Did J.D. Vance Just Make His 2028 Pitch?

Did J.D. Vance just test the waters for a 2028 campaign? Plus, investors hold their breath before today's pivotal U.S. inflation report. We'll look back on 25 years of the global war on terror. The U.S. was better at eradicating groups around the world than it was at stabilizing the environments in which these groups took root. It's Friday, September 11th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Does J.D. Vance want to be president? I gotta say, it's pretty cool to hear a crowd that is this fired up chant your name. So go ahead and do it again. The vice president delivered a primetime speech at Republicans' midterm convention last night and met with chants of, 488, a reference to a potential campaign to succeed Donald Trump. He tried to change the topic, but didn't put those rumors to bed. Can we please, we gotta take care of business this November, then we'll worry about what comes next. Vance is a leading presidential contender, according to early polls, as is Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is notably absent from the GOP convention as he wraps up a diplomatic tour of South America. Pressed by reporters, Rubio said he doesn't know what the future holds, and has, quote, no plans. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom has signed over a dozen bills regulating addictive social media features and AI-driven chatbots used by kids. This is about actually addressing the problem, the scrolling, the algorithms. This is about addressing the substantive issue around the engineering. And that's what makes this truly a significant and consequential bill, and truly something we're proud to claim is a nation-leading bill in terms of addressing. social media harms to our kids 16 and younger. The legislation targets features such as autoplay and technology that relies on user information to decide which content to show. California is also leading the charge on regulating AI chatbots, with a new law requiring parental controls and suicide crisis protocols, expanding child privacy protections, and targeting AI-generated sexual depictions of minors. The push follows Meta's recent $18 billion legal settlement, over its platform's impact on teenagers, though tech companies maintain that delivering a tailored experience is part of what makes the platforms valuable for teens. It's CPI Day, with U.S. consumer inflation data due out at 8.30 a.m. Eastern. It's a final key data point ahead of next week's closely watched Fed meeting, the outcome of which remains uncertain. Analysts say that any indication that inflation has accelerated could be a green light for a rate hike. Global markets are largely in a holding pattern ahead of that report, with all eyes on the 10-year Treasury yield and whether it breaches 5%. Keep your eyes on WSJ.com throughout the day for our analysis on what the bond route means for the U.S. economy and stock market. Prediction Markets platform Calchi is looking to expand its push into perpetual futures. Known as PERPs, those contracts let traders bet around the clock and amass leverage on positions. Leverage that's heightened given their lack of an expiration date. Calchi and Coinbase this year won approval to launch PERPs tied to cryptocurrencies, but Calchi is going beyond that, launching futures tied to gold and silver yesterday. And as we report, eyeing PERPs tied to 60 popular ETFs and stocks. Journal reporter Alexander Osipovich has more. The idea is that you will be able to bet on stocks going up or down and in contrast to actually just holding the stock, you would be able to use these products to get leverage. So putting down a small amount of money and potentially amplifying your profits or losses if the stocks move in the direction that you're betting on. So for example, you can get a leveraged ETF on a particular stock that'll allow you to get 2x or 3x leverage. So the fans of these products are people who want to have new ways of trading things. People who have gotten accustomed to the crypto world and the sort of things you can do there would like to do them in stocks. The disadvantage and what the critics say is that these are very risky products and you will have a lot of people blown out of the water faster than they can blink, essentially, if there's a sharp move in the market. We are exclusively reporting that the Pentagon is considering lending roughly $5 billion to AI cloud computing startup FluidStick, potentially adding the U.S. military to a growing list of those financing the AI infrastructure boom. The loan would be the largest offered by the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, which was launched by the Biden administration and scaled up again last year. The program is aimed at financing companies with national security applications and has the authority to provide more than $200 billion in loans and loan guarantees over the coming years. And software maker Adobe says it's hit 1 billion monthly active users thanks to an expansion of what it calls its freemium AI offerings. The company behind such products is Photoshop. has been racing to stay ahead of AI-native competition, hoping that customers embrace its homegrown offerings instead of turning to other AI vendors offering their own photo and video generation tools. Speaking to investors, incoming CEO Anil Chakravarty expressed optimism that AI was growing Adobe's addressable user base, not shrinking it. We believe that the market is larger than ever in terms of people across whether they are individuals or small businesses or enterprises around the world, where they're really using creativity to express themselves and their ideas. And it's getting more and more important for people to just stand out. It's not clear if markets agree, though. Adobe stock pulled back overnight after executives attributed a slowdown in new recurring revenue in part to its freemium strategy. The company's shares are down more than 35 percent year to date. Coming up, national security correspondents Michael Gordon and David Cloud join me to mark 25 years since the September 11th attacks kicked off the global war on terror. We'll have that conversation after the break. Today marks 25 years since the September 11th attacks put global terrorism front and center on the minds of Americans. In the ensuing years, the U.S. and its allies attacked Afghanistan to root out al-Qaeda bases and later embarked on a broader war on terror that expanded to include a protracted war in Iraq, the American response to which quickly soured. All told, the two conflicts claimed more than 7,000 American lives and left more than 53,000 American troops injured. Journal national security correspondents Michael Gordon and David Cloud spent years covering both countries. And they're with me today as we look at how the situation in both has evolved. David, we have a big milestone actually coming up in just a few weeks with U.S. September 30th. Some, including the U.N.'s coordinator in the country, have called Iraq's transformation after years of war remarkable. You spent many years covering Afghanistan, meanwhile, where it has been five years since we saw a very chaotic American withdrawal and the return to power of the Taliban. I imagine the situation there can't be described in similarly positive terms. I mean, it's hard to use the word success in relation to Afghanistan. We were there for 20 years. We withdrew the U.S.-backed government collapsed and was replaced by the government that we went in to depose. And at the same time, right now, the small and not terribly threatening remnants of Al-Qaeda still remain there, as do two other major terror groups, ISIS, Khorasan, and Tariqi Taliban, both of which don't threaten the U.S. homeland, but they do threaten the region. Afghanistan itself is a kind of theocracy in which women aren't allowed to have education. So from that perspective, it's a counterterror perspective. We've protected ourselves from Afghanistan returning immediately to being a locus of outward-looking terror groups. One of the advantages that the U.S. has benefited from in the terrorist scene is that these terrorist groups or militant groups or extremists are not united and sometimes are at each other's throats. So sometimes they do a lot of the United States' dirty work for it simply by fighting among themselves and killing each other. And it is true in Iraq, a kind of very rough democracy has emerged. They have a competitive election system, a narrow but competitive election system dominated by Iran. There are very powerful militant groups there that aren't terror groups per se, but they do threaten the U.S. And as we've seen in recent months, have attacked U.S. allies in the region and have been attacked by the U.S. But, you know, how do you define success in the global war on terror? Well, one way to define it, I guess, a minimal goal would be depriving Al-Qaeda and other groups of achieving their objectives. I think the U.S. largely did that. But there's a broader definition is, did U.S. succeed in stabilizing these regions such that they could never again be a kind of a strategic vacuum in which terrorists might arise? And you can certainly argue that in the case of Afghanistan, which David knows better than I, the U.S. failed to create a politically sustainable outcome unless you think the outcome is Taliban rule. In Iraq, I would argue it was a mixed success. Yes, there is a system there and there is certainly a degree of stability, it's not everything the U.S. would have hoped. And Syria is still a work in progress. So the U.S. David, that would seem to feed into the blowback theory, would it not, that the U.S. may have taken certain actions for what seemed like obvious reasons at the time, but in the process bred a whole new generation of radicalized enemies. Is it too early to say if that has in fact come to bear? I don't think it's too early at all. In fact, I mean, the blowback, we certainly saw the blowback in the Islamic State from the policy of overthrowing Saddam. And we've seen the radicalized terrorists and militants strike in multiple places. So it's certainly an aspect of it. And I think we'll still be dealing with it for years to come, although maybe not at the same level that we saw in the decades immediately after 9-11. But let's step back and just look at what al-Qaeda's objective was when they launched the 9-11 attacks. The goal was to drive the Americans out of the Middle East, including the American military. Well, that certainly was a failure. Now, whether the American response to al-Qaeda has engendered other problems, I think is an important issue to consider. For example, just in the military sphere, which is what I try to focus on, there was a huge opportunity cost in terms of funds and training and assets that would be need to be developed to deter China. And also Russian aggression, what they came to call great power competition during the first Trump administration and the end of the Obama administration. So a lot of the assets that went into the war of terror, certainly some of those might have been better devoted to building up American deterrence in the Pacific. So that was just in the military sphere. So to say that the American policy had drawbacks, I think is an important point. But I think the al-Qaeda objectives were completely stymied. I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal National Security Correspondents Michael Gordon and David Cloud. Michael, David, thank you both. Thank you. My pleasure. And that's it for What's News for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff. And I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show. Otherwise, have a good weekend. And thanks for listening. © transcript Emily Beynon