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| By The Free Press |
It’s Wednesday, June 18. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Everything you need to know about Iran’s nuclear program; Garry Kasparov on why Israel sees the world as it is; Jay Solomon on the potentially “medieval” fight for Fordow; and more on the Iran war. Plus: Breaking History is back, Kat Rosenfield on “Materialists,” and much more.
But first: All eyes on Trump.
On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump and his top advisers met in the Situation Room. A U.S. strike against Iran is on the table, officials said. And Trump’s social media posts showed no indication that the president was looking to de-escalate. “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” he said on Truth Social.
Has the president made up his mind? As Eli Lake reported on Monday, “Trump is the decider”—and he’s working with a very small team on perhaps the biggest foreign policy call of his presidency. But that hasn’t prevented furious fights outside the White House—on Capitol Hill and in MAGA World—over the question of whether the U.S. should intervene directly in the conflict. Those fights are the subject of our first two stories today.
In his latest report from Washington, Gabe Kaminsky lifts the curtain on the MAGA civil war over Iran. He talks to White House officials and some of the most powerful influencers in the MAGA ecosystem about the biggest divide on the right. Oh, and he gets a text from Tucker Carlson.
Peter Savodnik reports on the strange coalitions forming on the Hill because of the war. He talks to lawmakers attempting to block Trump from acting without congressional approval, and finds a group of progressive anti-Zionists, MAGA Republicans, and libertarians unified in their opposition to U.S. involvement.
—Oliver Wiseman
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Tune In: Everything You Need to Know About Iran’s Nuclear Program
It’s hard to keep up with the onslaught of information coming out about the Iran war. That is doubly true of the details of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Israel has claimed that Iran was on the cusp of weaponization and has enough enriched uranium to produce nine bombs or more. Is that true? And if it is, how far has that program been set back? Most urgently, is it possible for Israel to destroy the nuclear weapons program on its own? Or will America have to get involved?
These are the kinds of questions physicist and nuclear weapons expert David Albright will be answering on a Free Press livestream later this morning. No one is more qualified to tackle these issues than David, a former IAEA inspector and founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. (Read more about him in this piece published by our friends at Tablet.)
Join Albright at 10:00 a.m. ET today with our own Eli Lake. Bring all your questions about Natanz, Fordow, B-2s, and more.
This livestream is available to paying subscribers only. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, click below to become one. You won’t want to miss it.
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Will Destroying Iran’s Nuclear Program Require a ‘Medieval Battle’? | ||||||
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Garry Kasparov: Israel Won’t Fall for the Illusion of Stability | ||||||
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Can Any Woman Resist a Rich Husband? | ||||||
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This Week on Breaking History: Buckley, Trump, and the Death of Conservative Civility
Over 40 years ago, William F. Buckley created the intellectual framework for the American conservative movement that fueled the Reagan revolution. But what happened to the Reaganite movement in Trump’s Republican Party? Has it been definitively left behind? On the latest episode of Breaking History, Eli Lake takes a deep dive into the rich life of Buckley, and looks at how today’s conservatives have both supplanted and emulated the movement that Buckley helped to build.
