Red Cards.
The deterrence problem.
“The first email I read, every morning, is News Items.” — Rick Cordella, President, NBC Sports.
1. Michael LePage:
I think we will look back at 2026 as a landmark in medicine, the year in which the first protac drug was approved. What’s special about protacs? Well, while most drugs simply block their targets, protacs utterly demolish them. Per molecule, protacs are far more potent, and they can also do things other drugs just can’t. To put it in sporting terms, existing drugs tackle their opponents one-on-one, and sometimes that opponent evades them. Protacs are like a referee who red-cards an entire team, taking them off the field altogether. (Source: newscientist.com)
2. Gallup Poll:
Americans' approval of the job the U.S. Supreme Court is doing has fallen to a record low of 33%, driven by a steep drop in Republicans’ backing of the court since last year. The prior low approval rating was 39% measured a year ago.
Corresponding with the drop in approval, disapproval of the court has climbed to a record high 61% in the July 1-19 Gallup poll, conducted just after the end of the 2025-2026 Supreme Court term.
Sixty-two percent of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court was doing in Gallup’s initial 2000 reading, and majorities typically approved of the job the court was doing through 2010. (Source: news.gallup.com)
3. Just one in three Americans support the war on Iran, the lowest reading in a Reuters/Ipsos poll since the five-month-old conflict’s early days, with most respondents saying that President Donald Trump has failed to explain his goals. The poll, conducted Friday through Sunday, also showed the Republican president’s approval rating ticking higher to 37%, up three points from last month when his rating tied the lowest of his presidency. Trump has offered shifting objectives for the conflict such as aiding Iranians to topple their leaders, taking out Iran’s ballistic-missile capabilities and preventing it from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The poll found that 69% of Americans — including four in 10 Republicans - think Trump has not “clearly explained the goals of U.S. military involvement in Iran.” (Source: reuters.com)
4. CSIS.org:
Deterrence is ineffective when adversaries—such as the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Russia, Iran, and North Korea—know the United States cannot sustain a long war. Low munitions stockpiles and constrained industrial capacity change the time horizon adversaries use to assess U.S. staying power and weaken U.S. capability, credibility, and communication. Capacity therefore acts as a fourth deterrence variable by making U.S. combat power more replenishable, repairable, and resilient over time. There is a deterrence problem at the core of U.S. efforts to revitalize the defense industrial base. Recent conflicts are consuming high-end strike munitions and air-defense interceptors faster than the current defense industrial base can replace them. At the same time, these capabilities are key to conventional deterrence and changing how adversaries assess the costs and benefits of launching major wars short of nuclear exchange. Worse still, major rivals including the PRC, Russia, and North Korea are all at or near a wartime footing, producing and stockpiling munitions for future contingencies. Even Iran has proven capable of sustaining the production of ballistic missiles despite sustained attacks by the United States and Israel. As a result, in a major regional conflict, U.S. use of munitions would likely exceed current stockpiles, with some long-range precision-guided munitions potentially exhausted in less than a week in a Taiwan Strait conflict. (Source: csis.org)
5. President Trump set the stage for his first meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu in months by declaring that Israel “wouldn’t survive” without the US and playing down concerns about selling F-35s to Turkey. The US president’s remarks came on the eve of his meeting in Washington with the Israeli premier on Tuesday, the first since the two men launched the war on Iran earlier this year. The meeting comes as US and Israeli interests in the Middle East have appeared to diverge, with Trump announcing a ceasefire between the US and Iran in April — before Israel had achieved any of its war goals. (Source: ft.com)
6. The Kremlin has initiated a new crackdown on anti-war voices ahead of Russia’s parliamentary elections in September, barring candidates from running if they show any sign of opposing the bloody, expensive and increasingly unpopular military operation in Ukraine. While repression of political opposition forces is nothing new in President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the new clampdown is jarring because for a moment this spring, it seemed like a rare window had opened for dissent, as the authorities appeared to create a pressure release valve for growing dissatisfaction over the war. But with the government coming under increasing pressure over Ukraine’s relentless drone strikes and the growing toll on the economy, including an acute fuel crisis, hard-liners in the Kremlin and the security services are gaining the upper hand and have pushed successfully for more repressive measures. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
A News Items Mini-Feature: Subscribers sometimes ask, what newsletters do you read? “A lot of them” is the immediate answer. One of the very best is Liz Hoffman’s “Semafor Business”. It’s well-reported, well-written and well-informed. Added bonus: it’s free. We’ll recommend others as we go along. There are a lot of good ones.
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