KUIDAORE

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.

昨夜､娘から衝撃的な発言があり急遽家族会議をしました…。 娘曰く「日本人に見られるのが恥ずかしい…」と…。 なぜなのか問いましたら「歴史の授業で南京大虐殺を知った」と。 娘はインターナショナルスクールですので､私は「それは日本人の先生から教わったの？」と訊きました。 すると､「IGCSEのカリキュラムの中でイギリス人の先生から教わった」と…。 ※IGCSE（Cambridge IGCSE）とは、14〜16歳（日本の中学〜高校1年）を対象とした世界的に認められた中等教育修了資格です。 イギリスが中心で､この後にIBやAPなどに進みます。 家内が「そんなこと､していないのよ！」と言いますと､「ママやパパの頃は事実が分からなかったのよ」と… 私から､「1985年に南京大虐殺記念館が中国でオープンするまでは､南京事件って言って中国も騒いでいなかったんだよ」と言っても「それは日本の視点で､世界からは違うよ」と…。 衝撃を受けました私は､添付の記事（日本のメディアではなくNYタイムズ）を見せて､冷静に虐殺する合理的なメリットがないことや､中国のプロパガンダの特性などを話しました。 蒋介石の行動や､南京での日本軍と現地の方のスナップ写真なども見せました。 娘はまだ半信半疑のようです。 私が心配しているのは､上記の内容を海外の教育プログラムに入っていること…。何とかできないか模索中です。