Sunday, March 1, 2026 · 65 newsletters

America Goes to War with Iran

foreign-policy · politics · markets · ai · china · business · culture

Published on Sunday, March 1, 2026.

Pulled from 69 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. One story swallowed the Saturday inbox. The U.S. and Israel launched a "major combat operation" against Iran in the dead of night, Trump declared regime change as the objective, and almost every political and foreign-policy writer dropped what they were doing to react. The rest of the day, the SCOTUS tariff ruling, Block's 40% layoff, and the Paramount/Warner deal, would have led on any other Saturday. Today they're aftershocks.

The Big Foreign Policy Story: "Operation Epic Fury" and a Regime-Change War Without Congress

Americans woke up to the news that overnight, the U.S. joined Israel in striking Iran in what Trump branded "major combat operations." News Items by John Ellis compiled the early reporting from NYT, Times of Israel, Haaretz, and Jerusalem Post: dozens of U.S. strikes from carriers and Middle East bases, Tehran's presidential complex hit, blasts in Isfahan and Karaj, sirens across Israel, and a U.S. official saying the campaign could "last several days." The Bulwark framed the three open questions: why now, what's the goal, and where does this end. Per Jim Swift's Overtime issue, no one inside or outside the administration can answer the second.

The case for the war makes no sense. Vox's Zack Beauchamp called it "the scary incoherence at the heart of Trump's latest, biggest war," and Joshua Keating asked what "America First" even means anymore. Trump's stated goals contradict each other: he says he obliterated Iran's nuclear program in last June's Operation Midnight Hammer, then says they're days from a bomb, then says the actual goal is "freedom for the Iranian people." Dan Pfeiffer at The Message Box was blunt: "I can't emphasize the stupidity and danger of launching a regime change war in Iran enough." There is no imminent threat, no AUMF, and per Pfeiffer's reading, no plan for what comes next.

The Article I problem. Edwin Eisendrath in Lincoln Square wrote the most pointed legal piece of the day: Trump signed the FY26 Defense Authorization in December 2025, which repealed the 1991 and 2002 AUMFs. The only remaining authorization is the post-9/11 counterterrorism one, which doesn't apply. Trump just initiated a war Congress did not declare. Eisendrath: "This morning, America is no longer a democratic republic governed by the rule of law. It is a tyranny governed by a man." Matt at WTF Just Happened Today noted that Democrats are already moving to force votes on War Powers resolutions.

Regime change, the Venezuela template. SpyTalk reported the administration's actual operating theory: replicate the January Venezuela operation, which lopped off the unpopular clerical leadership while inviting the next layer of officials (in this case the IRGC) to defect with immunity. Skeptics inside the intelligence community told SpyTalk that Iran is not Venezuela, that the protest movement won't be invited into any successor government, and that no one has thought through "missing" nuclear material if the regime collapses. Foreign Affairs editor Dan Kurtz-Phelan curated five essential reads for the moment, including Behnam Ben Taleblu on what regime change would actually require, Nate Swanson (formerly on Trump's Iran negotiating team) on why Iran will escalate, and Sanam Vakil and Alex Vatanka on Iran's divided opposition.

The political read. Rick Wilson named it "Operation Epstein Fury," a one-line dismissal of the cover-story timing. Anand Giridharadas at The Ink led his Weekend Reads with a Center for American Progress piece arguing the saber-rattling has actually made future diplomacy harder and made Iran's leadership more, not less, likely to view concessions as fatal weakness. Gov Brief Today put the broader pattern in one sentence: 59 days into 2026, the U.S. is at war with a third country, having already kidnapped Venezuela's president in January, bombed Syria all winter, and floated a "friendly takeover" of Cuba on Friday morning, hours before the bombs hit Tehran. Lincoln Square's breaking coverage tallied it as Trump's eighth military intervention in just over a year. Trump's January 2025 inaugural promise, that his presidency would be measured by "the wars we never get into," has aged with rare velocity.

On the ground in New York. Gothamist led with the NYPD and state police boosting patrols on what they're calling routine precaution. Lincoln Square's interview with retired Navy Commander Bobby Jones, who hosted Anchor Watch and had been stationed at the Bahrain base Iran retaliated against, called the entire premise a Trump grudge against an Obama-negotiated deal that he then walked away from in his first term. Iran already returned fire on U.S. bases in Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE, and reportedly moved to close the Strait of Hormuz.

The Other Story: SCOTUS Killed the Tariffs, Trump Pivoted Within Days

This would have been the lead any other weekend. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources v. Trump that the administration's use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs was illegal. The Flip Side's Week in Review ran the full SCOTUSblog opinion alongside takes from both sides. Matt Klein at The Overshoot zoomed in on the strange reasoning (the Court decided the case on the meaning of "regulate," not on whether the underlying emergency was real) and on Trump's immediate pivot to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which Adam Tooze and others say is also illegal because the 1974 conditions ("fundamental international payments problems," large balance-of-payments deficits, imminent currency depreciation) don't exist in 2026.

China is watching. Trivium China called the SCOTUS ruling "Chinamaxxing or Chinataxxing": the headline news is good for Beijing (effective tariff rate drops), but Washington has alternative tools, USTR Jamieson Greer hinted at Section 301 duties, and a Trump trip to China is still booked for late March or early April. The math: even with a 15% flat tariff under the 1974 Act, China's blended rate will be lower than under IEEPA's 34% Liberation Day tariffs plus the 20% fentanyl surcharge. Whether that holds depends on Section 301 and on whatever Trump decides to do post-Iran.

AI & Business: Block Cuts 40%, and the AI Layoff Narrative Cracks Open

Om Malik wrote the sharpest piece of the day on it. Jack Dorsey laid off about 4,200 people, more than 40% of Block (Square + Cash App + Tidal), citing AI. The stock jumped 22 to 24 percent. Om's read: Wall Street wasn't rewarding the AI narrative. It was rewarding the cut. Block's "AI transformation" memo was undercut hours later when Dorsey admitted on X that the actual problem was that he had over-hired and "built 2 separate company structures (Square & Cash App) rather than 1." Om calls this "narrative substitution," AI as cover for ZIRP-era operational rot. He links to the Oxford Economics report that finds the evidence for an AI-driven labor shakeup is "patchy," and to Fortune's coverage of Sam Altman confirming the "AI washing" pattern. Contrary Research ran both sides: Balaji Srinivasan called Block the "first AI cut" while Elad Gil argued "most AI productivity is still around the bend" and the AI story is PR cover for COVID-era overstaffing.

The political resonance. Lincoln Square's Lincoln Logue opened with the contrast that's now driving a lot of populist energy: a C-SPAN caller saying she has $65/month for food after her SNAP cut, on disability, having lost 28 pounds she couldn't afford to lose. And then Dorsey cuts 4,000 people, gets a 24% stock pop, and the market calls it discipline. "Widespread suffering at the bottom, unchecked excess at the top," in Evan Fields' phrasing. Worth flagging: this is the same week Trump went to war in Iran. The optical sequence matters.

Other AI threads in the inbox. Runtime on AWS and OpenAI getting stateful (AWS launched a service for running agents built with OpenAI, fresh off Amazon's planned $50B OpenAI investment) and ServiceNow shipping an agent for running agents. Alex Brogan at Faster Than Normal made the underreported argument that AI's quiet bottleneck is post-training talent, and Latin America has quietly built a world-class pipeline for it. Trung Phan at SatPost covered Citrini's viral AI doomer piece (and the rebuttals) and Anthropic's standoff with the Department of War.

Media: Paramount Wins Warner Bros, Netflix Takes a $2.8B Termination Fee

Trung Phan at SatPost led with the Paramount/Ellison camp officially outbidding Netflix for Warner Bros in a $110B deal, $82B for the studio plus $30B in assumed debt. Combined net debt: $70B. The new empire holds CNN, CBS News, March Madness, the UFC, plus Star Trek, Mission Impossible, SpongeBob, South Park, Top Gun, the Sheridan-verse, the DC Universe, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, and HBO. Hollywood agents are now freaking out about the cost-cutting "synergies" the deal demands. Phan's read: David Zaslav is the actual winner. Jaskaran at The Social Juice flagged the parallel agency story, WPP abandoning the holding-company model in a major strategic overhaul, and Omnicom planning $1B in labor cost cuts while saying talent is "the differentiator."

Markets: Paul Krugman Talks to Barry Ritholtz About the AI Trade

Paul Krugman recorded Wednesday and published Saturday, mid-AI selloff. Ritholtz, civilized money manager and author of How Not to Invest, walked through the Citrini Research piece that triggered a wild week in markets, the history of Malthusian/Luddite tech-disruption fears, and why the labor-force composition change always matters more than the panic over it. The piece is also a sane reset on prediction markets, on Cory Doctorow's "Enshittification," and on what an investor should actually pay attention to right now. Krugman opens with the line of the week: "Yeah, but some of the Epstein class also grew up lower class. That didn't stop them from developing horrific tastes."

The other macro item. 1440 carried Pakistan declaring "open war" against Afghanistan's Taliban government, with Pakistan's roughly 170-warhead arsenal in the background and India recently warming to the Taliban. Easy to miss in the Iran shadow, hard to overstate.

VC & Venture

Last Money In ran the LP-frustration piece every founder should read: even Founders Fund, with its reported ~3x+ across the first five funds, has returned essentially zero DPI on any vintage since roughly 2014. The 2017 vintage is on a near-decade hold. "You can't deposit a markup." David Cummings added the angel-side companion: he met a man at a conference who had made 15 angel investments through reputable groups, properly diversified, and watched all of them go to zero. Cummings' rules: invest with a local fund first, only follow experienced leads, stick to areas where you have unique expertise, and beware the "leftovers law" (the deal already passed by everyone else with pattern recognition).

Culture & Saturday Grace Notes

Why Is This Interesting? did its weekend round-up: a Steve Jobs Archive "Letters to a Young Creator" project featuring Jony Ive, Mickey Drexler, Bob Iger, and Cindy Sherman; British GQ on Texas's Rolex University (Harvard-level admit rate); a New Scientist piece on young-donor stem cell infusions easing frailty; archaeologists finding elephant bones that may confirm Hannibal's war elephants in Spain. PUNCH made the case for the Hot Penicillin (hot apple cider, Scotch, honey, lemon, ginger beer) as the March cocktail. Yotam Ottolenghi wrote a quietly excellent piece from the road about pre-show performance anxiety, opening the door to audience confessions of cooking shame ("Mum tied a Peking duck to the ceiling fan to speed-dry it"), and how that vulnerability resets the room. Scott Clary had the business-philosophy line of the day, retelling Jerry Yang's 2008 refusal of Microsoft's $44.6B Yahoo bid: "Held one dollar tighter than the people running the company alongside him. That pattern looks like a founder who experienced every offer as something being taken from him rather than something being given. He had data and a vision and a case for independence. It all felt rational. It was emotional, dressed up in numbers." Eight years later, Yahoo sold to Verizon for $4.83B. Michael Girdley ran the companion piece on "deal fever" via Gap's catastrophic Kanye partnership: before signing, write down the three most likely ways the deal blows up. If you can't do the exercise, you have deal fever.

Black History Month Closes With a Warning, Not a Celebration

Shaniqua McClendon at Crooked Media wrote the month-closing essay worth reading: Black history is not a celebration to be filed safely in the past, it's "a guide and a warning for the future," especially in a week when new efforts to authorize racial and gender discrimination in voting are advancing in Congress and the Supreme Court. Reconstruction collapsed because federal enforcement waned. Bloody Sunday forced the 1965 VRA. The lesson, McClendon argues, is that voting rights have never been a gift, only a thing extracted under pressure. Dan Pfeiffer's mailbag sat with the harder companion question: why didn't the 2024 "democracy is on the ballot" message land? His answer is honest, swing voters either don't see the threats or don't rank democracy as a top-three issue, and Democrats need a way to make abstraction concrete (ICE in local communities is one).

NYC

Gothamist had a busy Saturday outside the Iran beat: Luigi Mangione avoided the federal death penalty after DOJ declined to appeal, hundreds of protesters showed up at a planned ICE detention facility in NJ that's faced bipartisan opposition for weeks, and a long feature on Shelter, the legendary 35-year-old NYC dance party, with an interview with DJ Timmy Regisford. The Met pushed out a Ken Burns conversation timed to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, plus a Year of the Horse Chinese calligraphy primer.

China & Tech

Tech Buzz China ran a long, technical piece on China's position in the orbital compute stack: where the real bottlenecks are (lift, power, radiation hardening) and which Chinese names (Xiamen Changelight, Fudan Microelectronics, China Satcom) sit on the value chain that Sam Altman recently dismissed in public. A piece worth flagging if you're trying to triangulate where the next decade of compute infrastructure actually gets built.

Three Takeaways for You

The U.S. is now in a war of choice, launched without Congress, with no defined endpoint, no coherent stated rationale, and no plan for the day after the regime falls. Almost every political writer of every persuasion across the inbox today (Bulwark, Lincoln Square, Message Box, The Ink, Vox, Crooked, Gov Brief, SpyTalk, Rick Wilson) converged on the same uneasy read: this is not 2003 Iraq, this is worse, because there isn't even a fig-leaf AUMF this time. Track the War Powers vote next week, that's the moment Democrats and a handful of Republicans either start drawing a line or don't.

The Block layoff is the most important business story of the week if you care about how the AI labor narrative actually works. The "first AI cut" framing is a 22% stock pop wearing a transformation memo. Once the CEO admits on X that the real cause was COVID-era overhiring and a structural mistake, the "AI replaced 4,000 workers" story collapses, and what's left is Wall Street rewarding discipline. Expect more of this, and expect the AI cover story to keep getting cited even when, as Oxford Economics shows, the productivity evidence is "patchy."

If you only read three pieces today, I'd suggest: Edwin Eisendrath's "While We Slept, Donald Trump Launched a War" on the AUMF and constitutional stakes, Om Malik's "Block & Tackle: Job Cuts & the AI Narrative" on narrative substitution and "AI washing," and Dan Pfeiffer's "Trump's Dumb War Is a Test Democrats Must Not Fail" for the political stakes of how the opposition responds in the next 72 hours.