‘No imminent threat’
Recently: How did a criminal industry worth tens of billions entrench itself in Cambodia? Jacob Sims on the nexus of organized crime and autocracy in Southeast Asia.
Today: The American president’s counterterrorism director has left his post, calling the Iran war a lie manufactured by Israel. … Pakistan says it struck military installations in Kabul; Afghanistan says it was a hospital full of patients. … &c.
From the weekend despatch: As millions watch fake images of the war in Iran, many are dismissing real footage as fake, while the White House keeps posting clips from Grand Theft Auto and cheat codes. What’s going on?
For members: Spring isn’t winning everywhere.
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A letter to the president
On Tuesday morning, Joe Kent, the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center—a retired Green Beret, Gold Star spouse, 11-combat-tour Army Special Forces veteran, and one of the most credentialed MAGA loyalists in the federal government—posted his resignation letter on X. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” he wrote, “and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” He accused Israel of using “the same tactics” it deployed to draw Washington into Iraq. He invoked his first wife, Shannon Kent, a Navy cryptologist killed in Syria in 2019, in a war he called “manufactured by Israel.” Then he told the president he could “reverse course” or “allow us to slip further toward decline and chaos.”
Kent is the first senior Trump administration official to break with the war—and, notably, a prominent member of his party’s America First wing, the faction that, until June 2025, had President Donald Trump’s ear on keeping the country out of Middle Eastern conflicts. The White House’s response was immediate—and vicious: One adviser called Kent a “crazed egomaniac”; Trump called him “very weak on security”; and the press secretary called his claims about Israeli influence “insulting and laughable.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—Kent’s boss, herself a longtime opponent of Middle Eastern wars—said only that the president “is responsible for determining what is and is not an imminent threat.” The U.S. is now at war with no counterterrorism director. And Trump’s circle will be bracing for what comes next—with three sources telling Axios they expect Tucker Carlson, the conservative broadcaster and one of the war’s most vocal critics on the right, to interview Kent soon.
Meanwhile
- De facto, de mortuis. Israel has killed Ali Larijani, the secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who’d been running the country since the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Feb. 28—despite Mojtaba Khamenei’s official succession. Iran confirmed the death on Tuesday, along with that of Larijani’s son Morteza. Israel also killed the Basij paramilitary commander Gholamreza Soleimani. Larijani—a former nuclear negotiator and parliament speaker—had walked in a pro-Palestinian rally in Tehran as recently as on Friday. He was 67.
- Omid, after dark. A Pakistani airstrike hit a 2,000-bed drug rehabilitation center in the Afghan capital late on Monday, killing at least 408 people and injuring 265, according to Afghanistan’s Taliban government. Roughly 3,000 patients were inside at the time. Pakistan denied targeting the hospital, saying it struck military installations. The Norwegian Refugee Council has confirmed large civilian casualties. The Pakistan-Afghanistan conflict is now in its third week.
- A cup overturned. Cuba’s grid collapsed again on Monday—third time in four months, no oil shipment in three—while Donald Trump mused about “taking” the country. … 2026 has seen the deadliest start to any year for Mediterranean crossings: 682 confirmed missing as of March 16, the real toll almost certainly higher. … Ecuador has deployed 75,000 troops and a nightly curfew in a U.S.-backed offensive against drug traffickers. … Arctic sea ice has hit a record daily low. … & African football’s governing body has overturned the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final, declaring Morocco the winners by forfeit after Senegal’s players had refused to play.
The best tech opportunities are
happening in markets
everyone thinks are ridiculous
Most tech newsletters tell you what happened. The Hustle shows you what’s possible. Billionaires buying mountains. Pickleball entrepreneurs building empires. An orange-drink scandal that became a marketing masterclass. These aren’t just entertaining (though they absolutely are). They’re case studies in spotting gaps, thinking differently, and finding profitable chaos in unexpected places. Business as unusual, delivered in five minutes flat.
Seeing things
The war on screen
An AI-generated video showing Iranian missiles striking Tel Aviv appeared in more than 300 social media posts over the past two weeks, accumulating tens of millions of views. The skyline shudders; buildings erupt. An Israeli flag hangs in the foreground—a detail the AI tools insert automatically when prompted for “missile strike on Israel.” Of course, the attack never happened. Another fabricated video showed captured American special forces held at gunpoint by Iranian troops. Another depicted the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln on fire—footage Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps themselves initially cited as evidence of a successful strike. (The Lincoln was fine.) The New York Times has catalogued more than 110 unique AI-generated images and videos about the war in two weeks. BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh says this conflict may have broken the record for viral AI-generated content during wartime.
Meanwhile, as we saw last week, the White House has been splicing real strike footage with Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and SpongeBob SquarePants—its communications director tweeting video-game cheat codes for unlimited ammunition. All while the administration still hasn’t entirely defined what victory looks like.
Genuine footage, it turns out, looks “wrong.” Real video of missile strikes tends to be distant, shaky, shot at night—missiles as bright specks, explosions as plumes of smoke. The AI versions look like cinema: mushroom clouds, sonic booms rippling across cities, hypersonic missiles trailing light. The fabricated war is more vivid, more emotionally legible, more shareable than the actual one. And authentic footage of an Israeli rocket hitting a busy Tehran street—cars sent flying—circulated online and was widely dismissed as AI-generated. The fakes aren’t just building confusion about the conflict. They’re eroding your capacity to trust mediated information about anything.
This is a war whose objectives have multiplied by the week. The official social-media accounts of those prosecuting it have been treating killing as content. And its visual record is now the most contested of any war, ever.
Weather report
The battle between seasons
51.1655° N, 71.4272° E
From the despatch: Spring isn’t winning everywhere …
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New music
‘Crumbs’
Girl Scout are an energetic power-pop band from Stockholm, and this is their newest single ahead of their newest album, Brink—out March 20. The track is a dispatch from the road—about the freeloaders and energy vampires they’ve encountered on tour. “You bleed me dry and leave me with crumbs,” Emma Jansson wails on the chorus.
