Hello, and welcome back to the Daily Review. Judah Grunstein is out on vacation, so I’ll be pinch-hitting on this week’s editions of our newsletter.
Today at WPR, James Bosworth asks whether Latin America’s new crop of right-wing leaders can build any lasting regional initiatives. Sabina Henneberg and Sarah Yerkes examine the state of affairs in Tunisia, five years after Kais Saied’s authoritarian power grab. And Ulrike Franke wonders what happened to Europe’s promised drone wall.
Scroll down for more on those items. But first, here’s our take on today’s top story:
President Donald Trump at a political event at Rockland Community College, Suffern, NY, May 22, 2026. (Photo by Anthony Behar for SipaUSA via AP)
A specter is haunting America—the specter of communism. Or so President Donald Trump and his allies would have you believe.
According to a Reuters tally, Trump invoked the c-word 81 times over a two-week stretch in late June and early July. The president’s accusations of communism picked up after the June 23 Democratic Party primaries in New York, where a handful of leftist candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won contested elections. DSA-backed congressional candidates have also emerged victorious in states like Pennsylvania and Colorado.
In response, Trump has ripped a page straight from the Cold War playbook of the 1960s, sowing unfounded fears among Republican voters about “hardcore, godless communists” who are “totally opposed to our way of life.” The president’s aides reportedly view this as an effective way to galvanize the MAGA base heading into midterm elections in the fall.
Even setting aside the willful conflation of communism and socialism, there are several problems with this strategy. For starters, it ignores the fact that, 18 months into Trump’s second term, the U.S. economy has stalled: Wage and employment growth have leveled off and inflation expectations remain elevated. A recent CNBC poll found that 61 percent of the U.S. public is pessimistic about the economy, and 60 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. With so many voters concerned about bread-and-butter issues, Trump’s red-baiting rhetoric risks coming off as tone-deaf.
Yet there is also an important historical lineage behind the president’s obsession with communism. During his rise to prominence in the New York real estate industry, he was mentored by Roy Cohn, who prosecuted the convicted Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Cohn later went on to serve as chief legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose infamous anti-communist investigations during the 1950s triggered a wave of political repression that ruined thousands of lives.
It is doubtful that the same tactics McCarthy once employed—and which led to his downfall and censure by Congress—will resonate today. The median voter is 52 years old, meaning they weren’t yet old enough to vote when the Berlin Wall fell or when the Soviet Union collapsed. And while Americans continue to hold more favorable views of capitalism than socialism, the gap is getting smaller.
But Trump’s anachronistic warnings of a “communist menace” don’t represent just his own personal views: This Cold War-era mindset pervades his administration and the broader Republican Party. Consider a recent report from the State Department titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism.”
“For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” the report warns in its opening paragraph. It goes on to claim that “Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history—from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses—can be linked, in some way, shape, or form to Cuban influence.”
As historian Michael Bustamante pointed out in a thread on X, the pages that follow are filled with selective history, exaggerating the threat that Cuba poses to America while omitting the genuine grievances that have fueled contemporary and historical activism in the United States. For example, “Much of the report’s review of Cuba’s support for Black movements historically reads as if there were no reason—in the 60s or the present—for African-Americans to have criticisms of life in [the] United States at all,” Bustamante wrote.
Instead, the report would have its readers believe that virtually all domestic discontent in America over the past six decades has been manufactured by a sinister foreign government. The same government that is, according to Trump, teetering on the verge of collapse due to his administration’s own fuel blockade.
Like Trump’s bombastic claims of modern-day communist subterfuge and terror plots, the claims in the report don’t stand up to even the mildest scrutiny. That doesn’t mean they can’t do real damage, particularly if the claims in the report are used to justify military action against Cuba in some form. But as a political tactic to win votes in the upcoming midterms, they are unlikely to be effective.
Right-wing candidates have won nearly a dozen elections in Latin America in the past four years and now dominate governments across much of the region. Their recent bilateral visits and statements indicate this newly elected crop of leaders view themselves as allies and part of something bigger. Yet, none of the new presidents of Latin America have answered the question of what they will attempt to achieve regionally in this current moment of right-wing convergence, James Bosworth writes.
On July 25, 2021, President Kais Saied staged a massive power grab in Tunisia by declaring a trumped-up state of emergency. Since then, he has cracked down on dissidents and activists at home while alienating Tunisia’s traditional foreign partners, a state of affairs that Western officials have been slow to accept. But allowing Tunisia to continue to slide deeper into isolation and autocracy would be a mistake for the international community, Sabina Henneberg and Sarah Yerkes write.
Drone incursions over Europe’s eastern flank are becoming a persistent threat, with incidents involving injuries and property damage piling up. In response, the EU promised an ambitious and expansive “drone wall” to counter these incursions, but for now, slow progress has left member states to pursue their own solutions. The 4,000-kilometer barrier, as announced in EU speeches, is too ambitious and too vague, Ulrike Franke writes, and the EU needs to be careful not to overpromise and underdeliver.
Germany: German police shot and killed a suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attack over the weekend, after he allegedly charged at them with a sharp object. Local authorities said that the man drove a van into a crowd of revelers before stabbing people with a machete. The attack, which investigators said was motivated by Islamic extremism, left one person dead and 29 others injured.
The suspect was identified as Abdul Ballout, a 21-year-old German citizen of Lebanese descent with a documented history of sympathy toward the Islamic State group. Authorities said he attempted to join the militants in Syria in May 2025 and had previously posted IS propaganda online.
After serving a three-month prison sentence in Lebanon on charges related to inciting sectarian violence, Ballout was arrested again when he tried to return to Germany in November. Although sentenced to 22 months in prison, he was released on probation in May, spurring widespread debate over why he was freed despite previous convictions and extremist ties. Judges at the time had cited his previous sentence in Lebanon, as well as his claims that he had distanced himself from IS.
This weekend’s incident reflects a broader pattern of IS-inspired violence that Clara Broekaert and Colin P. Clarke wrote about in a WPR briefing last December. As seen in the case of other deadly incidents like the truck ramming attack in New Orleans in 2025, IS has continued to inspire individuals to carry out violence on its behalf. While the threat is indeed far diminished from the group’s peak in the mid-2010s, the group’s decentralized global network remains potent enough to conduct sophisticated terrorist attacks.
India: Weeks of nationwide mass protests over systemic failures in the country’s education system, including a controversial exam scandal, culminated Saturday with the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan—a key demand of the movement spearheaded by the newly formed youth platform known as the Cockroach Janta Party.
Consumer Affairs Minister Pralhad Joshi was appointed as the new education minister, the duties of which he will fulfill in addition to his current role. One of the BJP’s longest-serving ministers and a close associate of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Joshi faces a challenging path ahead amid heightened scrutiny of the education system, political analysts say.
As WPR’s Srijita Datta wrote in a briefing last month, the BJP has been consistently adept at suppressing dissent while maintaining the support of its Hindu nationalist base. However, Pradhan’s departure marked an unprecedented retreat for Modi and the BJP: It was the first time that a sitting minister had to step down due to public pressure in the 12 years that they have been in power.
Iran, Ukraine: A Ukrainian strike on an Iranian commercial vessel in the Caspian Sea killed one sailor and injured several others, prompting warnings of retaliation from Tehran.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the incident, which he described as “a violation of the U.N. Charter,” would not go unanswered. Ukraine dismissed those threats and said it had targeted a Russian warship, as well as “cargo ships that are under international sanctions.”
The incident marks a new escalation in tensions between Tehran and Kyiv, which have deteriorated since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Kyiv has repeatedly accused Tehran of supplying Moscow with Shahed drones used in attacks on Ukrainian cities. Recently, in the wake of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran, Ukraine deployed military personnel to the Gulf States when they were hit by Shahed drones from Iran.
Spain, France: Wildfires are continuing to rapidly spread, displacing more than 300,000 people in what French media outlets have described as one of the largest evacuations in the country’s history—a crisis that is already weighing on the local economy. As further heatwaves are expected to blaze across the region this week, French President Emmanuel Macron is expected to hold a crisis meeting today, and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is planning to visit the affected areas in eastern Spain.
More From WPR
Paul Poast on whether the decline of the Roman Empire can be compared with the United States.
Frida Ghitis on how Iran’s war tactics are losing their effectiveness.
Charli Carpenter on why the ICC will outlast the Trump administration’s campaign to dismantle it.
Robert Zaretsky on Europe’s inadequate response to deadly wildfires and heat waves.
Read all of our latest coverage here.
