The Free Press

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where the “new normal” at synagogues is horrifying, we’re drinking only eight beers per week, and everyone is morally good. Let’s jump in.

Fast and efficient. That is an apt description for Canada’s government-run assisted-suicide program, as I reported in The Free Press last week. Some deaths even occurred on the same day that the person sought approval for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID), according to a 2024 report.

It’s Tuesday, March 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Arthur Brooks on why he lives with his grandchildren—and you should, too. Kat Rosenfield read the polyamory memoir so you don’t have to. Patrick McGee on how Taiwan became “the world’s smallest superpower.” Plus: How anti-Israel activists hijacked Columbia’s grad student union. And much more.

But first: How long will this war last?

Is the war in Iran almost over, or just getting started?

On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump appeared to signal that things might soon cool down. He told CBS News that the war was “very far ahead of schedule” and “very complete, pretty much.”

Those words were certainly what markets wanted to hear. Oil prices dropped from a high of $119 per barrel to $85. Stocks surged.

But just as Wall Street seemed confident that it had another case of “TACO” on its hands, Trump struck a different tone. “We have won in many ways, but not enough,” the president said in a speech in Florida hours later. “We will not relent until the enemy is totally and decisively defeated.”

Then at a press conference afterward, Trump threatened major action if the Islamic Republic continued to try to choke off the world’s energy supply. “We will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world,” he said.

So what is Trump likely to do? Matt Pottinger worked closely with the president on national security during his first term and thinks reports of the war’s imminent end are greatly exaggerated. Drawing on his experiences in the White House, Pottinger explains why he thinks this war will continue for weeks, not days.

Before Monday’s mixed messages came Friday’s demand from Trump of nothing less than “unconditional surrender” from Tehran. That, argues the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, is not likely to come anytime soon. Iran gets a say in this war, too—and if Washington is going to insist on complete capitulation, we could be in for a long fight. All of which is why Fukuyama thinks the president’s rhetoric is “very foolish.” Read his column on why Iran won’t surrender, and why Trump’s demand that it does is so dangerous.

In our third story on Iran, Aaron MacLean looks at the unenviable position of Mojtaba Khamenei, the nepo-baby mullah who was announced as his dad’s successor on Sunday. Trump, who had previously said he wanted a role in picking the country’s next leader, said he was “not happy” with the choice. Ominously for Khamenei, Trump added: “If he doesn’t get approval from us he’s not going to last long.”

MacLean looks at those prospects in his latest analysis of the conflict. “Full-on paranoia has never been more justified than for Iran’s new hard-line top man,” writes Aaron. If he were counseling the Ayatollah, his advice would be to stay away from laptops, smartphones, or any kind of personal tech. Read his column on why Mojtaba’s hardest job will be surviving.

—Oliver Wiseman

In yesterday’s Front Page, we included the wrong link for Roya Hakakian’s essay on the Kurds’ role in the fight against the Islamic Republic. We apologize to readers—and to Roya!—for the mistake. Here is the correct link:

• Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster, has agreed to pay $280 million in penalties to 40 states that sued the company alleging anticompetitive business practices and artificially inflated concert ticket prices. Under the terms of the settlement, the company will allow the concert venues it works with to use other vendors to sell tickets, rather than with Ticketmaster exclusively.

• Rep. Kevin Kiley of California left the Republican Party on Monday to register as an independent. Although he plans to continue caucusing with the GOP, he cited partisan redistricting as the primary reason for his decision, writing on X, “Gerrymandering is a plague on democracy, one that Gavin Newsom has brought back to California.”

• The Pentagon identified Sergeant Benjamin Pennington of Kentucky as the seventh U.S. service member killed in the war with Iran. The 26-year-old died Saturday from injuries he sustained during an Iranian attack at a Saudi air base on March 1.

• Anthropic sued the Department of Defense on Monday, arguing that its designation of the company as a “supply chain risk” violates the AI company’s First Amendment rights. Anthropic has insisted that its Claude model not be used for surveillance of U.S. citizens or to power lethal weapons, while the Pentagon has demanded that the tools be available for “all lawful use.”

• Floods in Kenya killed 42 people over the weekend, with the death toll expected to rise as authorities continue search and rescue missions. President William Ruto has ordered relief food to families affected by the floods.

• In the first high-profile defections since the war in Iran began, five Iranian women soccer players received humanitarian visas in Australia after Trump called Australian prime ​minister Anthony Albanese to ensure they would not be sent back to Iran. The players were called “wartime traitors” for choosing not to sing the national anthem before their Women’s Asia Cup tournament opener.

Energy markets breathed a sigh of relief on Monday after President Donald Trump suggested he could declare victory over Iran at any time. “I think the war is very complete, pretty much,” he told CBS News. In a press conference later in the day he suggested several times that the war had achieved its basic objectives of rolling back Iran’s weapons programs and that it would be over “very soon.”

As I listened closely, however, I could hear Trump circling back to a rationale for staying in the fight long enough to ensure the United States doesn’t find itself back where we started in a few short years. Let me explain why I believe Trump is more likely than not to listen to his instinct to “finish the job,” as family members of recently fallen U.S. service personnel beseeched him this weekend, even if it means weeks (not days) of war still lay ahead.

“If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.”

So proclaims the final chapter of Adult Braces, a new memoir by Lindy West that is half-travelogue, half–polyamory memoir, and 100 percent privilege-disclaiming self-deprecation of the doth-protest-too-much variety. Perhaps you recall the moment in Girls where Lena Dunham snaps, “No one could ever hate me as much as I hate myself, okay? So any mean thing someone’s gonna think of to say about me, I’ve already said to me, about me, probably within the last half hour.”

Even as the world’s attention is focused on the Middle East, Beijing’s looming threat to Taiwan poses less immediate but potentially catastrophic risks to the world economy. Well aware of the danger, Taiwan is beginning to make extraordinary strides in breaking its dependence on China. In the process, it could help us break ours, too.

I’m deeply pessimistic about U.S.-China competition. The war in Iran will help determine the global order of the next decades. But the battle for supremacy with China will be at least as important, and it rests on our ability to keep China’s global economic influence in check. Unfortunately, in key sectors of the global economy, China is increasing its lead. Already dominant in industrial production, China is expected to increase its global share of manufacturing to 45 percent by 2030.

Columbia University’s leadership has managed to largely restore calm and resolve its battle with the Trump administration over allegations of campus antisemitism. But all that would be threatened if the graduate students who teach courses, serve as teaching assistants, and conduct research go on strike.

The union, representing about 3,500 student workers, has asked them to authorize a strike. The results of that vote could be announced as soon as Tuesday. If enough members vote yes, leaders of the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC) could launch a walkout anytime.

Of the many questionable decisions President Donald Trump has made with regard to Iran, one of the strangest was his declaration last Friday that the United States would demand “unconditional surrender” from Tehran. When Trump launched the attack with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, he was obviously hoping for a quick victory, something like the outcome he achieved when he snatched President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January. But the war expanded across the Middle East, with Iran shooting missiles and drones at American allies and bases all over the Persian Gulf. It was clear that what remained of the Iranian leadership was not about to capitulate, and that the conflict could drag on—as Trump himself admitted—for weeks.

Normally, a smart leader in such a situation would try to lower expectations and declare an achievable objective in the war, such as degrading the better part of Iran’s ability to strike targets with ballistic missiles and drones. This would offer an opportunity for Trump to declare victory and disengage. Instead, Trump did the opposite.

If I were advising the newly appointed Supreme Leader of Iran, Mojtaba Khamenei, I’d suggest that he avoid texting in the days ahead. Or really, any kind of personal tech—tablets, laptops, and so on. Also using the fridge—keep an eye out for “smart” features. Riding in a car manufactured in the past 15 years or so is risky, especially in the vicinity of traffic cameras. Or going outside at all. Or being inside, if in the presence of anything that collects data. Every exposure to one of the sensors that now saturate our world adds to the chances that his specific location at a given time will become known to Israeli or American targeters.

Full-on paranoia has never been more justified than for Iran’s new hard-line top man. Mojtaba’s father and predecessor met his end in an Israeli air strike just over a week ago, as have numerous other senior leaders of the Islamic Republic since the hostilities commenced. The ability of the Israeli and U.S. militaries to target specific people on the battlefield and kill them has entered a kind of golden age, enabled by the same digital revolution that makes possible all of the non-murderous aspects of the new world emerging around us.

Events in Iran are unfolding across my screen. The flash of air strikes followed by rising plumes of smoke—now the country’s bleak daily rhythm—streams remorselessly onto my feed. Mullahs howl. Politicians gesticulate. Washington and Jerusalem threaten and promise. Fragments of Persian, half learned and half forgotten, return to me. Gar sabr koni ze ghure halva sazi—“If you are patient, you can make halvah from sour grapes”: encouraging words once offered by my long-suffering Persian teacher as I butchered verb conjugations. Now I cautiously wonder if the phrase might be apt. Are we seeing the possible—if not immediate—end of a regime that has held one of the world’s oldest civilizations hostage for nearly half a century?

But then my mind flicks to darker memories: the sadistic crackdowns and the long history of crushed uprisings. I watch Iran strike its Gulf neighbors. Another proverb surfaces: Mar-e zakhmi khatarnak-tar ast—“A wounded snake is more dangerous.”

Twenty years ago, I lived in the foreigners section of the student dormitories (Kuye Daneshgah) of Tehran University, a dense complex of concrete blocks just off Enghelab Street where arrivals from across Iran crowded into functional rooms for the duration of their studies. Like almost everywhere in the country, the regime’s violence had struck these buildings. Only a few years earlier, security forces and Basij militia had stormed them during the 1999 student protests, beating them in the corridors and throwing some off balconies. As an older student told me matter-of-factly one day: Inja bud. It was here.

The government as a functioning entity doesn’t really exist anymore. Things are falling apart.

Two decades on, the violence has never really stopped. In January, the regime murdered around 30,000 of its own people; weeks later, the United States and Israel began pounding its facilities, trying, finally, to end it for good. For now, Iranians can only wait. Many hope the war will not last, and that it might herald the birth of something better. In the meantime, explosions are constant. Tehran’s night skies flare with ordnance as cell phones light up with rumor. So far the strikes have largely hit regime facilities, although 153 people, including children, were killed when a reported U.S. strike hit a school in southern Iran.

As the war rolls on, I try to speak to the people who matter most in all this: Iranians. These days, checking in on those I care about is a valuable exercise in more ways than one. Only by understanding what is happening inside the country, and in the minds of its people, can we begin to judge whether this war—and the colossal gamble it represents—has any chance of succeeding.

I have a clear memory, from when I was about 4 years old, of an errand with my mother to The Bon Marché, a department store in Seattle, where I grew up. A friendly saleslady asked me my name. “Arthur,” I replied, at which she burst out laughing. Apparently, a little boy being named Arthur seemed discordantly funny to her—like naming your dog “Steve.” My mom was not amused. “He is named after his grandfather,” she answered dryly, as we hurried away.

Actually, I am named after both of my grandfathers, Arthur Hansen (a Dane, whom I therefore called “Bedstefar”) and Charles Brooks (a good old-fashioned American “Grandpa”). Bedstefar was a joker; he had a bumper sticker custom-made for his Buick that said, “Be Alert! The World Needs More Lerts!” Grandpa was a serious man: a preacher and an academic.

I have positive memories of them, even though, despite both living within three hours of us, I didn’t see either very often: a couple of times a year at most, for maybe a day at a time. If you asked me to tell you the biggest life lesson they gave me, I’d have to think on it. I think one of them taught me the rules of croquet.

Much the same could be said of the relationship between my three kids, who grew up on the East Coast of the U.S., and their grandparents in Seattle and Barcelona. My children’s memories of the old folks are happy, but hazy: Sometimes they saw our parents at Christmas or during a summer trip, but not often enough to establish any sort of intergenerational intimacy.