The Free Press

With war raging in the Middle East, we want to bring you as many trusted voices on the news as we can. One such voice is the Israeli journalist Amit Segal. He writes a daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

There is a cardinal rule in diplomacy: Everything that happens before a deal is closed—the threats, the slammed doors, the declarations that “it’s over”—is simply negotiation by other means. Donald Trump’s recent move to blockade the Strait of Hormuz falls squarely into this category.

Even when the strait was effectively closed during earlier military operations, Iranian, Russian, and Chinese tankers sailed through unimpeded. Although the U.S. Navy could have easily stopped them, increasing the pressure on Iran and its key sponsors, Trump deliberately chose not to escalate. The president was walking a tightrope: maintaining heavy pressure on Tehran without triggering a catastrophic spike in global oil prices. At the time, a total blockade would have instantly removed millions of barrels of oil from global circulation. Now, however, with the countervailing force of negotiations calming the energy markets, Trump has the freedom to ratchet up the pressure.

It’s Monday, April 13. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Why Orbán lost. Why the AI crash will hit us all. Why even chimps wage war. And much more.

But first: Did Iran just blow it?

The mullahs had a rough weekend. Forty-eight hours ago, the ceasefire in Iran looked like the beginning of the end of the war—a first step by President Donald Trump toward pulling out and accepting a new status quo with the regime intact. But then talks collapsed and now Trump is escalating.

American destroyers are patrolling the Strait of Hormuz with both offensive and defensive aims. If Iran opens the waterway to free-flowing traffic, U.S. ships will be there to escort commercial vessels through. But if the regime continues charging a toll for the passage, the United States will close the gate.

“Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump said Sunday. And the strait isn’t his only target. By that evening, government sources said the U.S. is considering strikes in Iran’s interior. In other words, the war is back on.

What changed in a weekend? The White House got its closest look yet at how stubborn their counterparts are. Weeks after its supreme leader was killed, and facing even more destruction, the regime shot down every firm U.S. demand during marathon negotiations in Pakistan. What were they thinking, with so much at stake? Eli Lake explains the Iranians’ approach at the crossroads of the war.

Few could have predicted Trump’s renewed pressure campaign, and reopening the strait will require tactical genius. But Zineb Riboua believes it will be more than worth the effort. That’s because closing the waterway is the last card Iran holds. If the U.S. calls its bluff by successfully keeping it open, there will be nothing left to negotiate.

President Trump seems to seize every opportunity to talk things through, preferring a masterful deal over risking even a single American life. But one of Trump’s former advisers thinks the president was wrong to ever slow down. John Bolton spoke to The Free Press’s Nicholas Clairmont before the negotiations over the weekend, and made the early case for how U.S. armed forces can press ahead.

In many ways, the war is pushing America’s military outside its zone of mastery. One difficult new dimension consists of drones, which the Navy has at times struggled to repel over the strait and across Iran. Americans have much to learn from Ukraine, which has mastered drone warfare over years of combat with the Russians. Aidan Stretch describes how U.S. companies are racing to adapt the cutting-edge tech that’s dominating a new front.

—The Editors

• A machete-wielding man calling himself “Lucifer” slashed three people on a Grand Central subway platform Saturday before being fatally shot by NYPD detectives after ignoring 20 orders to drop the weapon. The victims, ages 65 to 85, are in stable condition.

• Americans face steep price hikes on essentials, with grocery staples up nearly 43 percent since 2019 and coffee prices more than doubling. Housing has been hit hardest, with the median homeowner’s monthly payment jumping 72 percent to over $2,800.

• President Trump was booed by the crowd as he entered UFC 327 in Miami Saturday night, just as Vice President J.D. Vance announced from Islamabad that U.S.-Iran negotiations had collapsed without a deal. Trump, who walked in alongside Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White, had yet to comment on the failed talks.

• Chinese car brands are growing rapidly in the UK, capturing nearly 10 percent of sales last year with well-equipped models like the Jaecoo 7 undercutting European rivals. Experts warn European automakers face an “existential crisis,” with Chinese brands forecast to claim 20 percent of the UK market by 2028.

• Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is investigating Representative Eric Swalwell after multiple women accused the California Democrat of sexual assault and harassment, including the sending of unsolicited explicit photos. Swalwell denies the allegations as “flat false” but has since decided to suspend his gubernatorial campaign.

• Justin Bieber delivered a stripped-back Coachella headline set, sitting with his laptop to revisit YouTube videos of his younger self and sing along to hits like “Baby” and “Beauty and a Beat.”

• A blast of record-breaking heat will sweep into the eastern U.S. next week, with Washington, D.C., expected to hit 94 degrees, and New York’s Central Park reaching 87 degrees, by Wednesday.

• Rory McIlroy won the Masters on Sunday, becoming the fourth-ever repeat champion and the first to accomplish the feat since Tiger Woods in 2002.

Shadi Hamid came of age in an environment where America was often seen as a font of destruction, the root cause of the world’s problems rather than their solution. He marched against the Iraq War. He read Noam Chomsky. Like many on the left, he saw the United States primarily as a source of global harm. But over time, he came to see American power as a …

Viktor Orbán’s defeat in the race for the Hungarian prime ministership is no less momentous for being totally unsurprising. Even the many Americans who were late to tune in—noticing Hungary’s election on Sunday only after J.D. Vance showed up last week to give his friends a boost—likely heard that Orbán’s days could be numbered. Now that he has lost to Péter Magyar, a former member of Orbán’s own party who ran on youth, anti-corruption, and the kind of economic liberalization that a younger Orbán once himself rallied for, the result is worth studying. It shows how things can eventually fall apart even for a leader who triumphs on his own terms. Orbán changed his country, and all of Europe along with it. Then his people tossed him out for the right reasons.

As an American who has lived and worked in Hungary for several years now—and not as one of the ideological tourists drawn here by the Orbán movement itself—I will say a few kind words about Viktor Orbán. The old battle-ax rose from a young anti-communist activist to prime minister to international political celebrity, no small feat for a kid from small-town Hungary. Much to the chagrin of liberal critics who wanted to use him as a symbol of everything around the world they disagreed with, Orbán was right about a few big issues, notably immigration and the importance of encouraging families to have more kids. One sign of his enduring influence is how widely his ideas have been copied: The European Parliament just passed tough new immigration enforcement measures slated to go into effect in June, and pro-natalism has gone from a fringe preoccupation to a thoroughly mainstream concern. Much of Orbánism’s program, it must be understood, has also been copied by the man who just defeated him. If Orbánism’s appeal for Hungarians remains, why was the man himself just tossed from power?

On Sunday, President Donald Trump announced a full U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and threatened to destroy “the little that is left of Iran.” In a pair of Truth Social posts, Trump declared that the U.S. military would begin blocking ships from entering or leaving the strait, intercept any vessel that had paid tolls to Iran to transit it safely, and warned that any Iranian who fires on U.S. or peaceful vessels would be “BLOWN TO HELL” while the Navy works to demine the strait. The announcement came as ceasefire negotiations in Islamabad, Pakistan, broke down and the U.S. delegation led by Vice President J.D. Vance returned home. In effect, Washington has moved to strip Tehran of the one coercive instrument it believed it held in reserve.

Wars usually shut doors for American foreign policy. But this episode has revealed that Operation Epic Fury has opened them with uncommon force. To understand why requires an honest reckoning with Iran’s biggest mistake in this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) decision to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most consequential miscalculations in the regime’s history.

Following the American and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guard pursued two anticipated outcomes from its Hormuz strategy.

A study 30 years in the making, published last week in Science, announced an explosive finding: The largest known group of wild chimpanzees, located in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, is locked in a bloody civil war. The study’s authors said this might be the first “rare fission of a wild chimpanzee group and subsequent lethal aggression against former group members” in 500 years. At least 24 chimpanzees have been killed out of a total of about 200.

I asked evolutionary biologist Colin Wright to explain what turned these Ngogo chimpanzees against each other, whether their civil war can be stopped, and what it tells us about humans.

Wright isn’t one of the article’s authors, but he has studied various animal species and their social dynamics and community ecology. He is also founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand, an online publication about free speech, science, and reality, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tanner Nau: What’s going on with the chimpanzees? Why are they waging war on each other?

For as long as I can recall, telling people to put their 401(k) in an index fund was considered the soundest investment advice you could give. Most of us lack the skill—and the stomach—to make money by choosing individual stocks. But an S&P 500 index fund generates returns (less exceptionally low fees) that mirror the stock market as a whole, removing the need for people to become stock-pickers. To quote the late Jack Bogle, who created the first index fund for individual investors: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack!”

Over the years, the message has gotten through: As of the end of last year, index funds and exchange traded index funds held a combined $30 trillion. Stock picking has become extinct, almost. Since 2000, the S&P 500—the most commonly used index among fund companies like Fidelity and Vanguard—has gained over 630 percent.

The trouble is that Bogle’s original premise no longer holds: Index funds have stopped being a proxy for the entire market.

Do we have a right to know who Satoshi is? That is, the Satoshi Nakamoto who created Bitcoin in 2008 and mysteriously disappeared. He announced that he was leaving Bitcoin development in 2011, leaving no further trace except for two emails of uncertain authenticity that may have been sent in 2014 and 2015.

A New York Times investigation by John Carreyrou published last week is the latest effort to unmask Satoshi’s true identity. Based on evidence that ranges from an early interest in anonymous digital cash to hints in his writing style, the Times article concludes that Satoshi is British crypto CEO Adam Back. Two years ago, an HBO special, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, identified Satoshi as Canadian programmer Peter Todd, but as possibly working with Adam Back, giving the nod to Todd on the programming side. To be clear, Back denies the claims, as does Todd.

The identity of Satoshi isn’t just the greatest mystery of the crypto world, it’s one of the great mysteries of the world, period. So it’s no surprise that historians, journalists, crypto enthusiasts, and casual crypto watchers (I include myself in that latter category), are eager to know who Satoshi really is. In 2014, Newsweek identified him as an unemployed Japanese American programmer, in a scoop that quickly fell apart. Wired pinned him as Craig Wright, an Australian cryptographer, who turned out to be an imposter. There have been many other guesses over the years.

The cliché about the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it has never won a war, but never lost a negotiation. Over the weekend in Pakistan, that diplomatic winning streak ran into a brick wall named J.D. Vance. Despite coming into the talks demanding everything from war reparations to military control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian delegation left Islamabad with nothing.

“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” the vice president told reporters in Islamabad on Saturday before departing for Washington. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” Vance’s message was backed up by President Donald Trump, who told reporters over the weekend, “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me. And the reason is because we’ve won.”

Going into the talks, the Iranians acted as if they had the upper hand. Iran’s threats to international shipping through the vital choke point of the Strait of Hormuz threatened to send the global economy into a tailspin. Trump said he had an agreement before the talks for Iran to open the strait in exchange for a ceasefire. But when the negotiations began, the strait remained largely closed.

The Iran war is providing the world with the latest demonstration of how quickly drones have transformed modern battle. The Islamic Republic’s regime has gained leverage over the Strait of Hormuz in part through a fleet of cheap, long-range drones, which continue to threaten oil tankers and terrorize cities across the region. Analysts say that the U.S. did not appropriately prepare for this drone threat. That is only partly true.

The Donald Trump administration, and those around it, have spent years looking for lessons in Ukraine, which has developed some of the world’s most sophisticated drone expertise in its war with Russia. The administration saw an opportunity to learn from Ukraine’s lessons, but missed acting on it. Now the U.S. is racing to catch up to the frontier of drone warfare.

Perhaps the most convincing demonstration of Ukraine’s drone expertise came in a Ukrainian assault behind the Russian line last summer. In June, four trucks hiding more than 100 Ukrainian drones in wooden cabins hurtled down Russian highways toward four of the country’s most protected airfields. Hours later, pilots located thousands of miles away in Kyiv sprang the drones from the trucks and began flying them into some of Russia’s most expensive aircraft. By the end of the operation, Ukraine’s small first-person-view drones, which cost no more than a few hundred dollars a unit, had dealt more than $7 billion in damage to Russia’s air fleet. Military experts across the globe lauded the mission, code-named Operation Spider’s Web by Ukraine’s security services, as one of the most daring and successful in modern warfare.