Jed Friesen

French Gen. Michel Yakovleff saying that establishing an austere airbase inside Iran was crazy and that U.S. officials needed to "stop snorting cocaine" is now a TERRIBLE look for the French military. The U.S. did exactly that, just outside of Isfahan, FFS.

As the furious replies continue, I'm recognizing that this fits into one of my core themes. The world economy is based on US hegemony. As the US retreats from hegemon status, the damage will be worse for other nations than us. International trade depends on the US Navy 1/

Man created the aircraft…God created the pilot. One is replaceable, the other is not. We prioritize accordingly.

Some attribute the dismissal of U.S. generals by a television host—who now also serves as U.S. Secretary of Defense—to disagreements over a potential ground invasion of Iran. How difficult it must be, after decades of war crimes and bloodshed, for the generals to make a childlike minister understand that war with Iran is not a Hollywood movie.

Please bro please, Iran is really winning bro, the pilot rescue means the US is losing bro, it's Iranian 5D chess please bro, Chinese Professor Retard says we're losing bro didn't you see him on Tucker Carlson bro, please come on bro, what about the Epstein Files bro please

🚨“WE GOT HIM! My fellow Americans, over the past several hours, the United States Military pulled off one of the most daring Search and Rescue Operations in U.S. History, for one of our incredible Crew Office Members, who also happens to be a highly respected Colonel, and who I am thrilled to let you know is SAFE and SOUND!” - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸

This is developing legs, and is being misinterpreted. I hate it when US planes are shot down, but yesterday isn't the issue The issue is the vulnerability of the US military to technological obsolescence when military technology evolves. We have the best military in the world 1/

New information has come out in the last few hours about Iranian air defenses - and it looks like warfare may be evolving again. According to the Israelis (WSJ link later), Iran is moving from radar to multispectral cameras for air defense. Iran is also claiming new forms 1/

In your view, what is the best way to topple the regime? Or is it impossible? I’m not asking whether you think it’s a good idea. My question is a pragmatic one, not a strategic one or a normative one.

A lot of people, including some so-called conservatives, act like Trump is the reason things are the way they are, but that is completely backwards. Iran has been a terrorist state since 1979, illegal immigration has been a persistent problem for decades, the media has been corrupt and fraudulent since time immemorial, NATO has been freeloading on U.S. security guarantees since 1949, Europe’s energy problems started long before 2016, Ukraine and Russia have been at war since 2014, Xi has been running the CCP since 2012, and the list goes on. Trump did not create any of this, he just pointed it out, forced everyone to see it, and has been trying to confront it head on.

Recent events with Rwanda are a good example of the emerging multipolar world, and why most current people/governments are too weak & stupid to handle it Rwanda is a very small nation of 14M people, that is nonetheless a regional power because it has a kickass warrior culture 1/

Jim makes excellent points. But he’s missing the energy equation. MORGAN & MORGAN is the reason we can’t reopen the strait, not drones. Here’s the white elephant nobody in Washington will touch: Ukraine is losing. I don’t blame Jim for skating past this. It’s more politically dangerous for a journalist to say Ukraine’s strategy is broken than to misgender someone in SoHo. But the drone revolution everyone keeps celebrating? Look at what it’s actually accomplished. Iran spent years perfecting the Shahed. They tested it in Ukraine, with the Houthis in the Red Sea, against Gulf state targets. Thousands launched. Years of iteration. Then Iran got annihilated. The U.S. Army successfully copied the Shahed for its own use. It was effective in early strikes. Less so as the war progressed and defenses adapted. This is the pattern with every new weapon: diminishing returns against prepared adversaries. How many ships have been sunk by aerial drones? Zero. Ukraine’s had moderate success with explosive-laden jet skis, but only because Russian naval defenses were embarrassingly poor and commercial ships cannot shoot back. That’s a story about Russian incompetence, not drone supremacy. Here’s what Jim and most analysts get wrong: they measure drone effectiveness by kills. But kills are a terrible metric. Life in totalitarian states is cheap. Russia is feeding poorly trained convicts into the grinder. Killing them by the thousands hasn’t moved the strategic needle. If drones were assassinating Russia’s top weapons scientists or defense industry CEOs, that would matter. But attriting expendable infantry? That’s not winning. What could actually change the war is severing logistics. Destroying the Kerch Strait bridge. Ukraine has tried repeatedly and failed. Why? Because aerial munitions, unless they’re very large, simply don’t carry enough kinetic energy to drop a bridge. You can’t build that kind of weapon in a kitchen. When the tank appeared in 1917, people thought it would end warfare. It didn’t. Tanks turned out to be decisive only when advancing with infantry, artillery, and air cover. Drones are following the same arc: lethal in combination, insufficient alone. There are bright spots. A large drone swarm penetrated deep into Russia and damaged bombers at Engels, forcing dispersal of strategic aviation assets. Small drones recently hit highly flammable oil and gas storage in Russia. They can be smuggled, precisely guided by satellite, and aimed at petrochemical facilities or even LNG carriers at close range. But over distance? The Shahed has terrorized civilians and struck undefended targets. Against anything with real air defense, it fails. Look at Israel’s layered system. The drones aren’t getting through. Now here’s the deeper problem, and it’s one Americans don’t want to hear. Drive anywhere in this country. What’s the single most recurring image you see? MORGAN & MORGAN 1/2

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.

Good post. Even if you hate Trump there is literally zero reason to think it would be good for the psychotic Iranian regime to have nukes