Quotulatiousness

February 10, 2026

Trump’s bullying gets NATO members to get serious about defence

Filed under: Europe, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Living in a country that’s starting to feel a bit like little Melos facing the might of Athens in its prime, I can assure you that, for all of his other questionable moves, Trump has succeeded in forcing the NATO allies to address their freeloading on defence where every president before him had come up empty:

There are downsides to insulting and threatening friends and acting like a Mafia don slapping around his goons. You risk turning them against you, for one thing. But if those friends have been freeloading off you for years, well, there are some upsides, too. We’re seeing that as President Donald Trump’s rough treatment of our European allies has driven them to huffily make steps to actually defend themselves rather than continue to rely on the American defense umbrella.

There’s No Incentive Like a Kick in the Rear

For years, Trump has pointed out that the prosperous nations of Western Europe have long free-loaded off of American military might to maintain their security—especially against Russia’s threat from the East. He claims that, during his first term, he told NATO leaders if they didn’t meet the alliance target of 2 percent of GDP on military spending per member, they’d be on their own. According to him:

    One of the presidents of a big country stood up, said, “Well, sir, if we don’t pay and we’re attacked by Russia, will you protect us?” I said, “You didn’t pay. You’re delinquent?” He said, “Yes, let’s say that happened.”

    “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

Those were rough words for supposed allies. They didn’t stand alone. Since then, Trump has also threatened to acquire Greenland over the protests of Europeans, Denmark (which governs the island territory), and Greenlanders themselves. That’s on top of his trade war antics which imperil the commerce that most effectively binds people together in peaceful relations. Such bullying has an impact.

“European governments and corporations are racing to reduce their exposure to U.S. technology, military hardware and energy resources as transatlantic relations sour,” Politico‘s Nicholas Vinocur and Zoya Sheftalovich wrote last week. “At a weekend retreat in Zagreb, Croatia, conservative European leaders including [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merz said it was time for the bloc to beef up its homegrown mutual-defense clause, which binds EU countries to an agreement to defend any EU country that comes under attack.”

“Military spending across the European Union is ramping up in what observers have noted is a significant and ‘extraordinary’ pivot from the comparatively placid postwar decades,” Northeastern University’s Tanner Stening observed last summer. “As part of the ReArm Europe plan, EU member states hope to mobilize up to 800 billion euros. In June, NATO leaders agreed to increase defense spending up to 5% of each country’s gross domestic product by 2035.”

Commenting on the Trump administration, eugyppius clearly understands something that a lot of Trump’s critics (and many fans) don’t seem to comprehend:

AI-generated image from AndrewSullivan.substack.com

An unstudied impression: Donald Trump is like a shark, in that he must always swim forward or risk suffocation. He, his administration and the media ecosystem that has grown up around Trump’s political persona depends upon action and controversy. In fallow news cycles, Trump steadily loses the initiative and two things happen: First, the media establishment and the leftist activist machine begin gathering their own critical momentum. Second, the vast MAGA-adjacent social media sphere must turn to other controversies to keep the clicks and the ad revenue flowing. Both of these work against the forty-seventh president and his purposes.

Since Trump’s initial barrage of executive orders has subsided, the media cycle has therefore lurched from one moment of hysteria and excitement to the next. Each new controversy totally eclipses the last. Hardly anybody remembers or talks about Nicolás Maduro any longer; the twin Minneapolis ICE shootings and associated protests, too, have faded. What were hailed as pivotal events which would finally discredit Trump’s programme this time look, in retrospect, like passing trivialities – not necessarily because they didn’t matter, but because sustained attention in this crazy messaging environment is impossible.

And on Trump’s pimp-handed dealings with the NATO allies:

Trump and NATO: Much of Trump’s MAGA base remains firmly isolationist and demands that the United States abandon the NATO alliance. Trump himself knows this and he has periodically questioned the utility of NATO. Formally, however, Trump’s administration stands behind the alliance, as anyone can see from reading the 2026 National Defense Strategy and the 2025 National Security Strategy. Yes, Trump wants European countries to increase defence spending. Yes, he still hopes to complete a strategic pivot away from Europe towards China. And yes, in the longer term, he probably nurtures ambitions of reducing the importance of NATO in favour of separate bilateral agreements with various European states. Such arrangements would also provide a lever for present and future administrations to disrupt the various policies and initiatives of the European Union, which Trump clearly despises and which at least as presently constructed amounts to a suicide pact for all of us on the Continent. These populist pressures and future ambitions, together with a general distrust and legitimate scorn for Eurocrat elites, seem to be why NATO periodically fades from Trump’s favour, although never for very long. All of this is to say that I really don’t think Trump’s January bluster was a mere Art-of-the-Deal negotiating tactic, but a reflection of real tensions and contradictions within Trumpism.

Trump and Europe: Here again, we see two competing tendencies. Generally, the Trump administration has followed a sly strategy of pursuing ties with the more or less aligned and presently ascendant populist-right movements of Europe. The Trump administration has also defended our rights to free speech, particularly on social media; relentlessly attacked our insane energy transition; and criticised our elites for their failure (or refusal) to stop mass migration. The purpose of these efforts is to isolate the Eurotards by fertilising the hostile populism that is growing ominously just beneath their double chins. If you are wondering why Trump bothers with this, I refer you to my previous paragraph: Sympathetic governments in key European states, joined to the United States, would be a means of sidelining the European Union and remaking Atlanticism in Trump’s image.

Exactly how to help the populist right into power is a much harder nut to crack. Expressing overt support for parties like Alternative für Deutschland can hurt more than it helps, and the Americans don’t have more direct means of influencing domestic politics over here. At the very least, this a long-term project requiring tactics and strategies we have yet to explore, and probably some institutions we have yet to create.

Update, 11 February: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Heightening tensions in the Indian Ocean

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, Fergus Mason updates us on what’s happening around the UK/US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean:

Diego Garcia

One of the great mysteries of Keir Starmer’s government is why he’s so determined to give the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, which is 1,200 miles away and has never owned them. Even now, as he desperately fights for his political survival, Starmer is pushing ahead with plans to give away the strategic archipelago then pay tens of billions of pounds to lease back one of the islands. It’s an odd thing to be so focused on — but whether his compulsion to surrender the islands is driven by corruption or naivete, it’s sending out signals of weakness. And those signals are being noticed.

The Maldives Makes A Grab

Last Thursday the Republic of Maldives announced that it had rejected the UN International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea’s ruling on its maritime boundaries, and sent an armed boat to carry out a “special surveillance operation” in the northern part of the Chagos island’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The Chagos EEZ is claimed by Mauritius, but of course actually belongs to Britain until Starmer’s surrender deal is approved by Parliament. However, the Maldivian government has now decided to make its own claim on the area — and it’s very publicly doing something about it. The “coast guard vessel” CGS Dharumavantha — a former Turkish Navy fast attack craft — is now operating in the area, along with drones from the Maldives National Defence Force Air Corps.

Of course, the Maldives has no real claim to the Chagos islands or any part of their waters. The country — a tiny group of islands southwest of Sri Lanka, with a land area of just 115 square miles — was a British crown colony from 1796 to 1953, and a British protectorate until 1965. Like Mauritius, it has never owned the Chagos Islands. However, it’s just 300 miles away from them, much closer than Mauritius. It appears that its leader, President Mohamed Muizzi, has decided that if the key British territory is up for grabs the Maldives should be the ones to grab it. It’s true the Maldives doesn’t have much of a navy, but then Mauritius doesn’t have much of a navy either and is a lot further away. If the Maldives can seize control over part of the extremely valuable Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA), and even possibly some of the northern islands, there isn’t a lot Mauritius can do about it.

Why would the Maldives be so keen to seize part of the Chagos EEZ? That one’s simple. Under British protection, the Chagos MPA (which is the largest marine nature reserve in the entire world) has been officially off limits to commercial fishing since 2010 but, in practice, has barely been fished at all since 1968. This makes it a unique and potentially lucrative resource in the Indian Ocean region, which has seen its ecosystems devastated by destructive fishing methods. The wealth of the MPA is the main reason Mauritius wants the Chagos islands. Its own coastal waters have been blighted by overfishing, including the destruction of coral reefs by explosives and bleach injection, and now it wants to plunder the MPA. The Maldives is also busily engaged in destroying its own fish stocks (fishing is the country’s largest industry and employs half the population) and is desperate for new waters to pillage. They don’t just want access for their own boats, either. Like Mauritius, the Maldives under Muizzi’s rule is an increasingly close ally of China.

The Scourge Of The Seas

China has the world’s largest fishing fleet, and it’s not even close. Over 44% of all commercial fishing is carried out by Chinese boats — and they’re notorious for flouting international law. Chinese boats regularly change their names and disable their satellite tracking systems to conceal their identity, then fish illegally in other countries’ waters. They violate quotas, catch protected species and strip whole swathes of ocean clean of any life much larger than plankton with massive, indiscriminate drift nets. Chinese fishing boats have also been implicated in people trafficking, drug smuggling and acting as spying and covert action platforms for the Chinese navy.

If either Mauritius or the Maldives gain control of the Chagos MPA it’s a certainty they will immediately give Chinese boats access, and this priceless nature reserve will rapidly be trawled and drift-netted into a barren, lifeless wasteland. From China’s point of view, of course, it doesn’t matter which of their lackeys takes over the Chagos islands as long as one of them does, so don’t expect them to step in to help Mauritius. They don’t care who they get the fishing rights from.

Dispatch from the UK: Beatings will continue until morale improves

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, Ed West shares some of the highlights, lowlights, and WTFites of the last week’s stories from formerly Great, now Mediocre Britain, including the case of an American asylum-seeker, the state of the jury system, and Birmingham among others:

Image from the Foundation for Economic Education

The quintessential UK news story mixes the sinister and comical. As I put it last time: the “Yookay” has elements of authoritarian menace with total farce and incompetence, a slapstick comedy in which WPCs turn up at your house to arrest you over Facebook posts while your son sits in a classroom next to a 30-year-old Iranian man pretending to be a child asylum seeker. All the internet mockery of Britain in the past few years focusses on the theme of a bizarrely mismanaged country, run by people whose priorities are totally upside down.

In her recent Wall St Journal column, Louise Perry wrote about what she described as “Mr Bean Authoritarianism … after the comic character played by Rowan Atkinson, one of Britain’s most successful comedy exports. Mr. Bean is childish and incompetent. He constantly gets things wrong. He can’t understand the most basic facts about everyday life, which results in various slapstick disasters. The British government frequently manifests Mr. Bean-style incompetence but without his genial manner.” She wrote:

    “Pathways” isn’t the first example of government messaging that treats the British public like naughty children. In 2023, Police Scotland came up with another, much-mocked cartoon character called “the hate monster”. “Before ye know it, ye’ve committed a hate crime,” announced the voice-over, with an effect that was simultaneously sinister and risible. “You are constantly on the brink of criminalization,” the ad implicitly told us. “Now look at this silly cartoon.”

    Incompetence and authoritarianism are often bedfellows. Governments that frequently make mistakes will feel compelled to hide those mistakes, for fear of the public’s response.

[…]

Take a hike

“The British countryside will be made into a less ‘white environment’ under nationwide diversity plans. Officials in rural areas, including the Chilterns and the Cotswolds, have pledged to attract more minorities under plans drawn up by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). The plans follow Defra-commissioned reports that claimed the countryside would become ‘irrelevant’ in a multicultural society, as it was a ‘white environment’ principally enjoyed by the ‘white middle class’.

“More diverse staff will be recruited, marketing material will be produced featuring people visibly from ethnic minorities, and written in ‘community languages’.”

Isn’t English a “community language”? I’ve written about the War on the Countryside before; the powers-that-be are obsessed with getting Muslims to hike, for some reason. Just recently, a woman received an MBE for walking up hills while wearing a hijab. It all seems so counter-productive, increasing a sense of paranoia among everyone, when no one is stopping anyone from taking a walk in the countryside, and no one is going to give you a hard time. As Alexandra Wilson explains, some of this is downstream of the incentive systems within academia.

[…]

Official secrecy

One of the characteristics of the UK state, and which differentiates it from the US, is a tendency towards secrecy. I think it’s in the English character, which is why we basically invented spying, and are very good at it, give or take the odd communist traitor. This was most egregiously displayed by the government’s secret plan to airlift huge numbers of Afghans into the country, without telling the public, and it has become a regular feature of the criminal justice system.

Just last month it was revealed that a “reporting restriction was put in place at Nottingham Crown Court in September last year, preventing any mention of the defendant’s immigration status”. The man in question was from Pakistan and the authorities were worried about the risk of disorder, but he was unmasked by local Reform MP Lee Anderson.

This is the second time in a month where a British court has deliberately withheld the nationality of a rapist: “Last May in Leamington Spa, a girl was abducted and raped by two Afghan asylum seekers who had arrived by small boat just months before. Initially, Warwickshire Police described the rapists as ‘two 17-year-old boys from Leamington’, while referring to their 15-year-old victim as a ‘young woman’. It was not until the case went to sentencing in December that their backgrounds could be reported, after a legal challenge by the Daily Mail was granted. Meanwhile, the ‘horrific footage’ played at the trial has still not seen the light of day, with their barrister saying: ‘I have no doubt that if the general public were exposed to that, we would have disorder on our hands’.”

I don’t think the press habit of referring to foreign offenders as “Newcastle man” or “Burnley man” really helps the situation. All the details are immediately shared on social media anyway; it’s not the 90s any more.

FAMAS G1: Simplified for Export

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Sept 2025

The FAMAS G1 was developed as a lower-cost option for FAMAS export sales. The original F1 model had been offered for international sale, but it attracted little interest largely because of its high price. In response, GIAT created the G1 with many of the extra features left optional. This allowed them to reduce the price by up to 40%. Specific feature reductions included:

  • Omitting the bipod legs
  • Omitting the grenade launching sights and barrel fittings
  • Omitting the night sights
  • Omitting the burst fire mechanism
  • Replacing the trigger guard with a molded whole-hand trigger guard

The mechanism stayed the same, and all of the omitted features could be included as options. This still failed to generate any export sales, in part because GIAT came under ownership of FN, and FN’s competing assault rifle options were more profitable than the FAMAS.

The G1 did contribute elements like the whole-hand trigger guard to the mid-1990s G2 model adopted by the French Navy, however.
(more…)

QotD: The (historical) walls of Jericho

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

These strategic (and operational) considerations dictate some of the tactical realities of most sieges. The attacker’s army is generally going to be larger and stronger, typically a lot larger and stronger, because if the two sides were anywhere near parity with each other the defender would risk a battle rather than submit to a siege. Thus the main problem the attacker faces is access: if the attacker can get into the settlement, that will typically be sufficient to ensure victory.

The problem standing between that attacking army and access was, of course, walls (though as we will see, walls rarely stand alone as part of a defensive system). Even very early Neolithic settlements often show concerns for defense and signs of fortification. The oldest set of city walls belong to one of the oldest excavated cities (which should tell us how short the interval between the development of large population centers and the need to fortify those population centers was), Jericho in the West Bank. The site was inhabited beginning around 10,000 BC and the initial phase of construction on what appears to be a city wall reinforced with a defensive tower was c. 8000 BC. It is striking just how substantial the fortifications are, given how early they were constructed: initially the wall was a 3.6m stone perimeter wall, supported by a 8.5m tall tower, all in stone. That setup was eventually reinforced with a defensive ditch dug 2.7m deep and 8.2m wide cutting through the bedrock (that is a ditch even Roel Konijnendijk could be proud of!), by which point the main wall was enhanced to be some 1.5-2m thick and anywhere from 3.7-5.2m high. That is a serious wall and unlikely the first defensive system protecting the site; chances are there were older fortifications, perhaps in perishable materials, which do not survive. Simply put, no one starts by building a 4m by 2m stone wall reinforced by a massive stone tower and a huge ditch through the bedrock; clearly city walls [were] something people had already been thinking about for some time.

I want to stress just how deep into the past a site like Jericho is. At 8000 BC, Jericho’s wall and tower pre-date the earliest writing anywhere (the Kish tablet, c. 3200 BC) by c. 4,800 years. The tower of Jericho was more ancient to the Great Pyramid of Giza (c. 2600 BC), than the Great Pyramid is to us. In short, the problem of walled cities – and taking walled cities – was a very old problem, one which predated writing by thousands of years. By the time the arrival of writing allows us to see even a little more clearly, Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Levant are already filled with walled cities, often with stunningly impressive stone or brick walls. Gilgamesh (r. 2900-2700 BC) brags about the walls of Uruk in the Epic of Gilgamesh (composed c. 2100) as enclosing more than three square miles and being made of superior baked bricks (rather than inferior mudbrick); there is evidence to suggest, by the by, that the historical Gilgamesh (or Bilgames) did build Uruk’s walls and that they would have lived up to the poem’s billing. Meanwhile, in Egypt, we have artwork like the Towns Palette, which appears to commemorate the successful sieges of a number of walled towns

So a would-be agrarian conqueror in Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Levant, from well before the Bronze Age would have already had to contest with the problem of how to seize fortified towns. Of course depictions like these make it difficult to reconstruct siege tactics (the animals on the Towns Palette likely represent armies, rather than a strategy of “use a giant bird as a siege weapon”), so we’re going to jump ahead to the (Neo)Assyrian Empire (911-609 BC; note that we are jumping ahead thousands of years).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-29.

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