DRBiGuy1
5.5K posts
Sens. Shaheen (D) & Tillis (R) pan Trump’s NATO threats: “Any President that contemplates attempting to withdraw from NATO is not only fulfilling Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping’s greatest dreams but would be undermining America’s own national security interests.”
JUST IN: 🇮🇷🇪🇺 Iran says any European country is welcome to make a deal to transit through Hormuz Strait.
Let’s be real here. Europe has spent decades freeloading on American security. Even now, with every NATO member finally hitting the 2% GDP target in 2025. But beyond the financial contributions, the real rupture is philosophical and the Iran crisis has shown a spotlight on it. Europe worships process. Endless committees, consultations, and “predictability.” Macron actually calls it a virtue. For Trump, this is paralysis as his style is to articulate a threat, fix a target, and act. The Americans are men of conviction and purpose. Europe on the other hand lives by bureaucratic liturgy and in high-minded abstractions. Sure, Americans might make mistakes when acting. But Europe never considers what the costs of not acting actually are. Just look at how their nations are doing on various fronts, especially on the border crisis, and you see the same cancerous rot that undergirds their foreign policy approach play out domestically. It's the same problem on a different scale. Iran is currently holding the Strait of Hormuz hostage, choking 20% of global oil and spiking prices past $100 a barrel. Meanwhile, the regime is bleeding from strikes, its nuclear ambitions are still alive despite degraded capability, and its proxies are firing missiles at allies and oil tankers. If this isn’t a clear and present danger to the global economy - of which Europe is a part - then I don’t know what is. Yet when Washington asked to use European bases to finish the job - bases the US has defended for generations, the response was hesitation and hand-wringing. The US did strike from RAF Fairford, but only after warnings that British soil could become a “legitimate target.” If you cannot agree that a theocratic regime with eschatological ambitions who have shown no restraint in hitting out at Gulf countries and threatening the world’s energy jugular is an enemy worth confronting, then what, exactly, are we allies about? Europe loves to preen about being tough on Russia. They issue condemnations and speeches and slap sanctions that hardly work to cripple the Russian economy. Now here was a chance to do something concrete: let the Americans use the bases they already pay for, help clear the Strait, and actually degrade the Iranian war machine that arms Moscow’s proxies. Turmp didn’t ask for boots on the ground or any kind of more offensive action. All he wanted was permission to operate from the infrastructure America has underwritten for decades. They couldn’t even manage that. So can you blame the Americans for seeing NATO for what it is? A paper-tiger alliance that expects Washington to bleed and pay while Brussels and London convenes and deliberates. If Europe refuses to treat Iran as the threat it is while happily letting American power keep the Strait open and the lights on, then the alliance is already dead. Trump is simply stating the obvious and the Americans are becoming very reluctant to subsidize the European delusion any longer.
I’m confused. President Trump says the war is 2/3 weeks from being over and the main goal of preventing Iran from developing a nuke has been achieved. Yet they still have all their enriched uranium? 🤔
BREAKING: Britain has fewer than 50 Storm Shadow cruise missiles left. The stockpile that once exceeded 200 was drained over two years of transfers to Ukraine to help Kyiv strike Russian targets deep behind the front line. The missiles worked. They hit command posts and ammunition depots and naval headquarters across occupied Ukraine and Crimea. They helped Ukraine survive. And now Britain has almost none left for itself, during a war being launched from its own airfields against a country that just hit a British oil facility with drones. Brimstone anti-armour missiles sit at 25 to 35 percent of pre-war stocks. Paveway IV precision-guided bombs, the same weapon the RAF used over Libya and Syria, are at 30 to 40 percent. The National Audit Office estimates that Britain can sustain high-intensity combat operations for three to six weeks before requiring American resupply. Three to six weeks. The Iran war is already in its fifth week. If Britain were fighting it rather than hosting it, the cupboard would already be empty. The Army is 10,000 soldiers below target. Type 45 destroyers suffer chronic propulsion failures requiring six to twelve months of repair. The F-35 and Typhoon fleet operates at 60 to 70 percent availability. The industrial base that would replenish stocks runs on rare-earth magnets manufactured in China, the same China that controls 90 percent of the permanent magnets in every guided missile Britain would need to fire and is currently being asked to broker the peace. Any direct involvement beyond basing would require 8 to 15 billion pounds in emergency supplemental spending. National debt exceeds 100 percent of GDP. There is no majority in Parliament for funding a war the Prime Minister says is not Britain’s, fought with weapons Britain does not have, replenished by supply chains controlled by a country Britain needs to broker the ceasefire. This is why Starmer says “not our war.” Not because of principle. Not because of legality, although his own advisors have told him the strikes are legally questionable. Not because of Iraq, although the ghost of Blair hangs over every press conference. Because of arithmetic. Britain gave its missiles to Ukraine. It gave its bases to America. It gave its diplomatic capital to a 35-nation meeting about reopening Hormuz “after the fighting stops.” And it has nothing left to give except words, which cost nothing and accomplish less. Trump knows this. He mocked the Royal Navy in the Telegraph interview. He dismissed Starmer’s windmills. He called NATO a “paper tiger” because the paper is literal: Britain’s defence capability exists on paper. On the tarmac and in the magazines and in the recruitment offices, the numbers tell a different story. The story says that one of the six largest economies on earth, the country that once ruled a quarter of the planet, cannot sustain a shooting war for longer than six weeks without calling Washington for resupply. The bases are full. The aircraft are American. The missiles are gone. The debt is real. And the Prime Minister stands at the podium and says this is not our war while the war takes off from our runways carrying weapons we could not replace if we tried. Britain is not refusing to fight. Britain cannot fight. The doctrine is not a choice. It is an inventory report. And the inventory says zero. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
