Tony Allwright

Food for thought. Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed. In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines. In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive. A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent. By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right. In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

French President Macron: “Europe is an extremely attractive continent. For months I’ve been saying this, and thanks to our American friends, I now have an unprecedented selling point: We are predictable.”

Israel today

Here we have an Irish politician saying that Israel is killing *millions* of people. Not only is she not fact-checked on air, TonightVMTV has written her wildly false assertion here as if it is true. This is the level of bias and disinformation we’re talking about in Irish media. It is impossible to overstate it.

BREAKING: Enoch Burke’s mother and sister arrested and jailed Martina and Ammi Burke were arrested by Gardaí today at Castlerea Prison after visiting jailed schoolteacher Enoch Burke, their son and brother. Judge Brian Cregan sentenced them to two weeks in prison after they spoke out against his lies and unlawful actions in the case of Enoch Burke. Martina and Ammi Burke had been teaching in Castlebar this morning before travelling to Castlerea for their scheduled visit at 2.15pm. As they left the prison after concluding the visit, Gardaí were waiting outside to arrest them. Lies have been told from the bench since September 2022 when Enoch Burke was first taken from his teaching post at Wilson’s Hospital School and thrown into a jail cell. He refused to call a student by a new name and the “they” pronoun. He was subsequently suspended and has now spent over 600 days in prison. Ireland’s church leaders have maintained a treacherous silence on this issue. Archbishops Eamon Martin and John McDowell speak frequently about battlefields far away - Gaza, Ukraine, the Middle East - but are silent on the battlefields in the schools of Ireland, on their own doorstep. Children in the classroom are being educated in every form of sexual perversion. Martina and Ammi Burke have now been sent to Mountjoy Women’s Prison because they refused to be silent in the face of gross injustice from the bench. Parents, rise up and speak out for your sons and your daughters.