Steve Foot

The utopia that lied. Here's the truth...

To recap: 1. The EU Council blocked $40 billion to Hungary because it wouldn't give NGOs control over its courts. 2. The EU Court blocked Hungary from passing a FARA law to see whether NGOs there were funded by the EU. 3. The EU Council announced it would centralize voting power on EU accession to block Hungary from having a vote in the future if Orban won the election. 4. The EU flooded Hungary with political NGOs to back Magyar's campaign to oust Orban from power so Hungary would bend to the EU on Ukraine accession, mass immigration, MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, etc. 5. Magyar wins, the EU immediately imposes a 27-point conditions list for Hungary to unblock the funds, including on Ukraine accession, mass immigration, MMIWG2SLGBTQQIA+, etc. 6. The EU Commissioner comes out and says she's actually going to centralize voting power to cut out EU members like Hungary anyway.

Food for thought. Trump’s Deal With Indonesia: Mahan at the Strait of Malacca Hu Jintao warned China about this moment more than twenty years ago. In 2003, the then Chinese president coined the phrase “Malacca dilemma” to describe a simple, brutal fact: the country’s economic rise depended on foreign oil sailing through a narrow strait that other powers could, in a crisis, choose to close. Most of China’s imported crude and gas still squeezes through that same bottleneck between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The US has just moved to wire that vulnerability, and it is no accident this is happening on Donald Trump’s watch. Washington’s new Major Defense Cooperation Partnership with Indonesia is being sold in the usual diplomatic euphemisms: capacity building, maritime security, joint training. Strip away the boilerplate and you see something far sharper. The agreement’s focus on maritime domain awareness, subsurface and autonomous systems, and special forces training is about giving Indonesia and by extension the U.S. and its allies, a far richer picture of everything that moves between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and greater ability to shape it in a crisis. As with Trump’s broader Indo‑Pacific posture, this is one more move to reassert the US as the pre‑eminent maritime power of the age, and to ensure China feels that reality every time a tanker clears the Strait. Hu’s “Malacca dilemma” was never only about a single shipping lane. It was about the geometry of China’s energy dependence. Oil from the Gulf and Africa has to arrive by sea. The shortest, cheapest route runs past India, through Malacca and adjacent Indonesian straits, and then up into waters where the U.S. Navy and its partners have operated for decades. A coalition that can see, track and, if necessary, interdict that flow holds a lever over China’s economy that no amount of rhetoric about multipolarity can wish away. More than a century ago, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that sea power, fleets, chokepoints and maritime commerce, would decide the fate of great powers. The Malacca dilemma is Mahan’s theory rendered in modern energy terms: a continental power whose trade and fuel move by sea lives or dies by access to narrow maritime bottlenecks policed by others. Trump’s Indonesia move is pure Mahan: rather than chasing dominance on land, Washington is tightening its grip on the sea lanes and straits through which China’s economic lifeblood must flow. Beijing has spent two decades trying to escape this trap with pipelines from Central Asia and Russia, a corridor through Myanmar and a “string of pearls” of ports from Gwadar to Djibouti. Yet the volumes tell a less reassuring story: overland routes move at the margin, while the bulk of China’s energy still comes by tanker and still passes through Southeast Asian chokepoints. The dilemma has been managed, not resolved. That is why Indonesia matters. Jakarta insists it is not choosing sides and will continue to balance between Washington and Beijing. It doesn’t have to do more than that for this pact to bite. As Indonesian officers train with American counterparts and integrate U.S.‑supplied surveillance and patrol systems, the operational environment quietly changes. Chinese planners contemplating a crisis over Taiwan, the South China Sea or even a clash around Hormuz now have to assume that traffic through Malacca and its alternatives will unfold under a web of sensors and partnerships that lean, in practice if not in rhetoric, toward Washington. Another move by President Trump, in other words. From rebuilding American shipyards to pouring money into Indo‑Pacific maritime forces, the pattern is clear: the United States intends to remain a maritime superpower, and to make China live with Hu Jintao’s old nightmare instead of escaping it. Mahan would have recognised the logic instantly: in the end, it is the power that commands the sea, and the straits, that sets the terms for everyone else.

I’m going to make many of you spitting mad at me for pointing this out, but now that we have started the naval blockade, Iran’s strategic position (which was already hopeless) has become terminal. They are soon going to run out of storage space for their oil. And we haven’t even yet taken Kharg Island. This will force them to shut down current oil production, which itself is a drastic step that will further wreck their economy. Without their oil money, they’re finished. And no one is coming to save them, either. Nobody wants to mess with the two best militaries on the planet. Meanwhile, pretty much the entire rest of the globe is demanding that Iran reopen the strait. And because markets always adjust, the Gulf states are already adopting workarounds in order to avoid this same problem in the future. When the history of this war is written, it will be recorded that the regime’s decision to close the strait was a colossal miscalculation that relied too heavily on short term consequences (a hike in the price of oil, coupled with the belief that nations would unite against us rather than them). In chess, there is a famous quote to the effect that the threat is always stronger than the execution. Here, the threat to close the strait was stronger, especially with Trump and with countries in Europe and the Far East. The decision to close the strait was never going to work as long as we refused to budge. And it has greatly weakened Iran’s position. The same point applies to Iranian attacks on energy structure and desalination plants. Once they went beyond mere threats to actual attacks, they weakened their position and strengthened our resolve and those of our allies. Now everyone fully understands the risk of the regime’s ability to blackmail the global economy on top of all their other shit. The Gulf states now understand the folly of hoping that the alligator would eat them last, and are now working on a closer alliance with U.S. and Israel. I don’t know how much longer this war will last. But don’t bitch at me when I say that we have had a clear strategic plan from the beginning and that it is playing out. Once we decided that Iran was not going to surrender immediately, we decided to begin the death grip with the blockade. The rest is now a matter of time, patience, and persistence.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 President Trump posts image portraying himself as Jesus Christ.