CaptainThugwash

🚨 SECRETARY RUBIO: If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked, but them denying us basing rights when we need them, then that’s not a very good arrangement. That’s a hard one to stay engaged in and say this is good for the United States.

The 4 main differences between the foreign USA and the foreign China from a European perspective 1. China is not laying claim to any territory held by a EU member state 2. China has not actively pushed to start a massive land war on European soil 3. China has not purposely engaged in policies to harm European energy security 4. China does not occupy Europe via post-war treaties and forces on the ground China is not a European ally...but it is definitely not an enemy like the USA obviously is.

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.

It’s been three weeks since I first published Economic Blitzkrieg so I figured it’s worth doing a quick overview of where we are and where I think we are headed: First to summarize: The thesis was Trump didn’t really care that much about tariffs. He cares about fortifying US hegemony by cutting out China. But to be more precise I’m going to fully outline what he cares about and then what he’s trying to do about each. Top of the list are his primary issues that needed to be addressed quickly & forcefully: A) Chinas growing industrial, technological and militaristic strength relative to the US B) A dependence on China at the base layer of U.S. industrial and military supply chains C) An unsustainable fiscal debt load and budget deficit that couldn’t be easily addressed without either irreparably impacting reserve status or forcing significant voter pain via austerity Less pressing but still relevant downstream issues that were also considered, in no particular order: D) Fentanyl crisis E) A free riding Europe that benefited from the U.S. security umbrella without commensurate compensation F) Growing economic entanglement between China and supposed military allies to the U.S. G) Growing unwillingness by voters around the world to take economic pain as the price of being a “good ally” as demonstrated by continued flow of Russian gas into Germany H) A concerted and accelerated shift of the Chinese economic model up the value-add ladder following the bust of their real estate bubble into areas that have traditionally been staples of higher-income economies including autos, semis and robotics I) Increased concern around the value of IP and the US’s assumed ability to control access to AI following Deepseek and the subsequent torrent of similar models out of China despite two years of GPU import restrictions J) A near term fiscal setup that seemed incredibly bleak given Yellen’s decision to short-date the govts debt in the form of $10T of maturities in 2025 while at the same time juiced fiscal spending to a degree that practically gaurentee economic malaise of the deficit were to be closed cold-turkey. So my thesis is that Trump turned to a number of high-IQ and mid-IQ advisors and asked for a plan. People such as Miran, Thiel, Pottinger, Colby, maybe Bessent… and yes maybe even obsessive single-issue types like Kyle Bass and Navarro. Who came up with the plan only mildly matters at this point… And these individuals constructed the following sweeping plan that attempts to solve everything all at once within the constraints he has. Constraints that include: midterm elections, the existing rule of law in the U.S. (loosely), high debt loads throughout the developed world and general unwillingness to “rock the boat”, an adversary who can exert far more economic pain on most countries vs the US. And most importantly, and adversary who has a defacto emperor for life while Trump has to wake up every morning and check the polls. Said another way, an adversary with a much higher pain tolerance vs either US politicians or voters. So what was the plan: Isolate China. Force countries to choose between two spheres of trade. Two spheres of military security. Two spheres of financial rails. But because of the aforementioned constraints you couldn’t just go to countries and ask them nicely to walk into an economic woodchipper… and while they were at it please run don’t walk since you have midterms coming up. So the strategy had to introduce game theory. It had to magnify the economic leverage. It had to introduce time constraints. It had to be binary. In or out. No room for ambiguity that can be undone by a subsequent government administration. 1/n continued below…

no and this is nowhere close to "Pixar-grade"

In the summer of 2000, as the Harry Potter series was quickly becoming a global sensation, legendary Yale critic Harold Bloom gave one of his most unpopular takes, calling 35 million readers wrong

In the summer of 2000, as the Harry Potter series was quickly becoming a global sensation, legendary Yale critic Harold Bloom gave one of his most unpopular takes, calling 35 million readers wrong