The Free Press

As part of our celebration of America at 250, we’ve started a weekly newsletter by historian Jonathan Horn. Learn what happened this week in American history, why it matters, and what else you should see and read in The Free Press and beyond. This week Jonathan looks at the surprise operation that would break the stalemate around Boston. To get this newsletter in your inbox every week, sign up here. —The Editors

There was little sleep this night 250 years ago around Boston. The British troops occupying the city had heard rumors of a rebel movement but could not hear the procession of wagons, oxen, and soldiers over the roar of the artillery duel that the Continental Army had begun. Not until the sun rose over Boston Harbor the next morning did the British discover what the cannon fire and darkness had disguised: George Washington’s men had transformed the previously unoccupied Dorchester Heights across the water into a formidable bastion with the fortifications and firepower needed to force the British out of the city.

The operation on Dorchester Heights on the night of March 4, 1776, led to Washington’s first significant triumph of the Revolutionary War and previewed a secret weapon that regimes underestimating the United States have failed to reckon with time and time again: the ingenuity and enterprise of the American people.

By March, the siege that had begun with the British falling back into Boston from Concord and Lexington was nearing the one-year mark. As discussed here a few weeks ago, Washington felt his countrymen losing patience with the stalemate. The officers he convened in a war council in mid-February had rejected his plan to throw troops across the frozen water separating his army from the British but gave their support to an alternative plan: fortifying Dorchester Heights.

It’s Wednesday, March 4. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: River Page on the internet’s favorite Iran “expert” and his web of conspiracy theories. Ted Gioia on how, in the age of AI, human touch is cool—and profitable—again. Olivia Reingold and Maya Sulkin report on a troubling spate of antisemitic threats at an elite American university. And much more.

But first: What is Trump’s endgame in Iran?

Hundreds dead in Iran, six U.S. service members killed, strikes on cities across the region, and major trade routes disrupted as oil prices skyrocket. As the war in the Middle East rages on, the whole world has the same questions: How long will it last—and what will come next?

According to Michael Doran, it’s possible to glimpse the path forward through the fog of war. He says the war will end one way: with a call from Trump to Benjamin Netanyahu to say, “Bibi, it’s time for a ceasefire.”

Iran knows this, and their strategy is simple: Force Trump’s hand sooner rather than later by raising the stakes at every opportunity. At stake is nothing less than control of Iran and the future of the Middle East. Read Michael’s piece for a sense of where this is headed:

What are the rules dictating Trump’s decision-making in this war? Elliott Abrams, who served as Special Representative for Iran in Trump’s first administration, dives into that question in his piece for us today. Complicating the picture: a president constantly rewriting his own rule book when it comes to “forever wars,” boots on the ground, and regime change. So what are the president’s red lines, and will he stick to them?

When the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979, it looked to remake the Middle East, writes Aaron MacLean. After the past few days, we can now say it has succeeded, though not in the ways it had hoped.

Israel and Arab nations are more aligned than ever, while the Iran regime is on the ropes and lashing out at just about everyone in the region. Iran is more isolated than ever. This isn’t just the story of a regime that overplayed its hand once or twice; it’s an exhaustive account of just how badly they blew it.

This war didn’t start on Saturday, argues Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States. It started in 1979. And if the Iranian revolution was the beginning, October 7, 2023 was the beginning of the end.

That was when the regime made a potentially fatal miscalculation. The regime triggered a catastrophic backlash with what Tehran and its proxies called the Al-Aqsa Flood. Today, Michael traces the tinderbox ignited with Trump’s February 28 attacks on Iran back to October 7, a time when Iran seemed much stronger and more sure of itself, before the regime’s house of cards collapsed.

—The Editors

On March 9, join The Free Press’s Coleman Hughes for a special conversation at Buckhead Theatre in Atlanta. Together with MLK Jr. biographer Jonathan Eig and civil rights pioneer Ambassador Andrew Young, he’ll explore what Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy can teach us today, at a time when America has seemed to reach a boiling point. This event brings together three extraordinary voices in a legendary venue for an unforgettable conversation. It’s our first-ever event in Atlanta, and one you won’t want to miss.

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• The Pentagon has released the names of four soldiers killed in an Iranian attack on a U.S. military base in Kuwait over the weekend. Among the slain are Captain Cody A. Khork, 35, of Winter Haven, Florida; Sergeant 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska; Sergeant 1st Class Nicole M. Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; and Sergeant Declan J. Coady, 20, of West Des Moines, Iowa. Two other soldiers who were also killed have yet to be identified.

• Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is expected to replace his father as Supreme Leader of Iran, The New York Times reported yesterday. Officials familiar with the deliberations said the clerics responsible for choosing him had reservations about announcing the selection for fear that he would be targeted by the United States and Israel.

• Two top aides to Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer were forced to resign on Monday amid an internal investigation into allegations of misconduct by senior officials in the department. The investigation came after the New York Post published a whistleblower’s complaint accusing Chavez-DeRemer of drinking on the job, having an affair with a member of her security detail, and using department resources for personal travel.

• A jury found a Georgia father guilty of murder and manslaughter yesterday for a school shooting his son committed in 2024 that killed four. Prosecutors said Colin Gray, the father of Colt Gray, failed to address his son’s anger issues, ignored his obsession with school shooters, and even gave him an assault-style rifle as a Christmas gift.

• A federal judge ruled yesterday that the Trump administration’s fight to stop New York City’s congestion pricing toll was unlawful, handing the state a major win for its traffic reduction program, the first of its kind in the U.S. The ruling comes after months of threats from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to withhold funding and approval for transit projects if the toll continued.

• Midterm primary voters in North Carolina, Texas, and Arkansas headed to the polls yesterday in several races, with James Talarico winning over Jasmine Crockett, carrying the state’s Democratic voters by seven points . Meanwhile, Trump has not yet endorsed a candidate in the Lone Star State’s crowded Republican primary.

• Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem defended her agency’s immigration enforcement strategy in a Senate hearing yesterday after drawing bipartisan criticism, including from Republican senator Thom Tillis, who called her tenure at DHS “a disaster.” Noem doubled down on her defense of ICE officers’ actions, claiming the agents “are facing a serious and escalating threat as a result of deliberate mischaracterizations of their heroic work.”

• The Trump administration is quietly assembling a criminal indictment of Nicolás Maduro’s successor Delcy Rodríguez, including corruption and money laundering charges, Reuters reported yesterday. Sources familiar with the matter say the move aims to bolster leverage with Venezuela following the January ouster of former president Maduro.

In five years as president, Donald Trump has established his own unique and changeable set of rules about when and how to use American military power. The current confrontation with Iran is proceeding based on some new guidelines, which may not sit well with many of his supporters. In the last four days, Trump has broken two of his own rules about foreign and defense policy, maintained two (so far), and ended a longtime American taboo.

First, Trump’s previous military actions complied with the “one and done” rule. This meant no “endless wars” and instead, very brief military actions that were over when they were announced: the killing of Iranian terrorist leader Qasem Soleimani in his first term, the Midnight Hammer attack on Iranian nuclear sites last year, and the capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro. Now, instead of another brief attack on nuclear sites or missile launchers, Trump has undertaken what could be a multi-week effort.

The fog of war does not prevent us from peering into the future and catching a glimpse of the exact moment when this conflict will end. Donald Trump will pick up the phone and tell Benjamin Netanyahu, “Bibi, it’s time for a ceasefire.” Netanyahu will reply, “Yes, I agree.”

The cooperation between Trump and Netanyahu is unprecedented in U.S.-Israeli history. American and Israeli forces operate as a tightly integrated unit, closer than ever before. Yet the underlying power dynamic remains unchanged from June 2025, when the first U.S.-Israeli joint operation against Iran ended abruptly.

When the Islamic Republic came into being in 1979, its leaders looked to remake the Middle East. We can now say that they succeeded, though not in the ways they hoped.

Rather than eliminating Zionism, ejecting the United States, and establishing the hegemony of Tehran, the net result of the post–October 7, 2023 wars is something like the opposite of these objectives—and the regime’s actions since America and Israel launched this most recent phase of the post-10/7 wars have only further weakened its own regional standing.

Someone with a mischievous spirit and a time machine might be inclined to return to October 6, 2023, and show Ayatollah Ali Khamenei the headlines of recent days. The experience would be like an American reviewing Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, a dystopian alternative history in which the Axis powers won World War II. Only in this case it would be a nonfiction vision of the future.

So what, exactly, are the consequences of Iran’s miscalculations?

Xueqin Jiang is riding high. The Beijing-based “predictive history” lecturer on YouTube—who is listed as a researcher at Harvard’s Global Education Innovation Initiative—predicted in 2024 that Donald Trump would win the election and start a war with Iran, and that the U.S. would eventually lose the war.

The accuracy of his first two predictions—particularly after Operation Midnight Hammer last June—earned him viral fame, the moniker of “China’s Nostradamus,” and a write-up in Newsweek. Now, some of his clips are going viral as Operation Epic Fury enters its fifth day, and the media is paying him mind once again. There’s just one problem—Jiang is a conspiracy theorist.

Officially, at least, the war against Iran began on Saturday, February 28, at 1:15 a.m., Eastern Standard Time. In reality, though, Operation Epic Fury of the United States and Israel’s Roaring Lion began at 6:29 in the morning, Middle East Time, on October 7, 2023.

In launching the Al-Aqsa Flood onslaught, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar believed he was initiating the long-desired destruction of the Jewish State and the final triumph of radical Islam. Little could he have conceived that, 875 days later, Israel would not only have survived but emerged as the region’s preeminent military power while Iran, the former jihadist hegemon, was reduced to an embattled remnant. Sinwar, along with a broad list of the Palestinian, Iranian, and Lebanese leaders who started and supported this war, would be dead.

How did that happen? How did a single attack launched across Gaza’s border, that lasted a little over a day and killed 1,200 Israelis, mushroom into a 28-month-long conflict entangling the United States and at least 17 other countries and claiming tens of thousands of lives? What concatenation of events transformed that brutal but localized battle into the full-blown war whose conclusion, as of this writing, remains totally unpredictable? The answer to such questions can be summarized in a single word: miscalculation.

A bookstore in Alabama keeps getting covered in the national news. Even The New Yorker recently sent a reporter to visit The Alabama Booksmith, a small, almost windowless business on a dead-end street in Birmingham.

From the outside, it looks like an old clapboard home. But this nondescript store has also gotten noticed by NPR, USA Today, Good Morning America, and a dozen other media outlets. You might think that it was some special tourist destination—and maybe it is.

In a time when many indie bookstores struggle to survive, The Alabama Booksmith is flourishing. But it has a crazy strategy that draws customers, who bypass stores in their own cities to purchase from a distant retailer.

Here’s the secret: Every book in the store is signed by the author.

The debate about the U.S.’s war in Iran is everywhere. It is threatening to split the conservative movement, dividing it between those who see it as Donald Trump’s breaking of a promise against new wars and those who see it as a necessary confrontation long overdue. Progressives, predictably, frame it as another Middle Eastern adventure dragged out of Washington by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Anti-war libertarians call it regime change in a new dress. And across the world, from Brazil to Beijing, London to Karachi, the argument is the same: America is fighting Israel’s war.

But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters, because if you misread what this war is actually about, you will misread everything that follows.

This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. The subtext, that Israel exercises outsize influence or “drags Americans into wars they don’t want,” borders on the conspiratorial.

Hours before hundreds of Jewish students were due to celebrate Purim at the Chabad House of Stanford University, Rabbi Dov Greenberg received an email.

“The coming Holocaust 2.0?” said the subject line of the email that landed in the Chabad chapter’s general inbox on Monday.

To Greenberg, the message to Jews was clear.

“Don’t get together. We’re on to you. We know about you, and we’re coming for you,” the rabbi summarized.