Earlier today, I published the Morning Compass briefing. Here I share a few thoughts on what stood out most. The transcript is below for those who prefer to read.
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I want to talk about three things that happened this week. And they may look separate. But they are not.
The first is the heat.
Europe is in its third heatwave of 2026. We are just ten days into July. Eleven people died in a wildfire in southern Spain. Several were found in their cars trying to escape the flames. Dozens are still missing. France recorded around a thousand heat-related deaths in June. Spain, roughly the same. The sea off the coast of Portugal reached 26 degrees Celsius. The EU’s climate monitoring service confirmed that June 2026 was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe. It broke the record that was only set a year ago in 2025.
Attribution scientists are clear. This heat would have been virtually impossible without human-caused climate change. Europe is warming roughly twice as fast as the global average.
The second thing that happened this week is quieter. But I think it matters more.
The UN agencies that monitor climate risk — the World Food Programme, UNHCR, the International Organisation for Migration — have been quietly removing the words “climate change” from their strategic documents. The Independent tracked the numbers. In a recent WFP strategy for Guatemala, the word “climate” appeared 41 times. In the Trump-era update, it appears zero times.
The reason is not scientific. The United States was the largest donor to these agencies and under Trump it cut that funding. The agencies need money to operate. So the language shifted.
This is how power shapes reality. Not always through laws or force. In these cases, it is just through a budget line.
And at least one million women and girls have lost access to humanitarian support because of those same funding cuts. These are not abstractions. These are real consequences of decisions made in Washington.
The third thing happened two days ago.
Trump fired the entire bipartisan Election Assistance Commission. Four months before the midterm elections. The EAC certifies voting systems and maintains the national voter registration form. Congress created it in 2002 to be nonpartisan. No more than two commissioners from the same party. Trump dismissed the two Democratic members by email. The Republican member resigned.
The justification was a recent Supreme Court ruling that gives presidents more power over independent agencies.
In late June, before this happened, I wrote about this pattern in The Planet. The technique is consistent across authoritarian histories. Remove the people whose job is to apply rules regardless of who is in power. Replace them with people who understand their first loyalty is to the leader. Chavez did it. Orban did it. Franco did it. The specific institutions differ. The pattern does not.
None of these three things — the heat, the silencing of climate language, the firing of election administrators — none of them are accidents. They are connected. They are the consequences of political choices made over years.
Europe is adapting to two emergencies at once. The climate emergency. And the emergency of American unreliability.
I was watching the NATO summit in Ankara. European leaders are past shock. They are planning. Britain and eleven other countries just committed to a thirty-seven billion pound missile project. Poland and the Baltic states are already spending more than four percent of GDP on defense. Germany is considering joining a new fighter jet program.
The Battle of Britain began on this date, July 10, in 1940. Britain had to stop a fascist advance through air power alone, without American help. It took until December 1941 for the United States to arrive after the U.S. had been attacked, and after Nazi Germany had declared war on the U.S.
Europe is not waiting that long this time.
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