday we finally got a document, the Editorial no 346 from Khamenei.ir, the official website of Iran’s supreme leader (hat tip to former Middle East diplomat Alastair Crooke).

The document is written in Farsi. Translated, it claims that the regional order of West Asia after the war will be the regional order of Iran’s resistance bloc. Iran will not return to the pre-war era neither regarding the strait of Hormuz, US military presence in the region or Iran’s security equation in the region. And the new leitmotiv is: From Hormuz to Beirut.

If that sounds threatening to Lebanon and Israel, it is because it is. It suggests that no compromise will be accepted in negotiations for the sake of getting a deal done. It suggests that Iran wants to integrate Hezbollah in Lebanon even more into Iran’s security infrastructure. The editorial is full of dismissive comments about the US not being able to achieve their goals and lost its way. And it is full of praise for Iran’s epic resistance.

The hardship for the Iranian population, meanwhile, is real. Inflation is over 100%, millions who normally use the internet to sell things could not due to the internet shutdown for nearly three months, with service reinstated only at the end of May. Even if imports are coming in through Iran’s long land borders, they are far from what they used to be. But economic hardship does not mean the regime gives in. (Source: eurointelligence.com. Italics mine.)

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1. The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be “the last of the last” once seemed unthinkable. That is just what happened on Thursday. The war in Ukraine — which reached 1,569 days, or more than four years and three months — has now outlasted World War I. (Source: nytimes.com)

2. Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled “Terminator” drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed. We tried it,” says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. “It’s a test. We never implemented it [more widely].” The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometers over around 10 minutes and then engage “Terminator mode”, in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. “We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.” (Source: newscientist.com)

3. The New York Times:

First Ukraine assembled an arsenal of millions of drones that, along with Russia’s own buildup, turned a 25-mile-wide strip along the front line into a killing ground. Then Kyiv expanded its reach deep into the Russian heartland as it targeted oil infrastructure and military factories, making long-range violence in the war a two-way street.

Now, Ukraine is focusing on the middle ground — the critical roads and railways, in some cases more than 100 miles from the front, that feed Russian troops and matériel into battle. Kyiv is calling the effort a “logistics lockdown,” and it is systematically reshaping the battlefield, at least until Russian forces find a way to adapt. (Source: nytimes.com)

4. The U.S. began a fresh wave of attacks on Iran yesterday, launching strikes against several targets on President Trump’s orders, the American military said. The attack came hours after Trump said Iran was “playing us for suckers” because it hadn’t accepted U.S. terms for a nuclear deal. The Pentagon cast the attacks as an act of coercive diplomacy designed to force Iranian concessions at the negotiating table. “If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday afternoon as he visited the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of U.S. Central Command. Iran responded, launching strikes against Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan. (Sources: wsj.com)

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