The Week in GLOBAL EYES
Description
A conversation with a reader—my own brother, as it happened—made it clear to me that even though it might seem to me that I’ve let everyone know where to find GLOBAL EYES, it’s unlikely that everyone read the explanation in question. For those of you who missed it, GLOBAL EYES is now a running blog, one you can find by going to the home page (click on “The Cosmopolitan Globalist” at the top of this newsletter), then choosing GLOBAL EYES:
I’ve decided to do this because otherwise, by the time you receive the newsletter, too many of the items are already stale. (You can see what I mean just by reading what I’ve posted to GLOBAL EYES in the past week.)
I’ve copied and pasted the past week of GLOBAL EYES below, which I’ll do weekly from now on. This is because I received an anguished email from a reader who very much wanted GLOBAL EYES to arrive as an email. I assume that if this was important enough to someone that he wrote to me, there must be more who feel this way.
So from now on, you get both. For those of you who want the news while it’s still fresh, it’s in the GLOBAL EYES tab. For those of you who want the email news roundup, you’ll get that, too. This should make everyone happy.
When I send out the past week’s GLOBAL EYES, I’ll preface it with a summary, written by ChatGPT, for those of you who just want the highlights. (Writing this kind of summary is one of the many tasks ChatGPT does better than I do.)
A question, though: I’ve copied and pasted this in the chronological order in which I posted it. Would you prefer that I reorganize it by region before sending it? That will make it more or less identical to the original. But I don’t know if that matters to anyone:
And just so I can be sure that all of this isn’t a spectacular waste of time:
🌐👁️ GLOBAL EYES: THE SUMMARY
(The summary and the illustration are by ChatGPT.)
The world briefly exhaled this week as the guns fell silent in Gaza — a peace more exhausted than triumphant. Twenty hostages came home, twenty-eight did not, and an American president declared the war “over” with characteristic fanfare. Israel’s eyes turned eastward toward Iran, even as Hamas resurfaced amid the rubble it created. In Washington, trade wars flared and government lights went out; in Beijing, the AI news mills celebrated America’s “decline” in prose no human could have written so mechanically. From Antananarivo to Havana, governments wobbled; from Ankara to Brussels, alliances strained; and in the midst of it all, the world’s great powers continued their slow retreat from responsibility, disguising exhaustion as strategy. GLOBAL EYES watched it all—the momentary peace, the mounting fatigue, and the strange conviction, everywhere, that the worst is probably behind us. (Claire—whose conviction is that? Not mine.)
Middle East
End of the Gaza War: A Trump-brokered deal ended 738 days of war; all 20 living hostages returned, 28 dead (only 4 bodies repatriated). Israel freed ~2,000 Palestinian prisoners.
Trump’s “Phase B” Peace Plan: Trump, Sisi, Erdoğan, and others convened to endorse a US–Qatar–Turkey–Egypt framework to disarm Hamas and form a new Gaza administration. Israel and Hamas were excluded from the Cairo summit.
Post-war shifts: Israel redirected focus toward Iran and the Houthis, with new intelligence about uranium enrichment near Natanz.
Regional diplomacy: Indonesia’s president Prabowo Subianto was rumored (and later denied) to be planning a historic visit to Israel; an awkward hot-mic moment with Trump (“Can I meet Eric?”) went viral.
Saudi and Gulf reactions: Riyadh and Abu Dhabi warned that excessive Qatari influence in reconstruction could “bring Hamas back.”
Cease-fire fallout: Hamas quickly re-emerged in Gaza, pursuing rivals; Gazans returned to devastated neighborhoods searching for the dead.
Iranian press admitted October 7 was a “costly mistake.” Tehran’s proxies weakened; Nasrallah dead; Syria slipping from Iran’s orbit.
Qatar’s diplomatic climb-down: Agreed to support Trump’s plan and mediate Hamas’s disarmament after Israeli strikes near Doha.
</u
United States
