The Week of Proclaimed Victories

Beyond the diplomatic quarrel over border closures, the effective shortage of tests in Congolese laboratories — as the epidemic crosses 500 cases and around a hundred deaths — was probed only by London, Abuja and Berlin. The capitals that commented on the subject almost all treated it as a foreign-policy file rather than a public-health emergency, even as a World Cup moving hundreds of thousands of people was opening the same week.

The dual pro-European vote in Armenia and Kosovo, which redraws two regional geopolitical orbits, was closely followed by the directly concerned powers (Berlin, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Ankara) but ignored by the capitals absorbed by Iran. Yerevan's tilt out of the Russian orbit, in particular, is a first-order strategic signal left in the blind spot by Washington, Tel Aviv and New Delhi.

Xi's first visit to Pyongyang in seven years concluded without a word on the nuclear issue — a silence Tokyo retained as the summit's chief lesson and that Seoul reads as an emboldening of Kim. What that silence says about a de facto recognition of the North Korean bomb, a long-term security issue, was almost entirely ignored by European and Middle Eastern capitals focused elsewhere. It is the week's least divergent subject (score 29) precisely because few capitals dug into it.