The Free Press

President Donald Trump likes to complain about allies who don’t pull their weight when it comes to defense. This week, Trump is being visited by two allies who bear more than their fair share—the leaders of Israel and Ukraine. Both countries are taking on America’s enemies, spending lavishly on defense, and sustaining civilian and military casualties—at an incredible rate, in Ukraine’s case. As threats to the U.S. converge in surprising ways, the time seems right for Trump to re-embrace these allies and switch from restraint to wholehearted support.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Volodymyr Zelensky both came to Washington to attend the memorial for the late GOP senator Lindsey Graham, who helped persuade Trump for years to support their nations’ war efforts. But they also came with urgent business, seeking to extract commitments from the president: for Israel, a plan to eliminate Iran’s remaining and restored nuclear facilities; and for Ukraine, U.S. assistance, including access to Patriot missiles, to counter Russian attacks.

Both meetings on Tuesday remained closed, as Trump chose not to invite the press into the Oval Office as he often does at the end of visits from world leaders. Yet the early signs suggest that this confidentiality is a positive sign. Trump keeps his most important “working meetings” private, and officials from all three countries called the talks comprehensive and productive. Netanyahu said his session was “one of the best conversations I’ve ever had with a president of the United States.”

And the day before the visit, news broke of a Ukrainian action that showed exactly how the alliance with the U.S. can be mutually beneficial. Ukrainian forces targeted and sank an Iranian vessel in the Caspian Sea over the weekend, whittling down the Islamic regime’s arsenal that has bedeviled U.S. efforts to keep open the Strait of Hormuz.

On the first night of my recent trip to Russia, driving from the airport at around two in the morning, I passed a gas station just outside Moscow. A long line of cars and trucks snaked around it, waiting for their ration of 40 liters (about 10 gallons) of fuel.

At least this station was still operating. Several others I passed along the way had no gasoline to sell at all.

There was something surreal about watching drivers queue for fuel in the capital of one of the world’s largest oil-producing countries. I had never seen anything like it in the city where I grew up. It was also an unmistakable sign that the war Russia launched against Ukraine was becoming much harder to keep at a comfortable distance—even in Moscow, the city the Kremlin had worked hardest to shield from it.

For most of the past four years, the Russian capital existed in a kind of parallel reality—something I repeatedly observed on my semiannual trips back home. While Ukrainian cities were being bombarded, occupied, and destroyed, Moscow’s restaurants, shops, and nightclubs remained busy. Western businesses, many of which left the country in the immediate wake of the invasion of Ukraine, had reopened using Russian names. (McDonald’s became Vkusno—i tochka, which can be roughly translated as “Tasty—period.”) While poorer Russian regions bore the brunt of mobilization and military recruitment, Muscovites had remained comparatively insulated from the war’s human costs, with independent casualty tallies consistently showing the capital had suffered among the country’s lowest per-capita battlefield losses. The war itself was confined mostly to TV, where it was packaged as a distant “special military operation,” conducted by soldiers somewhere far away.

Until now.

The question of America’s munitions shortage has dominated coverage of the Iran war in recent days. After President Donald Trump retreated from further strikes against Tehran last week, administration officials blamed depleted weapons stockpiles for forcing his hand. Park MacDougald, writing in Tablet, suggests there is more to the story, arguing the explanation is overstated and that the spin around it reveals more than the shortage itself. We’re pleased to republish it in our pages today. —The Editors

In a completely unforeseen development, Lucy has once again yanked the football away from Charlie—sorry, President Donald Trump has once again backed away from his threats to annihilate Iran and opted for more diplomacy.

We were also shocked—shocked!—to learn one of the alleged reasons Trump decided to stop bombing Iran on Friday night: a shortage of key munitions. Indeed, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Axios, and CNN all ran stories over the weekend on the supposed “munitions” shortfall, reportedly raised by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine during a meeting with the president last week.

“Any major operation against Iran will face challenges because the U.S. munitions stockpile has been significantly depleted by Washington’s ongoing defense of Israel and support for Ukraine,” the Post reported Caine as telling the president. “Intensifying the war could dangerously drain the Pentagon’s already diminished stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors and other air defense munitions in the Middle East,” was the Times’ gloss on the same meeting. CNN and the Journal corroborated the claims about Caine, with CNN adding that Vice President J.D. Vance also warned Trump against resumption of the war. In an “analysis” article posted on Monday, CNN’s senior political reporter, Aaron Blake, argued that the question of “munitions stockpiles” had become “pivotal” to U.S. planning. Blake linked to an April analysis from CNN, which argued that there was now a “near-term risk” of the United States “running out of ammunition” in a conflict with a near-peer adversary such as China.

Welcome back to This Week in Canada, where we insist that everyone else makes trade concessions—just as long as we don’t have to; the protection of dairy cartels is called patriotism; and bourbon is causing an international incident. Let’s jump in!

If you’ve lost track of where Canada and the United States stand on tariffs, don’t worry. So has everyone else. In the past 18 months we’ve had tariffs, retaliatory tariffs, paused tariffs, resumed tariffs, exempted tariffs, canceled trade talks, resumed trade talks, court rulings, appeals, and 51st-state taunts. Blink and you probably missed a tariff. If you’re a glutton for punishment, here’s a useful timeline.

And that just scratches the surface. After the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs, the White House scrambled for new legal authority—first relying on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a little-used emergency provision allowing temporary import surcharges for up to 150 days.

The resulting 10 percent tariff took effect on February 24, but because most goods that complied with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) were exempt, the measure fell far more heavily on imports from countries outside North America than on Canadian exports.

Last week, with the temporary surcharges about to expire, the White House announced that it was pivoting to Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a provision that had never before been used in the modern era. Unlike Section 122, Section 338 is aimed directly at Canada, with 50 percent tariffs on “products ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement,” as the White House put it in a “fact sheet” that cited “continued discrimination against and unreasonable and unequal treatment of U.S. commerce that has burdened and disadvantaged hardworking Americans.”

According to the White House, that discrimination largely comes from Canada’s supply management system, which protects Canadian dairy farmers with production quotas and high import tariffs, a 2025 retaliatory surtax on U.S. automobiles, and provincial liquor monopolies that removed or restricted the sale of American beer, wine, and spirits during the trade dispute. As if that weren’t enough, Canada also is one of the 60 countries hit last week with separate Section 301 tariffs of 10 percent on imports. The countries were accused of inadequately enforcing laws against the use of forced labor, giving those countries an unfair advantage over the U.S.

It’s Tuesday, July 28. 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 “secular sharia” and the latest victims of social media’s new morality police. Tyler Cowen on why you should stop worrying about AI-generated articles. Casey Babb interviews the Jews who are leaving Canada in droves. And much more.

But first: Is there a way out of the data-center bind?

America is living through a technological revolution—and the physical footprint of that revolution is data centers: hulking structures built on vast, multibillion-dollar campuses to store the computers needed to power the boom in artificial intelligence. These data centers are the biggest infrastructure build-out in U.S. history.

They are also becoming one of the most controversial issues in American politics. One recent survey found that just 14 percent of respondents are comfortable with a data center being built nearby. Across the country, more than 300 local governments have imposed bans or temporary moratoriums on data-center construction. Earlier this month, New York governor Kathy Hochul signed a one-year freeze on any new data centers.

Economically speaking, data centers are inevitable. Politically, they are anything but. This collision—between economic logic and political reality—touches almost everything, from who controls Washington next year to whether the U.S. or China wins the race for global supremacy. But with the stakes so high, is there a way out of the data-center bind? That’s what we asked Joe Nocera to investigate. He spoke to supporters and opponents across the country, the investors trying to get data centers built, the activists trying to stop them, and the policymakers searching for solutions. Here’s what he found.

—Oliver Wiseman

Calling all Abigail Shrier fanatics: Submit your questions for an AMA with Tough Love editor Freya Sanders. On July 30 at noon ET, Freya will coach you on how to get your letter into Abigail’s inbox—and answer your questions live. Only paid subscribers can submit questions via this thread—become one today for access to The Free Press Forum, Tough Love, livestreams, and much more.

The Iran war has reached a stalemate—in part due to a shortage of U.S. munitions. But our missile shortages go far deeper than this conflict, writes Aaron MacLean. In his latest column, he dives into the past, present, and future of U.S. weapons shortages, and argues that the real problem is not to do with Iran, but China.

Increasingly, the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, and even China’s looming threat over Taiwan, are becoming intertwined. Today, retired U.S. Navy rear admiral Mark Montgomery joins School of War to unpack the pause in U.S. air strikes on Iran after intensified bombing, the possibility of a revised ceasefire, and how the wars of our time relate to one another.

• Former JPMorgan banker Chirayu Rana retreated from some of the most salacious claims in his “sex slave” lawsuit against the bank and an executive, alleging in a new suit that he was the target of racism in the workplace. The new suit claims that colleagues called Rana racist names and sought to keep JPMorgan white and Christian. A bank spokesperson said the allegations have no merit, and the executive has filed a defamation suit against Rana.

• Authorities relied on an unvetted tip that turned out to be false to temporarily separate Pete Buttigieg from his 4-year-old twins last month, according to The Washington Post. Police only vetted the accusations of child abuse after taking the children into custody. The accuser was later found to possibly be “mentally unstable.”

• Firefighters are racing to contain raging wildfires in Spain and France that claimed two lives over the weekend and forced more than 300,000 people to flee. French president Emmanuel Macron called the fires “totally unprecedented” and warned that “the coming weeks will be tough.”

• A mass shooting at a Seattle food festival on Sunday that killed three people and wounded four others may have been gang-related, according to police. Authorities arrested a 15-year-old suspect on Monday, while another suspect was among those killed and a third suspect remains at large.

• New York City halted the conversion of a Manhattan office tower into a 32-story apartment building after city inspectors said they found multiple cracked beams in the building, according to The Wall Street Journal. The stop resulted from a wave of inspections after last month’s buckling of two columns in another Manhattan building undergoing a conversion.

• The Cracker Barrel CEO who oversaw a widely scorned rebranding effort that included banishing the overall-wearing icon Uncle Herschel and his rocking chair from the restaurant company’s logo is stepping down. Julie Masino reversed the changes, but same-store sales suffered. She said she felt “fired by America.”

• President Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Tuesday for the first time since the start of the U.S.-Iran war. “You’re fucking crazy,” Trump told Netanyahu in a tense phone call, accusing him of ingratitude, Axios reported.

• Trump asked the Supreme Court to allow his administration to enforce an executive order aimed at curtailing the use of mail-in ballots. The order would create a federal list of eligible mail voters and bar state governments from sending ballots to anyone not on the list. Lower courts have blocked the order in about half of all U.S. states.

Mark Montgomery, senior director of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral, returns to School of War to analyze the latest military developments across the world. Why has the Iran war entered such a dangerous and uncertain phase? What role will the Strait of Hormuz …

“Get a room. There’s kids around.”

The camera advances toward a finely dressed couple kissing in Central Park. They smile, and the man, dressed in a blue suit, tries to shoo the intruding TikToker, Jay Guapõ, away.

Guapõ, who has a history of antagonizing strangers for online clout, refuses. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch—if you touch me I’ll have to touch you.”

The man and woman start to look nervous. They ask Guapõ to put the phone down again. He doesn’t. It becomes clear, very quickly, they have something to hide.

The video was released Thursday. Within hours, internet sleuths figured out that the two are colleagues at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a white-shoe law firm in Manhattan. The man, Nathaniel D. Cullerton, is 45 and a partner. The woman, Kelsey Borenzweig, is 29, and an associate. Cullerton is married. Everyone from the Daily Mail to Above the Law covered the scandal, and the video has since amassed more than 5 million views.

The war with Iran is stalemated, in part due to a shortage of munitions available to the U.S. military. If this situation is not a full-blown crisis, it is certainly a scandal, and many observers have drawn the conclusion that these shortages would make deterring a potential Chinese effort to take control of Taiwan more difficult.

The deeper reality is even worse: The munitions shortfalls reveal that the United States was not prepared to deter China—let alone fight a war with it—even before the Iran war. If American stockpiles of defensive munitions, like Terminal High Altitude Area Defenses (THAAD) and Patriot interceptors, and offensive weapons, like Tomahawk cruise missiles and the Army’s ballistic missiles, are running low after only five months of intermittent warfare of varying intensity with a middle power like Iran, what would happen in a broader and more intense campaign against the People’s Liberation Army?

If nothing else, the war against Iran reminds us that presumptively short wars have a tendency to run inconveniently long. Either our old war plans with China involved some magical thinking, or we simply were never serious about matching our resources to our strategic needs.

The United States is not the first nation, or even the first great power, to confront a munitions crisis. The history of modern warfare is replete with them. In recent years, Ukraine, Israel, and Russia have all faced critical shortfalls and addressed them through foreign suppliers (primarily the U.S. for Ukraine and Israel, and North Korea playing a key role for Russia) while ramping up domestic production. Israel was helped by the United States in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in yet another such crisis.

Gad Saad has lived in Canada since his family fled Lebanon in 1975 after someone showed up at their home to kill them. But last month, the professor of marketing and evolutionary behavioral sciences announced on social media that he had given up on Canada and decided to leave.

“The taxation system is astounding, rendering it nearly impossible to accumulate enough money to truly retire,” Saad wrote about the first reason for his decision. It’s true. The typical Canadian pays 70 percent more in income taxes than the typical American. The second reason is far more alarming. “The government’s open immigration policies have made it unsafe for my family to remain here (due to the exponential increase in Jew-hatred),” he wrote.

Saad said basically the same thing on Joe Rogan’s podcast in May. “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.” Saad had already taken a leave of absence from Concordia University in Montreal and will continue working as a scholar at the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom at the University of Mississippi.

Saad’s decision made it even more painfully obvious that Canada has an antisemitism problem. As of mid-July, B’nai Brith had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents so far this year, compared with 10 during all of 2025. As The Free Press’s Rupa Subramanya reported in June, Jews account for about one percent of Canada’s population of 41.6 million, but were the targets of more hate crimes reported by police in 2024 than all other religious groups combined.

Last April, a woman named Shiloh Hendrix went viral after calling a black, autistic, 8-year-old boy the N-word in a Rochester, Minnesota, park and then using the same slur against a man who confronted her about it on camera. After her identity was made public, the online far right decided to make her rich, raising over half a million dollars for her on GiveSendGo, a self-described Christian crowdfunding platform. As I reported at the time, the vast majority of comments from donors on the site were plainly racist, as were the posts on X that portrayed her as a white supremacist folk hero.

It was one of the most clarifying moments of the anti-woke era—an obvious sign that the pendulum had swung too far—and the story should have ended there. But unfortunately, it didn’t—and now, overzealous prosecutors in Rochester have turned Hendrix into a bona fide free-speech martyr.

In the days and weeks that followed the incident, local activists, including the local NAACP chapter, organized protests and town halls demanding that Hendrix be arrested and charged—despite the fact that the incident never escalated to physical violence. A few months later local prosecutors obliged, and Shiloh Hendrix was charged with two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct. Last week, she was found guilty on one count (related to her racially insulting the man who filmed her), fined $1,000, and sentenced to probation and community service. The reaction from the far right was exactly what you’d expect.