LR

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.

while the March job numbers came in better than expected, the revision to February's numbers was significantly downward. 133,000 jobs lost just that month.

The Palestinians will not accept: 1. A two state framework, which is the final status resolution preferred by the US, Europe and most American Jews. 2. A secular Western-style democracy governed by a strong rule-of-law system under which all ethnic groups have equal rights. This is the solution envisioned by most Western leftists, and what they mean when they say "Free Palestine." Western leftists like to pretend the Palestinians are fighting for liberalism, for democracy and for pluralism. They are not. What the Palestinians want is: The destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Arab Islamist kleptocracy under which Jews, Druze, Christians and other minority ethnics will endure dhimmitude at best and likely genocide or ethnic cleansing. If the Palestinians have no intention of coexisting with Israel, then the conflict is existential and will continue until one side ceases to exist. That means there has to be a war which must continue until its outcome permanently settles the dispute over whether this is Israel or Palestine. Given the rising political power of Muslim factions throughout Europe and increasingly in the US, it is to Israel's benefit that this existential war begins as soon as possible. If the Palestinians would prefer not to have such a war (which would inevitably lead to mass death, destruction and dispossession on their side), their only alternative is to adopt the two state framework and seek a peaceful, diplomatic, permanent resolution of the conflict. To reiterate: There are only two possible final status possibilities: Two states at peace or a horrible war that ends with Jewish Israel from the river to the sea. The Palestinians get to choose which they want.

BREAKING: Justice Sam Alito explains that unlimited birthright citizenship means a Chinese, Iranian or Russian foreigner can have a child in America, and that US citizen owes military allegiance to a foreign adversary.

I assume that tonight Trump will head for the exits in Iran. He may try to disguise the retreat by announcing the U.S. is leaving NATO, which Trump will present as a liberation from ungrateful allies and a victory for America First. So he'll make a bad outcome far worse.