The Council on Foreign Relations

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is pleased to welcome Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran to the David Rockefeller Studies Program, CFR’s think tank. He will join CFR on Monday, July 13, as Philip D. Reed chair in science and technology, senior fellow, and director of the Energy Security and Climate Change program.

Original intent. The term pops up frequently in debates over how to interpret the U.S. Constitution. At its core, the concept of original intent holds that constitutional interpretation should be guided (or bound) by what the framers envisioned when they wrote the document in 1787. But what happens to original intent when the framers disagree on how to interpret their handiwork? It’s not an academic question. Just look at the so-called Pacificus-Helvidius debate, which began 233 years ago today.

Sam Vigersky served as the lead U.S. humanitarian negotiator at the United Nations from 2019 to 2024. While U.S. and Iranian negotiators circle the thorniest issues in Switzerland—Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, Tehran’s regional proxies, and long-term access through the Strait of Hormuz—the Trump administration has quietly seized on something it sees as win-win: releasing frozen Iranian money to buy American food under a humanitarian relief framing.

Seventy-six years ago today, President Harry Truman the U.S. military to intervene in the Korean War. Two days earlier, the North Korean People’s Army crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. Within hours of Truman’s announcement, North Korea would capture the capital city of Seoul. Truman’s decision, and the resulting war, had geopolitical consequences that are still felt to this day. The decision was equally momentous for its impact on America’s constitutional practice.

This newsletter was written without any assistance from the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model, Anthropic’s “Claude Fable 5”—not that I had any choice in the matter. Greetings from Silicon Valley, where all the talk is about Mythos and the relationship between regulation and innovation.

NEW YORK—In 1980, Douglas Hofstadter, an obscure young computer science professor at Indiana University, won a Pulitzer Prize for his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Equal parts brain-straining, witty, and epiphanic, “GEB”—as its devotees call it—leveraged math, art, and music to illuminate a remarkable feature of reality. Though systems may appear solid and self-sustaining, they also may contain contradictions that they can never resolve from within.

Being president is a tough job. Your every mistake is relentlessly dissected and replayed. Even when you get it right, people sometimes insist you got it wrong. Consider John F. Kennedy. On June 26, 1963, he gave a rousing speech to several hundred thousand cheering West Berliners. Yet that speech is misremembered by many people more than a half century later for a mistake he did not make. JFK’s visit to West Berlin had immense symbolism. The city was the focal point of Cold War rivalry.

Elliott Abrams served as deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor in the George W. Bush administration, where he supervised U.S. policy in the Middle East, and as Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela in the Donald Trump administration. The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the United States and Iran has left Israel on the sidelines.

Sam Vigersky led USAID Disaster Assistance Response Teams from 2015 to 2016 and previously served as senior humanitarian advisor to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Massive back-to-back earthquakes rocked northern Venezuela in the early evening on June 24. The first struck at 6:04 p.m. local time with a magnitude of 7.2, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Although the Strait of Hormuz, which had been closed to shipping since late February, appears to be slowly reopening as part of a U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement, concerns persist about the security of another regional maritime choke point: the Red Sea.