The Free Press

As war in the Middle East rages, a familiar debate has returned: Can America’s industry support our military goals?

Our adversaries have a lot more hardware—China has more ships; Russia has more tanks. But America does have an advantage, according to Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III, a new book from Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar and his colleague Madeline Hart: Our software is second to none.

“As America’s industrial base has lost ground, a rift has opened,” they write, “between Silicon Valley start-ups and legacy defense companies.” Between the sources of thriving software and rusting hardware. But what if our incredible technology could transform the way we make things in the material world?

In the following exclusive excerpt, Sankar and Hart argue that for the U.S. to remain the most powerful nation in the world, we need an industrial revolution—with the help of the Silicon Valley. —The Editors

U.S. manufacturing has struggled for years. In 2023, the overall productivity of the manufacturing sector was lower than at any point since 2003. In other words, our country’s industrial base was roughly as efficient as it was when George W. Bush was a first-term president and Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

And yet, during this very same period, the iPhone was introduced. Software took over the world. Data shifted to the cloud. Cars started driving themselves. Artificial intelligence (AI) put brains in machines.

The war with Iran is even more futuristic than the war in Ukraine. Not only are both sides using drones, but many U.S. and Israeli precision strikes are on targets selected by artificial intelligence. This may go down in history as the first AI war.

Yet 17 days into the conflict, the U.S.-Israeli campaign has run into a very old problem: control of a strategic waterway.

Despite being entirely outgunned, despite having lost control of its own airspace, the Islamic Republic retains sufficient firepower to attack shippers in the Strait of Hormuz, deterring them from moving through it. The resulting contraction of the world’s oil and gas supply has caused energy prices to skyrocket and threatens the stability of the global economy, not to mention the political future of Donald Trump’s administration. On Friday, the Pentagon ordered Marines and warships to the Gulf to open the strait.

Nowhere is the law of unintended consequences more binding than when crucial commercial choke points become casualties of war. Although it is fashionable nowadays to focus on financial choke points that can be exploited by sanctions, the oldest choke points are natural geographical features such as the Strait of Hormuz, the Black Sea Straits, and the Strait of Malacca, as well as man-made trade corridors such as the Suez and Panama Canals. These waterways often become critical in times of war. And their history helps answer the question now facing the Trump administration: Now what?

The 2026 Winter Olympics brought us Alysa Liu, the Hughes brothers, and a scandal colloquially referred to as “Penisgate.” It emerged when some ski jumpers were accused of injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid—the same substance used in lip fillers—to expand their suits’ surface area and improve their jump distance. Sounds niche, right?

Well, it’s…

Political news is ruining your mental health.

What were you reading right before this article? Probably some news, most likely about the war in Iran, which is dominating coverage, and ancillary topics such as the effect on the economy and markets. Along the way, you most likely encountered and felt compelled to consume some political news and opinions. I don’t mean humdrum policy stuff: what Congress voted on today, or the like. Instead, I mean horse-race politics and lightning-rod punditry.

And this lowered your well-being.

My confidence that you read about politics owes to the fact that political dilettantism—closely following who’s up, who’s down, who created the latest outrage—is a national obsession. We can’t get enough of “monitoring the situation.” In a 2023 survey of American adults, about a third said they follow national politics “very closely.” Meanwhile, 62 percent of Americans consume news about politics and government “often” or “extremely often,” which is 30 percentage points above the next highest area of news interest.

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. Here’s Amit’s daily newsletter, It’s Noon in Israel, which we’re pleased to publish in The Free Press.

On Saturday, President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that “Many Countries” would be joining the U.S. to keep the vital Strait of Hormuz waterway “open and safe.” Is he desperate for international help?

That’s one way the media is framing it: Trump didn’t anticipate Iran sending oil markets into free fall by firing on international shipping and is now scrambling to assemble a coalition to meet a threat he failed to foresee. It’s a neat narrative. It also fits a Trump incompetence storyline that this war has largely disproven.

It’s Monday, March 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Alysa Liu’s father on what he learned about freedom from his daughter—and Jimmy Lai. Tyler Cowen on how to win the AI arms race. Charles Lane asks: Can a Democrat with a Nazi tattoo win a Senate seat? The UAW reins in Columbia’s politically obsessed grad students. And much more.

But first: The war in Iran—and terrorism here in America.

The war in Iran shows no sign of stopping, with the U.S. suggesting it will ramp up strikes over several more weeks. But achieving the chief war aims will require more than explosions. Jay Solomon has the story on the next phase of the war: ending Iran’s nuclear program for good. Destroying or seizing uranium would be a fiendishly difficult task but Jay talks to U.S. officials about how it might be done.

It’s hard to see how it all could end—especially since Iran’s foreign minister told CBS News on Sunday that “we don’t see any reason why we should talk with Americans.” Michael Oren doesn’t know when a ceasefire will come, but he has a good idea of what it will take. The former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. believes the Iranian regime will hold out for anything it can call victory—and that the goal of the U.S. should be to cut off any hope of success the mullahs have.

Since the start of the war, Americans have faced a string of terror attacks. Over the weekend, vivid evidence emerged of the most recent attack’s close connection to the war. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali—who stormed a synagogue and school in Michigan on Thursday before guards stopped his advance—was the brother of a Hezbollah commander in Lebanon. Soon after the brother was slain by an Israeli air strike, Ghazali attacked America’s largest Reform synagogue.

The Hezbollah affiliation should frame the whole story. A U.S. ally killed a terrorist abroad, and his brother became a terrorist at home.

Yet much of the media is missing the story—or distorting it—just as they have with a whole spate of terrorist attacks that have struck Americans since the Iran war began. Read our editorial on how the war came home, and what the U.S. must do if it hopes to beat the extremists.

Noah Bernstein grew up attending a synagogue not far from the one attacked Thursday, and he describes how antisemitic protesters in his hometown of Ann Arbor were emboldened by the almost deadly rampage. He asked people there how they were dealing with this dangerous new reality.

—The Editors

• Russia has disabled mobile internet in Moscow and dozens of regions recently, severely disrupting payments, navigation, taxis, and messaging for millions. The Kremlin calls it necessary for security against Ukrainian drones, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov saying the goal is to “ensure security,” but foreign analysts see it as testing a nationwide censorship system modeled on Iran’s.

• The U.S. State Department has cut the fee for renouncing citizenship by about 80 percent, from $2,350 to $450, effective April 13. The reduction, following legal challenges from groups like the Association of Accidental Americans, restores the 2010 fee level amid criticism of the higher cost tied to rising expatriate renunciations.

• A new review in The Lancet Psychiatry highlights emerging concerns that AI chatbots can validate and amplify delusional thinking—particularly grandiose delusions—in people already vulnerable to psychosis, drawing from media reports of “AI psychosis” rather than fully causing new cases.

• The University of Florida deactivated its College Republicans chapter, after the Florida Federation of College Republicans reported a photo of a student leader performing a Nazi salute.

• Security at the 2026 Oscars has been dramatically increased, including rooftop snipers, SWAT teams to counter potential drone threats, zigzag vehicle approaches, undercover officers, and bomb squads around the Dolby Theatre, following an FBI alert about possible Iranian drone strikes from vessels off the U.S. coast targeting California.

• One Battle After Another won Best Picture at the 2026 Academy Awards, with Paul Thomas Anderson also taking Best Director for the film. Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for his performance in Sinners, while Jessie Buckley earned Best Actress for her role in Hamnet. (ICYMI: Read Liel Leibovitz on Why ‘One Battle After Another’ Is Irredeemable.)

Justin Marozzi is a historian and travel writer whose work has long explored the history of the Islamic world. In his new book, Captives and Companions, he turns to a subject that remains surprisingly under-examined: the history of slavery across Islamic societies. Stretching from the time of the prophet Muhammad to the modern era, the system he describ…

The war in Iran has come home.

On Thursday afternoon, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen named Ayman Mohamad Ghazali drove a vehicle packed with explosives into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan—one of the largest Reform Jewish congregations in the United States—while 140 children under the age of 5 were attending preschool inside. The building was set ablaze. A security guard was struck by the vehicle. More than 50 first responders were later treated for smoke inhalation.

Over the weekend, Tucker Carlson shared some alarming news: The CIA was reading his texts. The agency was preparing “some kind of criminal referral against me,” he said. They discovered that the populist podcast host was in communication with “people in Iran” before Operation Epic Fury.

If Tucker’s version of events is true, then it really is alarming. As much as I disagree with the unleashed, post–Fox News Tucker, as a broadcaster he has every right to contact sources in Iran or any other country without being spied on by our government. The notion that talking to Iranians before the war is a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act—which he claimed was the substance of the crime report the CIA is preparing against him—is a constitutional abomination.