The Free Press

Mike Doran, senior fellow and director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute, returns to School of War to examine why the war with Iran continues despite devastating military setbacks for Tehran. Is President Trump’s Iran strategy truly different from President Obama’s, or are the similarities overstated? What d…

Two tech titans went to war on Friday: mighty Apple and OpenAI. And to judge by the initial news stories, Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI, which it filed on Friday, looks like one for the ages. “Apple Sues OpenAI Alleging Trade Secret Theft, Says Scheme Was ‘at Every Level’ ” read the headline on CNBC’s story. The New York Times said in its print headline that Apple had accused OpenAI of “plundering trade secrets for its new hardware division.” Financial Times said the information OpenAI allegedly stole from Apple was “top secret.”

All the articles quoted the most incendiary sentence in Apple’s filing: “OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets.”

If the allegations are true—if, indeed, the trade secret theft was known and approved at “every level” of OpenAI—the consequences could be dire for one of the most important new companies in the world. It would surely derail the IPO OpenAI has planned before year’s end. But it could also damage the reputation of Jony Ive, Apple’s former chief design officer, whose start-up company was bought by OpenAI last year as part of a closely watched push to launch a device of its own. And maybe, just maybe, it could do in OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman as well.

In my column last week I argued that a reimposition of the American blockade of Iranian ports was the best path forward in our war against Iran. On Monday, U.S. forces did just that. What I did not argue for—but which was also announced on Monday—was a 20 percent toll on all traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. (You win some, you lose some.)

So what comes next? The reimposed blockade, if combined with enhanced efforts to protect non-Iranian traffic through the strait, will begin to heal some of the damage done to America’s strategic position in the region since April 7. That was when the president, in his eagerness to end the hostilities, announced a ceasefire with Iran in return for Iran opening the strait. But the Iranians, of course, did not open the strait—and between then and now, there has been a lot of to-and-fro over this question without much resolution.

Why did the president proceed with the ceasefire in the first place? Reports increasingly indicate that the war was predicated on a regime-change plan, driven by Israel, that failed.

Senator Lindsey Graham was always an effective legislator. But it took his sudden and tragic death at age 71 on Saturday for many to acknowledge his tremendous influence on American politics.

Over his 30-plus years on the Hill, eight in the House and 23 in the Senate, Graham—a Republican—fought with Democrats and GOP lawmakers alike. He was at times both one of President Donald Trump’s fiercest critics and staunchest defenders. A longtime Air Force officer, he was a staunch believer in American military might and how it could reshape the world for the better. It was a view he shared with the late senators John McCain, the GOP candidate for president in 2008, and Joe Lieberman, the Democratic candidate for vice president in 2000. General David Petraeus dubbed the trio the “Three Amigos.”

In recent years, Graham supported NATO and aid to Ukraine when both were unpopular among many in his party. He backed Israel to the hilt. And at home, he was a key player on the Senate Judiciary Committee, helping shepherd through numerous judges and Supreme Court justices nominated by Trump.

You may have heard some recent news about Congressman Ro Khanna’s trip to Israel.

For those who haven’t, early Thursday Israel time, Khanna was touring the West Bank with a small group led by an Israeli guide who heads Breaking the Silence, an activist organization opposed to Israeli military rule in the territory.

During the tour, the group’s car was stopped by a handful of armed Israelis. That was because Khanna was entering an area that many believed to be a closed military zone. Reports have since emerged that the designation had expired, but the Israelis on the ground seemed to have believed it was still in place.

I don’t know the specifics of this particular case, but to be clear about my own position: Sometimes, the IDF uses these closures to displace illegally built Palestinian settlements—settlements that rarely get building approval from the Israeli military authorities. When that happens, I’m on the side of the Palestinians affected. But there are other times, other cases, when the area genuinely isn’t safe to occupy, or when the squatters are recent arrivals, or when the IDF needs to designate an area a military training ground.

On January 3, Venezuelans cheered when the United States removed their longtime dictator Nicolás Maduro, and seemed to open the door for a return to democracy. But since then, U.S. policy has been to keep that door shut.

Support for Maduro’s replacement and former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, has been firm despite her regime’s poor response to the devastating earthquakes that struck on June 24. And now the United States risks losing the goodwill it earned by removing Maduro six months ago. As The New York Times reported last week, Venezuelans are “turning their anger toward the Trump administration, which has. . . stood by the government’s management of the disaster.” This is not only a betrayal of America’s long-standing commitment to restoring democracy in Venezuela after 27 years of socialist authoritarianism. It’s also against America’s own interests and counterproductive to the Trump administration’s main priority: extracting Venezuelan oil and getting it to consumers.

I served as the special representative for Venezuela in Trump’s first term. The administration imposed sanctions on Venezuela and rejected the 2018 presidential election stolen by Nicolás Maduro. And we backed the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, as interim president, while demanding an end to the Maduro dictatorship. Then came January’s daring raid on Maduro’s home and what Venezuelans hoped was a new era of freedom and democracy.

There’s a maxim that sustains the British royal family: Never complain, never explain. The logic is clear: If they whinge about their gilded cage, it might offend their less privileged subjects to the point of revolt; if they reveal a little too much about themselves, it destroys their mystique, which helps sustain them. People loved the queen because she didn’t seem entirely human.

To American ears, of course, this has always sounded ridiculous. Raised on a steady diet of freedom, in a country that was born a democracy, the American public has long viewed the Windsor stiff upper lip not as dignity but as repression. Which is why the United States so enthusiastically latched on to the man who defied his family—by doing a lot of complaining and a lot of explaining.

For six years, the American public has gobbled up the transatlantic fairy tale of Henry Charles Albert David Windsor, a.k.a. the Duke of Sussex, a.k.a. Prince Harry. He was the ultimate victim, the enlightened noble hounded by a predatory British press, fleeing across an ocean to find sanctuary in California. But following last week’s conclusion of Harry’s botched court case against the publisher of the Daily Mail, that fairy tale has finally run out of road. In fact, it might go down in history as a cautionary tale about why the royal maxim is essential, the fable of the prince who complained too much.

Vance Serchuk, executive director and partner at the KKR Global Institute, and former senior national security adviser to Senator Joe Lieberman, was uniquely positioned to witness one of the most influential partnerships in modern American foreign policy: the “Three Amigos” of John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham. What made their partnership s…

In October 1997, my father, Kim Wyman, then 59 years old, made a pilgrimage to Prague, the city of his birth. He had spent his childhood there, under Nazi occupation, before emigrating to Australia in 1951 with his mother when he was 13. He hadn’t been back since.

The primary purpose of Kim’s trip was to find the gravestone of a father he had never known. His mother, Truda, had divorced Milan Janota when Kim was 2 years old. In 1948, the Communist Party took over Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet-controlled government had refused to let Milan emigrate. He’d had no contact with his son. When Kim traveled to Prague, he had little knowledge of his father’s life, beyond his name and the fact that he had died.

For a month, Kim scoured cemeteries in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia—the “Velvet Divorce” had taken place in 1993—but with no success. At one cemetery in Slovakia, he left his business card with the caretaker, a Mr. Labuda, printing his father’s name on the back. Then he returned home to Australia, certain he had failed in his quest.

A year and a half later, back in Slovakia, Labuda ran into a former classmate named Zorka Václavová. In the course of their conversation, Milan somehow came up. Astonished to hear his name, Václavová told Labuda that she was Milan’s niece. Equally astonishing, Labuda still had my father’s business card, which he handed over to her.

After this incredible twist of fate, Václavová reached out to Kim. My parents flew back to Slovakia, where they met her in the small town of Čadca, about 250 miles east of Prague. It was here, she told them, that Milan was buried.

This was not the only revelation. During the visit, Václavová handed Kim a small bundle of worn document cases, tied with string like an old parcel. Milan had left them with her in 1956, the year before his death, and she had held onto them for 43 years—waiting, she said, for his son to come to Slovakia to claim them.

“Your father hoped we would meet one day,” she told him.

Thirty-five years ago, when we moved from Spain to the U.S., my Catalan wife was appalled at the American appetite for many things, from massive serving sizes to Jerry Springer. The American instinct for superfluous consumption baffled her. “Why do people want six bathrooms?” she wondered. “It must be the fast food.”

One hunger she admired, however, was Americans’ desire for self-improvement. Bestseller lists, she noticed, always contained titles like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. People in the U.S. always seemed to have a personal project to correct or upgrade something about themself.

She was hardly the first to notice this about America. In his great 1835 survey, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that “the first thing which strikes a traveler in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original condition.” Most Americans weren’t trying to be powerful or famous, but they wanted a better life, and weren’t willing to wait around for some bureaucrat or noble to make it so.

American history can practically be charted by self-improvement classics, from Benjamin Franklin’s annual Poor Richard’s Almanack in the mid-18th century and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” in the 19th, to 20th-century bestsellers such as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952). In the modern era, journalists such as Malcolm Gladwell and distinguished academics like Adam Grant have joined the tradition, upgrading the genre to have an increased reliance on scholarly studies and academic research translated into terms that regular people can understand, and using that data to suggest habits they can adopt.