Wars Won, Peacemaking Moves to Ankara

For two summers the hard part of the world's two biggest wars was the fighting. By the end of June it was supposed to be over. A US-Iran roadmap had been signed in Switzerland, a NATO assessment held that Russia could no longer keep Crimea supplied, the strait had reopened after a hundred days, and the US Senate had gone on record against the Iran war. The West had won both. This was the week that revealed how little winning settles. Neither war switched off. The fighting simply slipped to the edges -- to Lebanon, to a tanker in the Gulf, to a weapons plant deep inside Russia, to a row between Warsaw and Kyiv over a wartime medal -- and the job of actually ending the wars began migrating away from Washington and Brussels toward Ankara and the Gulf.

Start with Iran, where the peace is now being fought over everywhere except Iran. On June 27 Benjamin Netanyahu announced a US-brokered framework with Lebanon, a trilateral deal meant to disarm Hezbollah, which he called a historic blow to Tehran. Within hours Hezbollah's leader, Naim Qassem, rejected it. The same day the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency raised the threat level in the Strait of Hormuz to "substantial" after a tanker was struck by an unidentified projectile -- this following US airstrikes on Iranian targets. And yet the strait did not close: MarineTraffic counted 108 verified transits over the June 26-28 weekend, 48 of them on the Friday alone. The war is finished on paper and live on the water.

The diplomacy has the same split-screen quality. Washington's technical team packed up in Switzerland and flew not home but to Qatar, where Steve Witkoff and Marco Rubio confirmed the nuclear talks would continue -- and that Iran had so far received nothing under the deal. Tehran's foreign-ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, said the conditions for a final agreement were not yet met, and Iran flatly rejected an offer from Emmanuel Macron to help clear mines from the strait, insisting the waterway was its business alone. TIME called the arrangement a "60-day test," and that is the right frame. The guns have paused, but every hard question -- enrichment, the strait, who guarantees what -- has been moved onto a clock rather than answered.

Ukraine's war is winding down the same way: by not stopping. Kyiv is still winning by strangulation, choking Russian-occupied Crimea with drones -- Defence Minister Mykhailo Fedorov says the peninsula will soon "become an island" -- and on June 27 it reached deep into Russia itself, striking a weapons plant in Volgograd and a fuel hub serving Moscow. Russia answered on civilians. A June 29 strike on Dnipro killed six and wounded twenty-nine; drones hit two passenger buses in Zaporizhzhia, killing three; a guided bomb killed a woman in Kharkiv; another drone wounded a mother and her three children, aged three to thirteen, in a Kherson garden. Volodymyr Zelensky, calling it a "terrorist war," vowed to keep degrading Russia's ability to drag the conflict out.

What is new is that the winning side's coalition has begun to quarrel as openly as the enemies do. Poland's president, Karol Nawrocki, revoked Zelensky's Order of the White Eagle after Ukraine named a military unit for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army -- the UPA, which Poland blames for the wartime massacres of Poles in Volhynia. Two allies who need each other against Moscow spent the week trading insults over the events of 1943. It is the clearest sign yet that the coalition agrees on winning and on almost nothing about what the winning is for, a fracture plain ever since the roadmap was signed.

Into that vacuum steps Ankara. On June 29 Recep Tayyip Erdogan telephoned Friedrich Merz to talk up Turkey's mediation, days before he hosts the NATO leaders' summit on July 7-8 -- the alliance's marquee event, held for the first time in a country that keeps lines open to both Kyiv and Moscow. Turkey's pitch is real. It brokered the Black Sea grain deal and prisoner exchanges precisely because Erdogan armed Ukraine while never closing his channel to Vladimir Putin, and his personal rapport with both leaders is an asset no other NATO capital holds. But the role is more dangerous than it looks. As Foreign Policy warned this week, Erdogan will use the summit to extract his price -- including a long-blocked $700 million sale of US jet engines -- and, it argued, "when an alliance is split and weakened, leadership becomes dangerous": a Turkey meant to stand between the allies may end up forced to choose among them. The strain showed even now, with Ankara condemning Israeli airstrikes on southern Syria while Israel's cabinet, pointedly, moved to recognise the Armenian genocide.

Here is the week's real twist: the powers that won these wars look strongest abroad and shakiest at home. In Washington the Supreme Court had to step in, by 5-4, to stop Donald Trump from firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, upholding the central bank's independence against a president who then spent the week barking at petrol retailers to cut their prices as oil slid to $68 a barrel -- the dividend of the reopened strait arriving just as his approval fell to 36 percent, the lowest of his second term, with barely a third of Americans approving of his handling of the economy. Europe's winners fared no better. France's health agency counted more than a thousand excess deaths from a June heatwave that then rolled east into Italy and the Balkans, breaking records and setting off wildfires. In the northern German town of Stade, two shootings on June 29 -- one at a shelter for women and children -- left at least eleven dead, even as Berlin moved to block Volkswagen from closing four plants and shedding up to 100,000 jobs. The states dictating terms in the Gulf and on the Dnipro cannot keep their own people cool, safe, or employed.

The wider world supplied its own reminders that order is thin. In Venezuela the death toll from a pair of earthquakes passed 1,700, with thousands still missing. Pakistani airstrikes killed at least thirty-six civilians in eastern Afghanistan, opening a fresh cross-border front. And Britain, reading the same lesson as everyone else, unveiled a Defence Investment Plan worth more than 5 billion pounds, built around cheap drones and modelled explicitly on Ukraine -- the whole of NATO now remaking itself in the image of the war it is trying to end.

So the month closes with both wars technically won and practically unfinished, their fighting displaced to side-fronts and their settlement outsourced to middle powers. The test comes fast. If the Iran clock runs its sixty days without an enrichment deal, the incidents in the strait will stop looking like accidents. And on July 7 the cameras turn to Ankara, where Erdogan will try to convert his mediation into leverage and the alliance will try to look united. Winning, it turns out, was the easy part. The harder part begins now -- and it is increasingly being run from capitals that were never meant to be in charge.