Today at WPR, Charli Carpenter assesses recent allegations of atrocities committed against Palestinian detainees by Israeli troops. And Maurice Oniang’o reports from Nairobi on how Trump’s Ebola quarantine center is driving a wedge between the U.S. and Kenya.
Scroll down for more on those items. But first, here’s our take on today’s top story, in partnership with our sister publication, GlobalPost:
Argentina’s President Javier Milei arrives at Congress for the inauguration of Peru's new President Keiko Fujimori in Lima, Peru, Tuesday, July 28, 2026. (AP Photo by Miguel Paredes)
Argentine President Javier Milei took office in 2023 after campaigning with a chainsaw that symbolized his pledge to cut what he saw as wasteful government spending.
With support from the International Monetary Fund and a $20 billion financial backstop from the U.S. Treasury Department, he has partially delivered on his pledge. The self-described “anarcho-capitalist” has overseen an austerity plan that has helped bring annual inflation down from 211 percent in 2023 to 33.5 percent in June 2026.
His government has also passed business-friendly labor and tax reforms, and his deregulatory ambitions extend to allowing AI systems to own and operate companies with little human oversight. The Argentine peso, long a volatile currency, has stabilized, though it remains susceptible to pockets of weakness.
The problem, however, is that 33 percent annual inflation is still one of the highest rates in the world, and wage growth is not keeping up. Many lower and middle-income Argentines have also been hit hard by cuts to government wages and pensions, as well as a broad pullback in public infrastructure spending.
Some sectors of the economy, like agriculture and mining, are booming, but overall consumption and investment contracted year-over-year during the first quarter of 2026. The result, as journalist Martín Kanenguiser put it in a recent piece for Americas Quarterly, is a two-speed economy, in which benefits are accruing predominantly to the country’s rural outlying provinces but not the Buenos Aires metropolitan area.
Analysts say this is costing the president.
“Milei worked miracles bringing down inflation and corralling public spending. But that came at a significant social cost, and he has been far less successful in attracting investment and creating jobs,” Benjamin Gedan, head of the Stimson Center’s Latin America program and a WPR contributor, told Politico. “The president is ubiquitous, endlessly picking fights and exhausting even many onetime supporters.”
Milei’s policies and combative persona—not to mention corruption scandals involving his administration—have alienated many Argentines who rely on public services and government support. University employees who recently went on strike to protest his education cuts were among the latest groups of workers to take to the streets against his policies.
“This is a government that doesn’t care about the people,” Sergio Aguirre, a 51-year-old bus driver, said during a May Day protest. “Costs keep going up and our salaries stay the same. We survive on overtime pay.”
“The economy is not growing as strongly as the government thought it would,” Marcelo J. García, Americas director for the risk consultancy Horizon Engage, told the Associated Press. “The majority of Argentines may feel that they’re not seeing the benefits of (Milei’s) economic program. And that’s Milei’s biggest political risk at the moment.”
The IMF has argued for staying the course, saying the government’s tight fiscal and monetary policies have strengthened economic stability, reduced inflation and helped anchor investor expectations. However, IMF officials have also acknowledged that Milei needs to maintain public support for his reform agenda if it is to be politically sustainable.
So far, Milei has struggled to do so. Recent surveys put his approval rating between 35 and 40 percent, his lowest levels since taking office. And a corruption scandal involving his former chief of staff Manuel Adorni, who resigned last month, has further damaged Milei’s position. The president stood by Adorni until his resignation in June, publicly insisting that he was innocent even as the scandal intensified.
Milei’s mixed results have fueled discussion of a third way between his libertarian vision and the traditional opposition, known as the Peronist movement, which has long favored greater state intervention and higher public spending.
Axel Kicillof, the Peronist governor of Buenos Aires Province, is emerging as a contender to challenge Milei in next year’s presidential election. Once a close ally of former President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, he has increasingly asserted his independence from her political camp as he seeks to persuade voters that he represents something different from both Milei and the political model they rejected in 2023, the Buenos Aires Times reported.
“Milei is no longer a shoo-in to be re-elected,” Steven Levitsky, a professor of Latin American studies at Harvard University, told Bloomberg. “Right now, Peronism is positioned as the most viable alternative.”
Recent reports from the United Nations and numerous human rights organizations indicate that Israeli forces have been torturing and raping Palestinian detainees in its detention centers. Evidence of such abuses dates back decades, but Israel denies them each time they surface, often by alleging antisemitic “blood libel” on the part of anyone who makes or repeats the claims
This debate pulls attention away from an important fact: The accusatory dynamics are not unique to Jews or to Israel. Because the laws of war are most often enforced in the court of public opinion, critically understanding these dynamics, as well as the facts and applicable laws, can help observers make sense of reported atrocities, Charli Carpenter writes.
A U.S.-backed Ebola isolation facility at a Kenyan air force base, intended to quarantine Americans exposed to the virus, has triggered legal challenges and a fierce public backlash. Many Kenyans question why their country, which has not recorded a confirmed Ebola case during the current outbreak in neighboring Congo, should host Americans who have been exposed.
Critics in Kenya have homed in on the process by which the facility was approved, which reportedly involved a backroom deal between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Kenyan counterpart, William Ruto. The controversy has exposed the limits of conducting foreign policy on a transactional basis with little transparency or oversight, Maurice Oniang’o writes from Nairobi.
Peru: Keiko Fujimori will be sworn in as Peru’s first female president and the country’s 10th in as many years as the country has navigated a prolonged political crisis. Impeachments, arrests and corruption scandals prevented any elected leader from completing a full five-year term over the past decade.
Fujimori’s win was among the closest presidential races in Peru’s modern history, decided by a razor-thin margin of roughly 50,000 votes. Her candidacy has drawn protests from left-wing activists and civil society groups, with even more demonstrations planned during her inauguration. As Simeon Tegel reported from Lima for WPR earlier this month, Fujimori will face a complex political landscape as soon as she is sworn in, facing mounting discontent and a corruption-addled public sector that struggles to deliver basic services.
As the eldest daughter of former strongman Alberto Fujimori—whose autocratic rule during the 1990s ended in his ouster and later conviction for grave human rights abuses—Keiko’s political identity has long been shaped by her father’s polarizing legacy, one that she explicitly campaigned on. Many analysts and political observers worry that she may follow in her father’s footsteps and rule with brute force, Tegel reported.
United States, Iran: The U.S. and Iran maintained a pause in hostilities for a fourth straight day Tuesday, following nearly two weeks of tit-for-tat airstrikes. President Donald Trump claimed Monday that Iran had requested the pause to allow for talks, and that discussions between the two countries were already underway. Iran denied this, although they acknowledged that Qatar and Pakistan were continuing to mediate between the two sides.
Despite the recent lull in fighting, the Straight of Hormuz remains closed. Iranian officials have cast that as a show of strength and are pushing for any long term-agreement to preserve their ability to impose fees on ships transiting the critical waterway. Meanwhile, neighboring Oman, which sits across the waterway, has put forward a Gulf-backed plan for jointly managing the strait through voluntary fees instead.
As Paul Poast wrote in his WPR column last month, Iran’s ability to control shipping through the Strait of Hormuz was long seen as a hypothetical threat, but that changed once the war started. Poast argued that the vagueness of Hormuz’s status was a major flaw in the Islamabad Memorandum, which brought a temporary end to the fighting last month, and which mediators are now trying to salvage.
United States, Israel, Ukraine: Trump held back-to-back meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House today. Both leaders traveled to Washington to attend the funeral of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime advocate of U.S. aid to both Ukraine and Israel. While Trump’s relationship with Zelenskyy seems to have warmed since their dramatic confrontation in the Oval Office last year, Netanyahu—meeting Trump for the first time since the war with Iran broke out—has seen his support wane.
Before his sit-down with Trump, Zelenskyy told reporters that anti-ballistic missile defenses and strategic cooperation with Washington were at the top of his agenda. Meanwhile, Trump expressed some frustration with Netanyahu ahead of their meeting over reports that the Israeli leader planned to discuss suspected intelligence related to Iranian activity at Pickaxe Mountain.
“I know exactly what’s going on at Pickaxe,” Trump told said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” He claimed that Iran’s activities there are “not a big problem” and that “Bibi’s telling me that because he wants me to stay involved.”
Ukraine, United Kingdom: Prior to his meeting today with Trump, Zelenskyy was in London to meet with Andy Burnham, marking the new U.K. prime minister’s first meeting with a foreign leader since taking office a week ago. Burnham reiterated his “unwavering” support for Ukraine as Kyiv continues to fend off Russia’s full-scale invasion, now in its fourth year.
Zelenskyy described the U.K.-Ukraine relationship as at its strongest point yet, with much of their conversation centering around Kyiv’s need for more interceptors to counter Moscow’s ballistic missiles. The two leaders also discussed “joint defense production” and spent some time with hundreds of Ukrainian troops training in the U.K.
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Read all of our latest coverage here.
