The Free Press

Yuval Levin, founding editor of National Affairs and the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, has spent his career studying the institutions that shape American life. I wanted to sit down with him to discuss this unsettled moment in American politics—one in which both parties are fractured and go…

As Donald Trump wages war in Iran, a political battle is raging among his supporters at home. The anti-war wing of the MAGA movement is vying with the interventionists for control of the GOP’s future. And the non-interventionists are torn between their investment in Trump and their commitment to principle.

Step by step, Trump’s more dovish supporters have had to accustom themselves to his frequent use of military force. His killing of Qasem Soleimani in January 2020 upset many on the non-interventionist right, but it didn’t stop Trump from campaigning four years later as a man who had started no new wars in his first term. He did involve America in a new war when he bombed Iran’s nuclear sites six months into his second term, yet that intervention ended with a ceasefire just two days later. Then came the capture of Nicolás Maduro, a regime change—or at least decapitation—so swift and surgical that the anti-war wing of MAGA barely felt it.

The Pentagon and Anthropic have seen their relationship blow up in an argument over how the military could use Anthropic’s AI models. On the surface, this is a fight about defense contracts. Really, it is something much deeper: a stress test of how the United States governs frontier AI.

Anthropic is being eased out of Department of Defense contracting fo…

When I fought in Iraq in 2004, one of my friends, another Marine lieutenant, carried a 20-year-old bloodstained field jacket in his pack the entire deployment. Our battalion—the 1st Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment—carries the radio call sign “Beirut,” and this jacket belonged to Second Lieutenant Donald George Losey, who was killed along with 241 A…

Operation Epic Fury, this weekend’s joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, has been widely described as an extraordinary assault on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. That is true, but it misses a critical dimension. For years, Beijing has spent billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture.

In other words: This is all about China.

Let me explain.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, is dead. He was killed Saturday morning when U.S. and Israeli strikes reduced his compound in Tehran to rubble. In the hours after his death, the world reacted in different ways. For many Iranians, both in their country and the diaspora, it was a day of celebration. This man, a symbol of oppression for millions—and a leader with the blood of tens of thousands of his own people on his hands—was gone.

But some Western media outlets saw it differently. In obituaries written about Khamenei, excuses were made, his legacy was whitewashed, and nuance was introduced where none was necessary.

Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. In our most recent essay, John D. Spooner, 88, wrote about why knowing your family’s stories, and passing them along to the next generation, enriches everyone’s lives. This week, Sarah Flick explains why she wants everyone to know her family’s stories: because the world needs to remember the persecution that drove millions of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe in the early part of the last century.

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In my 60s, I’m at a point in my life where I look backward more than I used to. I suppose a lot of people do that. What is surprising, at least to me, is that I am thinking more and more often about my long-deceased grandparents, Zaide and Bubbe, who escaped from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century.

They were part of a massive wave of pre-World War II Jewish refugees—more than 3 million Jews came to the U.S.—but the circumstances that drove them out were never well-documented. In more modern times, antisemites have seized the opportunity to recast them as a group of unusually greedy emigrants, even calling them “white colonizers,” with all its implications of privilege. I’m from the last generation that heard about the diaspora from original sources; with my own limited time remaining on this earth, I have come to feel a powerful need to tell my grandparents’ stories. Time is running out to try to set the record straight.

Saturday night’s event in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was planned as a vigil for over 30,000 people killed by the Iranian regime in its brutal crackdown against protesters. But the event turned into a celebration with news that the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the attack by the United States and Israel.

Thousands of people gathered across Washington; waved the flags of the U.S., Israel, and prerevolutionary Iran; and blasted “Y.M.C.A.,” an anthem of President Donald Trump. Many converged later at an impromptu block party outside Iran’s de facto consulate inside the Pakistani embassy.

I spoke to several Iranian Americans about their feelings at this historic moment and their hopes for the future of Iran. Everyone expressed sorrow about the Iranian protesters who were killed and saw the bombardment as fulfillment of Trump’s promise six weeks ago that “help is on the way” for Iranians seeking regime change.

The Iranian Americans I met also said that they support Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran’s last shah, as leader of a transitional government. Some of them also had strong words for Democrats who are opposing the attacks. Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In the past 36 hours, the world has changed. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in joint U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran. Operation Epic Fury has birthed a new era in the Middle East. It is a moment full of both promise and peril. After the brutal dictator’s death, Iran has retaliated with drone and missile strikes across the region. U.S. and Israeli strikes continued into a second night Saturday. Today, Free Press writers help you make sense of these extraordinary developments.

Up first, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. In his essay for The Free Press, he puts this weekend’s momentous news in some historical context, explaining why Donald Trump, the greatest gambler of all the commanders in chief in American history, has rolled the dice like never before with his decision to attack Iran. Read Simon’s essay if you want to make sense of why the death of Khamenei is such a seismic development—and what might happen next.

What is Trump’s plan? For answers to that question, read Michael Doran, one of the most astute observers of the Middle East. He describes how the president shifted from a “strategy of coercion” to a “strategy of decapitation,” and reports on the plans for the “day after” that have long been in the works. To understand what the president is thinking, read this piece:

They say there is nothing worse in the world than war. Many Iranians would disagree, writes Roya Hakakian. What is worse? “A peace beneath whose facade a nation’s hope dies a thousand deaths every day.” Read Roya on why this war could be Iranians’ best chance at peace:

Perhaps the most pressing question right now is this: What will Iran do next? The answer, according to military analyst Aaron MacLean, is not a comfortable one. In the past, Iranian retaliations have been choreographed and limited. Not this time. Tehran is targeting everywhere from Tel Aviv to Dubai, and, writes Aaron, they won’t stop soon:

In both the buildup to the strikes and their immediate aftermath, the most common argument against the president’s action has been this: Trump does not have the legal authority to attack Iran. It’s a serious charge, and one that will dominate Washington, D.C., this week as Congress prepares war powers votes for this coming week. So what does the law actually say? Free Press legal columnist Jed Rubenfeld has the answer:

To listen to the chants at anti-war protests—or the denunciations from his opponents—Trump just started a war. But while it’s true that the president started this particular battle, this war has been going on for half a century, argues Peter Savodnik. In his column today, he recalls the Iranian hostage crisis, and how it took us too long to see our enemy for who they really were. Read Peter on why the strikes, rather than being the start of something new, could be the beginning of the end of something much older:

And in case you missed it, here’s more of our coverage of the Iran strikes and their fallout:

President Donald Trump launched a massive military attack on Iran Saturday, and he described the campaign with a specific, bold term. “The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties,” Trump said in his address to the nation, but “that often happens in war.” That last word is critical.

The Constitution limits presidents’ power to make war without the approval of Congress, but for over 200 years Americans have debated how far a president can go. With what we know so far about the attack on Iran, could it be argued that the president has crossed the Constitution’s redline? Of course it could.

Playing devil’s advocate, I’m going to lay out the simplest, strongest argument why Trump’s attack on Iran is unconstitutional. Then I’ll say what I actually think.

Here’s the case against the strikes.

The president is commander in chief of the armed forces, but the Constitution vests in Congress alone the power to “declare war.” Over 150 years ago, in the famous Prize Cases, the Supreme Court stated that this means the president cannot “initiate” a war without congressional authorization.