Theonlyskypie 🇺🇦

When this is over, the western part of NATO will never be the same. Spain, England, France and Italy have sold us out, as they too often have a history of doing. Eastern European nations are the heart of NATO. They spend money on defense, know how to fight and love the US. France particularly deserves fault and blame. From supporting China and Russia at the UN to denying Americans overflight rights, they’re doing what they’ve always done - showing weakness, while cutting deals with terrorists. (The reason the US has a Marine Corps and Navy is unlike France, we refused to pay a ransom to the Barbary Pirates. France is always happy to cut a deal.) Wars have unintended consequences as nations show their true colors. NATO will never be the same, and Western European weakness and acquiescence is the cause.

2) While defense needs are expanding due to Iran, Russia, and China, a single-year 42% hike is far more than the Pentagon could even spend next year. Ramping up defense spending takes time and the proper policy infrastructure. This is not a serious proposal.

French President Macron: Iran is a very bad regime — no discussion about that. I disagree with them on a lot of topics. But I don’t believe that we will fix the situation just by bombings or by military operations. Look at what happened with this type of operation in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Libya — we never delivered. Never. Even after 20 years. So you have to respect the sovereignty of people. If people want to change a regime, they want to react, step up, they can do so.

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.

Does not make a ton of sense to scapegoat an army general for a failed strategic bombing campaign, so I wonder what the beef is here.

Professor Robert Pape: "Iran is emerging as a new global center of power...this will end up being worse than Vietnam"

Confirmed UAV and USV attacks on temporarily occupied territories and the Russian Federation 🔎

Hegseth indicates reopening the Strait of Hormuz is not a core US objective: "We've been willing to lead, President Trump has led the entire time, but it's not just us. You might want to start learning how to fight for yourself."