joe

Wow: NFL waterboys earn over 3 THOUSAND dollars per game, which averages out to more than $50K per season, not including tips. Waterboys also attend practices, handle locker room prep, and travel with the team. What a fantastic job to have 💸📈

But we've not done that. On the contrary, we've so far focused on military targets. The Israelis have even hit Basij bases to prevent these thugs from killing more Iranian dissidents. I think prominent columnists such as you (and patriotic think tankers such as me) should be urging President Trump and his advisors to maintain that approach: to degrade as much as possible the regime's military capabilities, and whatever is left of its nuclear facilities. That would be an adequate outcome, more than any of Trump's predecessors has accomplished. But, of course, a better result -- not least for the U.S. -- would be for the clerical dictatorship to collapse and be replaced by decent leaders, friends of Americans, who would spend Iran's oil revenues in the future on improving conditions for the people of Iran rather than on Hamas, Hezbollah, the Shia militias of Iran, and the Houthi rebels of Yemen. (And no more drones for Putin.) I don't think that outcome is beyond reach if we just keep the main thing the main thing. Our allies could help. They certainly shouldn't hinder. I bet a dollar that Mark Rutte is telling them something along these lines.

Sorry Jonah. I actually sat in the room for the first half of the movie. For 24 polite years, Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama diplomatically asked NATO members to increase defense spending. For 24 years, it was one excuse after another, all focused in Western Europe on how they wish they could spend more, but their social welfare spending priorities wouldn’t let them. In other words, you the US will spend on defense and protect us. Along comes rude Donald Trump. Finally, someone made clear that if Europe kept freeloading the US was done. It took a bill in the China shop to move Europe. Diplomacy failed. Trump prevailed. That’s reality whether you or I like it. NATO self-withered after 75 years. If Spain, England, Italy and France won’t spend what’s necessary to have a real military, it’s time for something new.

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.

No buyers showed up at the Treasury auction, so the U.S. bought $15B of its own debt. That’s not a functioning market. That’s intervention. Next comes the playbook: inject liquidity, justify it with war, inflate assets, maintain the illusion. This is how the system survives.