Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2026

China’s weaker-than-it-seems strategic position

Filed under: China, Economics, Food, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR expands on a post by Tom Kratman about the strategic weakness of the current Chinese government:

Tom didn’t explain his second assertion, but it’s important so I’m going to do it.

China is in the worst strategic position of any great power in history because it is critically dependent on resources it has to import, and it doesn’t have control of the sea lanes over which it imports them.

China is neither food nor energy self-sufficient. It needs to import pork from the United States, grain from Africa, coal from Australia, and oil from the Middle East to keep its population fed and its factories running.

Naval blockades at about three critical chokepoints (Hormuz, Malacca, Sunda) would cripple the Chinese economy within months, possibly within weeks. China does not have the blue-water navy required to contrast control of those chokepoints. The moment any first-rate naval power or even a second-rate like India decides China needs to be stopped, it’s pretty much game over.

As a completely separate issue thanks to the one-child policy, Chinese population probably peaked in 2006 and has been declining ever since. Every year in the foreseeable future they will have fewer military-age males than they do now. Most of those males are only sons; their deaths would wipe out entire family lines, giving the Chinese people an extremely low tolerance for war casualties.

Then there’s the glass jaw. The Three Gorges Dam. Which is already in some peril even without a war — you can compare photographs over time and see that it’s sagging. If anyone gets annoyed enough to pop that dam thing with a bunker-buster or a pony nuke, the resulting floods will kill millions and wipe out the strip of central China that is by far the country’s most industrially and agriculturally productive region.

The Chinese haven’t fought a war since 1971. They lost. Against Vietnam. The institutional knowledge that could potentially fit their army for doing anything more ambitious than suppressing regional warlordism does not exist.

I could go on. But I think I’ve made Tom’s statements sufficiently understandable already.

The position of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, showing the major cities downstream of the dam.
Image by Rolfmueller via Wikimedia Commons.

And Tom Kratman responds:

Almost perfect; you missed four tricks.

1. People, when we talk about blockading China, imagine that we’re talking about a civilized stop and search. Uh, uh; we will designate a no go zone and sink without further warning anything that enters it.

2. Our blockade will be distant, well out of range of those Oh-they’re-just-too-terrible-for-words (but never tested) DF-21s. [Wiki] (You did sort of address this, but not in so many words.)

3. We can blow the levees on the Yellow River, too, to kill many millions more and destroy still more industry (it flows above ground).

4. China not only doesn’t have the navy to contest with us, it can never have that navy. Why not? Because there’s only so much wealth to go around; China is surrounded on all sides by enemies with anywhere from decent to quite good armies, any or all of which might take a stab (pun intended) at carving China up like a turkey. They must put a lot more money and effort and manpower into stymying those than they can ever put into meeting us and Japan.

April 29, 2026

Three views on the Iran conflict

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Alex Story outlines the three distinct ways that western opinions differ on the ongoing struggle with Iran:

The BBC has a long history of … careful wording in describing events in Iran since 1979. I don’t think this cartoon is unfair in portraying that.

TRUTH is the first casualty of war.

Opinions on a conflict depend deeply on the prevailing culture, erasing nuance in the process. The less of it there is, the easier it is to convince yourself of your righteousness and your opponents’ wickedness.

For instance, the Iranian question divides the world in three main groups.

The first staunchly believes that the Israeli tail wags the American foreign policy dog, working around the clock to recreate Israel’s “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates” Old Testament borders as described in Genesis 15:18.

The second will accept the long-standing Islamic Republic of Iran’s evil nature and its core philosophy of perpetual warfare leading in due course to the unbeliever’s submission but are sceptical if it can be removed solely by this war. As David, an exiled Iranian, said: “I’m caught between wishing for the end of the regime and the very real prospect of its entrenchment through external violence”.

The third will argue that the Iranian leadership should be obliterated. Ending the regime’s five-decades long barbarism, exemplified by the slaughter of “40,000 Iranians” across the country in January 2026 in Prince Reza Pahlavi’s recent words, would make the world a better place. Having lived by the sword, the mullahs should die by the sword, they will say, adding that few will miss them.

Positions turn into intellectual fortresses at the speed of light, fed by a constant stream of “news” destined to further harden preconceived ideas. Little is provided that offers any hope of peaceful co-existence. Data is used, ignored and abused, thus ensuring escalation and lying becomes the accelerator for a world on its irrevocable path to war.

But while truth dies early in the antagonists’ deadly exchanges, war eventually reveals it, and its revelations tend towards the astounding.

In our case, for instance, it has become crystal clear that Britain is now effete, irrelevant and defanged. It is a flotsam on rough international seas, bullied by some, ridiculed by others and ignored by all who have not yet emasculated themselves.

The United Kingdom, the former global hegemon and only European country to come out of the Second World War justified, is not the same country it once was, dismantled stone by stone by an establishment haughtily bent on demise over decades and encouraging others, partially successfully, to follow them down to the Gates of Hades.

Our end, however, cannot all be pinned on Starmer, Hermer, Sands, the Fabians and purple-haired socialists.

He then goes on to make the case that only a counter-revolution will rescue Britain from its current path to misery and global irrelevance.

April 23, 2026

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 1 Oct 2025

The first of this year’s video’s in answer to viewers’ questions — today we think about and compare Alexander and Caesar. This is not new, for in the ancient world the pair were often connected, even though they lived centuries apart. Appian compared and contrasted them, Plutarch paired his biographies of them, while Suetonius and others told stories about Caesar’s admiration for the famous Macedonian.

April 22, 2026

Reflections on the life extension of the A-10 – “we ought to be seriously looking at building an A11”

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR admits that there clearly still is a role for the “Warthog” in modern combat … under the right conditions:

Gotta admit I’ve changed my mind about this. I was in the camp that loved the Hog but was grudgingly prepared to concede that its time had passed — not survivable in a modern threat environment stiff with drones and MANPADs.

But damned if the A-10 didn’t turn out to be an effective tool against small-boat swarms in the Straits of Hormuz. And not so expensive to fly or ammo up that you end up with a nasty shot-exchange problem either — not something you can say for putting the F-35 on that job.

The Hog has demonstrated that there is still a tier of missions in between the envelope of an attack helicopter and a fast fighter for which the Hog is excellently fitted. Still. In 2026.

Of course you need to have done SEAD to lower the odds that it will be popped by competent air defense, but the US Air Force is very good at that mission. As it keeps demonstrating.

I was wrong. The Hog deserves its extension. And we ought to be seriously looking at building an A11. Maybe not a manned A11, but a functionally similar instrument with a big fucking gun and the ability to fly low and slow and loiter on a patrol area.

In conclusion: “Let me sing you the song of my people: BRRRRRRRRRT.”

April 19, 2026

Simple rules for judging commentary on the Iran situation

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You’ve probably noticed that I don’t include a lot of content on Iran or Ukraine these days. That’s largely because the fog of war propaganda is too dense for much reliable information to come to us and be subject to any kind of fair analysis. Lorenzo Warby has a few rules to suggest to those of you trying to sift real information out of the noise — both specifically on the Iran conflict and also more generally for these kinds of low-signal/high-noise conflicts:

There is a lot of poor quality commentary about on the current Iran War — or, as the Chinese call it, the War in West Asia. Fortunately, there are two simple tests that winnows out much of the noise so you can focus on signal.

Locations struck by:
– United States and Israel (blue)
– Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis, and PMF (red)

First Easy Test

Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?

If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.

Second Easy Test

Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?

If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.

The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.

[…]

Third, More Subtle, Test

The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.

If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.

A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.

April 15, 2026

Do “combat-trained Islamists in Britain … now outnumber the British Army”?

Filed under: Britain, Government, Middle East, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, Julian Mann asks Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch if Britain’s immigration policies have imported enough “combat-trained Islamist” to outnumber the ever-decreasing number of soldiers in the British army:

You won’t find anyone less military-minded than me but Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s speech to the London Defence Conference last week prompted me to put these questions to her on X:

“How many combat-trained Islamists do you estimate there to be in Britain? Would they now outnumber the British Army and, if so, by how many?”

I very much doubt that I will get an answer. She is a busy woman and she might be reluctant to comment for fear of being drawn into an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory. She should note that the question is about Islamists, not about integrated and peaceable British Muslims.

It was this part of her speech, highlighted by historian Niall Ferguson on X, that provoked the questions:

    General Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review, stripped away the pretence when he said: “Today’s army, frankly, could do one very small thing. It could seize a small market town on a good day”.

Ms Badenoch also said: “Between 1989 and 2022, defence spending fell in every year. One of the authors of the Strategic Defence Review has since said: ‘The UK is trapped in a conspiracy of stupidity because politicians won’t make the case for cutting spending to fund defence’. And he’s not the only one who thinks that. In Washington, US administrations have felt for years that, while America subsidised the defence of Europe, we built welfare systems instead. On this point, they are right. Before the Second World War, one in every £7 the British government spent went on health and welfare. By last year, it had soared to one in every £3. We have grown fat on welfare, prioritising benefits over bullets.”

According to the House of Lords Library: “As at 1 April 2025, there were 181,890 people in the UK armed forces, a 1 per cent decrease compared with the previous year. This total includes:

  • all full-time service personnel (known as the UK regular forces) and Gurkhas, who comprise 77.7 per cent of the total number of personnel
  • volunteer reserves (17.5 per cent of the total personnel)
  • other personnel, including the serving regular reserve, sponsored reserve and military provost guard service (4.8 per cent of the total personnel)

“The total size of the full-time UK armed forces, comprising the UK regular forces, Gurkhas and full-time reserve service, was around 147,000. Of these, 82,000 were Army personnel, 33,000 were members of the Royal Navy or Royal Marines, and 32,000 belonged to the Royal Air Force.”

So if there were 100,000 combat-trained Islamists in Britain, they would outnumber the British Army by about 20,000. I realise that there are various levels of combat training. It is possible that British Army personnel are better trained than any Islamist forces they might face on British soil. But would they be better motivated, given the way they are being treated by the Government? Why has the Government apparently failed to reckon with the appalling impact on morale and recruitment from the lawfare it is allowing against special forces and Northern Ireland veterans?

Update, 16 April: 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.

April 10, 2026

Trump’s intemperate, irresponsible, unhinged rants … worked?

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For all that Trump’s habitual form of social media post seem to frequently dance on the edge of incoherence — if not insanity — his track record is far better than his critics give him credit for. I thought his most recent blustering threats against the Iranian leadership would be counter-productive, but something approximating a ceasefire began just before his deadline. As Brendan O’Neill put it, this gives Iranian civilization a bit of a reprieve, but what about the West?

Imagine calling for the destruction of a civilisation. Imagine dreaming about violently scrubbing an ancient nation from the face of the Earth. Imagine flirting with the idea of obliterating a land with thousands of years of rich history. I am referring, of course, to the activist class and its annihilationist hatred for the Jewish State. For nearly three years, these people have beat the streets and swarmed the digital networks to agitate for the erasure of Israel, all the way “from the river to the sea“. President Trump’s juvenile bluster on Iran has nothing on their existential loathing for the Jewish homeland.

The frenzy of the past 48 hours, following Trump’s potty-mouthed and threatening social-media posts about Iran, has felt unhinged. The nukes are coming, influencers wailed. Trump must be “removed as president” in order to “prevent a catastrophe that our species will never recover from”, said the Guardian‘s Owen Jones. Within hours of this giddy apocalypticism, this huddled descent of the chattering classes into the pit of End Times prophesying, Trump had done what many of us expected he would: struck a kind of deal. The great detonation was not of a nuclear bomb but of the common sense of the cultural establishment. That’s the only thing that got vaporised yesterday.

Then there was the sheer cant. It was Trump’s ominous yelp that “A whole civilisation will die tonight” that got leftists and liberals frothing. It’s genocidal lunacy, they said. Let’s leave to one side that the target of his digital ire appeared to be the Islamic Republic, not Persia. “Forty-seven years of extortion, corruption and death will finally end”, he said. The more striking thing is the industrial-level gall of a cultural elite that is devoted to the dismantling of Israel, puffing itself up in fury over Trump’s hyperbole on Iran.

I agree that “A whole civilisation will die tonight” is a chilling thing to say. That’s why I’m so horrified by the frenzied anti-Zionism of our times. Our intellectual classes furiously deny Israel’s “right to exist”. Our activist classes openly call for Israel’s excision from the family of nations, by intifada (violence) if necessary. Our celebrity classes cheer the armies of anti-Semites (Hamas, Hezbollah) that were founded with the express intention of vaporising the Jewish nation. One minute the keffiyeh set is accusing the likes of Pete Hegseth of being in the grip of an anti-Iranian “bloodthirst”, the next it’s chanting for the death of the Jewish nation’s soldiers.

Future historians will marvel at the brass neck of an influencer class that took 24 hours off from calling for the destruction of Israel to bash Trump for posting about the destruction of Iran. I raise this not to be facetious but to draw attention to the moral disarray here on the home front that has been so spectacularly exposed by events in Iran. For it is undeniable now – we are surrounded by people who salivate over the violent disappearance of Israel but who fret over the withering of the Islamic Republic. They have taken sides – the side of the barbarous regime that dreams of “Death to America” over the side of the democratic state rebuilt by Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust. I’m delighted the Persian civilisation is safe – now what about the West’s?

April 4, 2026

RESISTANCE and REBELLION – The Conquered and the Proud 19

Filed under: Europe, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 10 Sept 2025

Today we think about attitudes to Roman rule and discuss how frequent rebellions were in the Roman empire’s provinces and what were their causes. In particular we think about Judaea, and the Jewish population of the empire more generally, in the first and second centuries AD. Why was there a big rebellion in AD 66 against Nero’s rule, another of the Jewish population in Egypt, North Africa and Cyprus but NOT Judaea against Trajan, and then the final major rebellion in Judaea under Hadrian.

March 28, 2026

QotD: The moment the American empire began to decline

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans1 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So … they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy”. What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.2 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation”, and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.

As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,3 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity”. I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.

Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.

Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.

The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil”. I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails

Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive4 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?”

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.

  1. Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.
  2. Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.
  3. Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it. >
  4. “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”

March 17, 2026

The mine threat in the Straits of Hormuz

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander discusses the naval situation in Iranian coastal waters as the threat of mines in the busy seaway helps deter civilian tanker traffic even more than existing drone and missile threat:

At the end of last week, things were a’buzz’n about ‘ole silent-but-deadly … MINES!

There is a lot of bad and in some places intentionally misleading reporting from traditional media on down over this weekend, so let’s do a quick summary.

The NYT got the ball rolling.

    Iran has begun laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf channel that carries 20 percent of the world’s oil, according to U.S. officials, an effort that could further complicate American efforts to restart shipping there.

    While the U.S. military said it had destroyed larger Iranian naval vessels that could be used to quickly lay mines in the strait, Iran began using smaller boats for the operation on Thursday, according to a U.S. official briefed on the intelligence.

    Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps can deploy hundreds, even thousands, of the small boats, which the Iranian force has long used to harass larger ships, including the U.S. Navy’s.

This quickly reminded everyone of a little event from the start of the year that had a memorable visual.

Via TWZ:

    Four decommissioned U.S. Navy Avenger class mine countermeasures ships have left Bahrain on what may be their final voyage aboard a larger heavy lift vessel. Avengers had been forward-deployed to the Middle Eastern nation for years, where critical mine countermeasures duties have now passed to Independence class Littoral Combat Ships (LCS).

    The public affairs office for U.S. Naval Forces Central Command (NAVCENT) and U.S. 5th Fleet first released pictures of the M/V Seaway Hawk, a contracted semi-submersible heavy lift vessel, carrying the former Avenger class ships USS Devastator, USS Dextrous, USS Gladiator, and USS Sentry last Friday. The Navy released more images and a brief statement yesterday. The date stamps on the pictures show the Avengers were physically loaded onto the Seaway Hawk in Bahrain on January 9.

This had a second echo of a seapower past.

    Battered and unseaworthy, HMS Middleton was dragged by tugs into Portsmouth naval base on Sunday.

    The Hunt class mine countermeasures vessel (MCMV) returned to the home of the Royal Navy on March 8 after being brought back from the Gulf by a heavy-lift ship.

    The ignominious piggy-back was cheaper than letting the more than 40-year-old ship make the 6,200-mile journey back from Bahrain under her own power and freed her crew to join other ships.

    But her return after a journey that took weeks meant the end of the Royal Navy’s anti-mine vessel presence in the Middle East after almost 50 years. Only unmanned drone systems are left, according to the Navy.

Another metaphor, etc.

However, there is a worry that Iran might mine the Strait of Hormuz because it has been a concern — and occasionally a reality — for almost half a century.

March 11, 2026

Britain’s reputation in the Near East just cratered

Filed under: Britain, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack Notes, Earl explains why the inexplicable delay in getting a Royal Navy warship out to protect Gulf allies from Iranian missiles is having serious negative impact on Britain’s longstanding relations with the targeted nations:

A MASTERCLASS IN MILITARY INCOMPETENCE

The Starmer administration’s handling of the Iranian crisis is being whispered about in the corridors of Whitehall as a historic “cock up” of the highest order. Despite receiving a formal request from the Americans on 11 February — a full 17 days before the offensive actually commenced — the British government appears to have spent that critical window in a state of paralyzed indecision. The U.S. request was not an invitation for Britain to join the initial “decapitation strikes”, but rather a plea for the Royal Navy to help shield vulnerable Gulf allies from the inevitable Iranian retaliation. Instead of stepping up to protect the 240,000 British citizens living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the Ministry of Defence oversaw a period of baffling inaction that has left regional partners feeling utterly betrayed.

The diplomatic fallout has been described by insiders as nothing short of catastrophic, with Middle Eastern allies expressing “undiluted fury” at the lack of British support. A former minister with deep ties to Amman reports that Jordan is “fking furious”, while leaders in Kuwait and the Emirates are openly questioning whose side Britain is actually on. The Cypriots are reportedly “incandescent” after learning that military assets were actually withdrawn from their vicinity just as the threat level spiked. Only this week did it emerge that HMS Dragon would finally deploy — nearly three weeks after the initial American SOS — a timeline that military experts say is far too little and far too late to restore trust.

Strategic failures have been compounded by what veteran commanders call a total lack of foresight regarding naval positioning. The only available Astute-class submarine was permitted to continue its journey toward Australia, despite having passed through the Gulf just weeks ago when it could have been held as a vital contingency. Security officials now warn that the Trump administration is viewing the UK’s “free riding” with growing contempt. There is a palpable fear in the MOD that the Americans, tired of London’s dithering, will simply cut Britain out of the loop entirely and strike a direct deal with Mauritius to secure the long-term use of Diego Garcia for future operations.

Inside the government, the situation is being described as “incoherent” and “unconscionable”. By allowing the United States to utilize British bases like RAF Fairford for strikes while simultaneously refusing to participate in the missions themselves, Starmer has managed to achieve the worst of both worlds. Critics say they have invited the risk of being targeted by Tehran without the benefit of having any say in the coalition’s strategic direction. One former defence chief has branded this policy “reprehensible”, arguing that Britain has effectively surrendered its seat at the table in exchange for a front-row seat to its own strategic irrelevance.

The sobering reality in Whitehall is a growing sense that the UK no longer has the capacity to shape events in the Middle East. A former Downing Street adviser noted that the “intensity of Labour’s feelings” on the conflict is now matched only by their lack of influence. Allies have stopped listening because they no longer believe Britain can — or will — deliver on its security promises. As the Trump administration continues its high-tempo campaign to dismantle the IRGC, the United Kingdom finds itself sidelined, watched with suspicion by its friends and emboldened by its enemies, all due to a fortnight of inexcusable hesitation.

On March 9th, The Guardian reported that HMS Dragon will sail “in the next couple of days”, heading to Cyprus to take over duties from French, Greek and Spanish ships in providing missile defence to the British air base at Akrotiri. YouTube channel Navy Lookout posted footage of HMS Dragon leaving Portsmouth here.

CDR Salamander looks back at the naval “special relationship” that appears more and more to be just a fading memory:

We need to stop pretending we have a Royal Navy we knew in our youth or even that of two decades ago. No, we have something altogether different. Something shrunken. Something weaker. Something that is, in the end, really sad. A symptom of a nation who has lost an enthusiasm for herself or even an understanding of her national interest and led by a ruling class that seems uninterested in stewardship.

The state of the Royal Navy — a condition that took decades of neglect to manifest into its form today and will take decades to repair if there is ever the will to do so — has become, as navies can often do, a symbol of the state of the nation it serves.

There is a lesson here, not just for the United States, but all nations who consider themselves a naval power.

If you fail over and over to properly fund, develop, train, and support your navy, you can coast for quite awhile on the inertia of the hard work and investment of prior generations, but eventually that exhausts itself, and you are left with the husk of your own creation.

Yes, I’m looking at you, DC.

March 10, 2026

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As I mentioned last time, as I don’t try to stay on top of the “breaking news” cycle, I’m not feverishly refreshing all my social media feeds to get the latest dope about the latest confict with the Islamic State. It’s not that I don’t care, but that as with all modern wars the ratio of signal to noise renders almost all of it worthless for finding out what’s actually happening. At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter tries to gather his thoughts on the issue, subject to the same kind of informational constraints:

When I sit down to write, I usually have some idea of what I want to say – not only a topic I want to address, but a specific message I want to communicate. This is not going to be one of those essays. My feelings on the war on Iran are conflicted, to say the least. Nor do I feel that I understand enough about what’s happening to say much of substance. Nevertheless, on a matter that is of such potentially world-shaking import, I owe it to you not to be silent. So I’m setting out here to try and organize my thoughts on the matter. Whether they come to some conclusion or not, I have no idea. If nothing else, perhaps this will serve as a jumping off point for further discussion in the comments. Many of you, I’m sure, will have strong opinions on the subject, and many will also possess insights that I do not.

Will this war be of world-shaking import? That is perhaps the core of the matter. If it is not, and the principle of Nothing Ever Happens holds, then bombing Iran will not actually matter that much. A month from now, or even a couple weeks, the bombardment will fade back into the news cycle, the storm and fury of a million passionately articulated hot takes fading back into the warm, frothing ocean of discourse.

Certainly this has happened before. Trump has bombed Iran’s nuclear research facilities a few months ago, and assassinated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Commander Qasem Soleimani a few years ago. Every time this kind of thing happens there are panicked shouts that thermonuclear Ragnarok is imminent, alongside outraged cries that Zion Don has betrayed MAGA by engaging in precisely the foreign interventionism that he repudiated, that he has been captured by the Neocohens, and that We Will Not Die For Israel. In each case, nothing much happened. Iran raised the red flag of revenge, or the gold flag of implacable annihilation, or the black flag of this time we really mean it, all of which amounted in practice to a few rockets being fired ineffectually in Israel’s general direction, to be absorbed by an Iron Dome that really seems to work quite well. There was no World War III. There were no boots on the ground. As I saw someone observe recently, We Will Not Die For Israel has become the groyper version of the Handmaid’s Tale: no one is actually asking anyone to die for Israel; there are no imminent plans for mass conscription; therefore protestations that one will resist a non-existent draft amount to the same kind of lurid masturbatory fantasy as declarations that one would never, pant, allow oneself to be confined in a harem, pant pant, and turned into, pant pant pant, breeding stock.

Brief pause for meme:

And back to John Carter:

Maybe that will change. Maybe a year from now I’ll be ruefully eating those words, as American boys are being shipped off by their hundreds of thousands to run around blinded by Russian electronic countermeasures in the cold mountain passes of the Zagros, getting picked off by snipers and shredded by Chinese drones.

But I doubt it.

Modern warfare doesn’t have much use for conscript armies. That lesson was learned in Vietnam: conscripts generally have poor morale, they aren’t highly motivated, they aren’t usually of the highest quality, and so they are of limited usefulness on the battlefield. Soldiers are highly trained professionals who have chosen the military as a career. That makes them much less likely to mutiny. Moreover, modern warfare is highly technical: soldiers have to be extremely well trained to be any use at all. The young men who volunteer for military service usually do so with some hope of adventure and even danger. As such, they often positively look forward to war.

None of this should be taken to imply that Israel hasn’t played a massive role in orchestrating and precipitating this war. They clearly have. Marco Rubio let this slip when he admitted that part of the reason the US attacked when they did was that Israel had signalled that they were going to attack with or without America’s blessing or assistance; since Iran would certainly direct some of its retaliation against the Little Satan towards the regional assets of the Great Satan, America’s hand was forced. This is a bit like when your shithead friend has had one Jameson’s too many and you sit down next to him at the bar only to find that he’s about to throw hands at some asshole you’ve never met: you’re liable to take a punch to the nose no matter what you do, so you might as well have your friend’s back. You can call him a shithead later.

Israel’s involvement goes much deeper than this, of course. Zionism’s penetration of American conservatism is hardly a secret. There are Dispensationalists all over the Republican party, including the Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, and probably Marco Rubio (though technically he’s a Catholic). Republicans who shrug off open anti-white bigotry systematically directed against America’s core population in essentially all of its universities react with fury to campus anti-Semitism, threatening to withhold funding from any institutions that tolerate hurt Jewish feelings. Then of course there’s the big guy himself. Trump has never been much of a Christian, still less an evangelical ZioChristian, but he seems to have undergone something of a religious awakening after divine intervention saved his life in Butler, Pennsylvania. And who can blame him? It certainly doesn’t seem implausible that since then, Trump has been influenced by Zionists who have convinced him that G-d saved him so that he could save America and, more importantly, G-d’s Chosen People. “You are the second coming of Cyrus the Great” would be an appealing narrative to a man with a vast ego. It would be even more appealing given the political and economic support it would come with. Certainly there would be no shortage of avenues for approach: Trump’s daughter is married into the tribe, after all.

March 7, 2026

The massive blind spot in gender studies programs

Filed under: Education, Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, stepfanie tyler recounts her own experience in university with gender studies:

Some feminists romanticize mandatory hair coverings, social exclusion and lack of rights for women in Islamic countries. Because reasons.

When I was in “Women’s and Gender Studies” in college, we spent a lot of time talking about “systems”, “the patriarchy” and all these hidden structures supposedly shaping women’s lives in the West

I entertained a lot of those ideas back then and I was trying my best to understand the frameworks they were teaching

But the one place I never gave them an inch on was women in the Middle East

Every time someone would say “that’s just their culture” something in me short-circuited. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t reconcile it

We were told American women were oppressed because of wage gaps or subtle social expectations, but when the conversation turned to women who could be punished by the state for showing their hair, suddenly we were supposed to become culturally sensitive (some of these lunatics even romanticized it!)

My professors used to get irritated with me when that topic came up bc they knew I wasn’t going to play along and my pushback would cause a rift in their narrative

They didn’t like it when I pointed out the hypocrisy of calling Western women oppressed while treating literal legal restrictions on women’s bodies as a cultural difference

One of my professors even had a running joke she’d use to preface discussions on Islam—she’d do this smug smirk and say something to the effect of “we all know Stepfanie’s take on Islam” as if I was the ridiculous one

Looking back, I wish I had the language and wit to verbally obliterate her but I was 22 and simply did not have the intellectual capacity yet. I didn’t know the first thing about geopolitics, I just knew in my bones how fucking stupid it sounded to be bitching about making 20 cents less than men when women in the Middle East were being stoned to death for showing their hair

Even back then, before my politics changed, that contradiction never sat right with me. And it’s one of the many reasons I despise so-called feminists so much today

March 6, 2026

Congress shrugs responsibility for declarations of war, as Trump expected

Filed under: Europe, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As many have noted, the President of the United States does not have the constitutional power to declare war, as that is explicitly assigned to the rights of Congress. But in this, as in many other areas, Congress is unlikely to interfere once a President has set the military machine in motion. It is convenient for both the sitting President and for the individual members of Congress, who can posture and speechify against or in favour, but won’t actually be held responsible by the voters regardless of the war’s outcome. President Trump’s use of trade war tactics against allies and enemies alike is also an area where Congress is apparently willing to turn a blind eye:

US military bases in Spain (Map from sutori.com)

No Spain, no gain? It was probably inevitable that President Donald Trump’s trade war would eventually get mixed up in his actual war.

Earlier this week, Spanish officials said they would prohibit American forces from using joint bases for war operations, unless those activities were covered by the United Nations Charter. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said his country would not “be complicit in something that is bad for the world”, the Associated Press reports.

On Tuesday, Trump declared that he intended to “cut off all trade with Spain”.

You might wonder: What legal authority does Trump have to unilaterally impose these sorts of revenge tariffs? After all, the Supreme Court ruled not that long ago that the authority Trump had been using to unilaterally impose tariffs based on his whims was unconstitutional. You might as well ask: On what legal authority did Trump launch a war against Iran? In theory, under the Constitution, Congress is supposed to authorize both tariffs and wars. In practice, they, uh, don’t.

Trump just does things, and the annoying constitutional worrywarts can figure it out later. (I say this as an annoying constitutional worrywart.)

In any case, yesterday, the Trump administration announced that Spain had changed its tune. “The U.S. military is coordinating with their counterparts in Spain”, White House Press press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. The implication was that the tariff threats had worked.

Spain, however, said otherwise. “I can refute (the White House spokesperson)”, Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares said. “The position of the Spanish government regarding the war in the Middle East, the bombing of Iran and the use of our bases has not changed one iota.” Maybe those tariff threats aren’t as effective as Trump thinks?

In a speech, Sánchez warned that the war could spin out of control. “Nobody knows for sure what will happen now”, he said. “Even the objectives of those who launched the first attack are unclear. But we must be prepared, as the proponents say, for the possibility that this will be a long war, with numerous casualties and, therefore, with serious economic consequences on a global scale.”

Sánchez also implicitly admonished Trump for escalating the war: “You can’t respond to one illegality with another because that’s how humanity’s great disasters begin”.

I will just note that in the Star Wars prequels, the fall of the Republic, and the descent into darkness and imperial rule, began with a planetary blockade and a trade war. At the time, people said it was wonky and boring. But here we are.

Where is Congress? The Constitution was built around the idea that each branch would fight to preserve its own powers, and this would create a system of checks and balances. But in Trump’s second term, Republicans in the legislature have been actively fighting to not preserve their power.

Yesterday, in a 47–53 vote, Senate Republicans voted against a resolution that would have required Trump to ask Congress to sign off on any further military aggression in Iran. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted with Democrats in favor of the measure; Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) joined Republicans to vote against it.

The measure was mostly symbolic. Even a successful vote would have been subject to a House vote and a presidential veto. And the position of both the White House and the GOP Speaker of the House is that this whole situation in which America is spending billions of dollars dropping thousands and thousands of bombs on military and political targets in a foreign country is not, in fact, a war. Nothing to see here. Everyone in Congress can go home and crack open a beer.

March 5, 2026

“[I]nternational law is not law; it is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law”

Filed under: Government, Law, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby discusses the charming illusion that “international law” is a real thing and must be treated as a real thing:

In domestic (“municipal”) law, questions of illegality arise. They arise because states have laws. They have laws because their laws come with remedies — consequences for breaking the law.

So, it is a genuine question whether President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in his attack on Iran. But that is a genuine question because the US has a Constitution that matters. The US is a rule-of-law state, no matter how much other common law jurisdictions may point and laugh at how politicised US law is.

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121), Henry J. Kaiser-class fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO-187), Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Carl Brashear (T-AKE 7) and U.S. Coast Guard Sentinel-class fast-response cutters USCG Robert Goldman (WPC-1142) and USCGC Clarence Sutphin. Jr. (WPC-1147) sail in formation in the Arabian Sea, Feb. 6, 2026. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to support maritime security and stability in the Middle East.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford via Wikimedia Commons.

In terms of the international order, however, there is no such thing as an illegal war, because (public) international law is not law. It is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law. It only pretends to be law as it has no remedies — apart from declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. (Private international law does have enforceable and enforced remedies, so is law.)

One of the consequences of this is that (public) international law, as an academic discipline, has no substantive reality-tests. There are no decisions by judges that are enforceable and enforced. This has led to academic international law being the vector by which the toxic ideas of the Critical Theory magisterium, that increasingly dominates Anglo-American universities, have infected Law Schools.

(Public) International law should not be taught at Law Schools, because it is not law. It should be taught in International Relations or Political Science Departments. A PhD in International Law should not qualify you to teach in Law Schools. Indeed, if you cannot tell the difference between actual law — with genuine remedies — and a simulacrum of law, you should not be teaching students at all.

Rules-based international order

When folk refer to the rules-based international order, they are not referring to nothing. There are various rules and conventions it is convenient for states, and other agents, to follow.

There is also a difference between the mercantile maritime order and continental anarchy. It is not an accident that the original international conventions pertained to sea travel and trade.

Within continental anarchy, it is relative power that matters. A war that depletes your resources and capacities, but depletes those of your neighbours more, is a winning proposition, within the state-geopolitics of continental anarchy. The geopolitics of continental anarchy leads states to seek weak or subordinate neighbours. The mercantile maritime order, on the other hand, is all about creating win-win interactions.

Russia, India and China are all continental Powers that live, at least to some extent, in a situation of continental anarchy. But they are also trading States that benefit from the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony. The tension between China as a trading nation becoming the biggest single beneficiary of the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony, and the interests of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), is the central strategic difficulty that CCP China faces.

Israel faces the strategic dilemma of operating in a region of continental anarchy but seeking support from states deeply embedded in the mercantile maritime order. Whether the Middle East has to be a region of continental anarchy, or can it become far more embedded in the mercantile maritime order, is precisely what is at stake in the latest conflict.

Any social order has to be enforced. This is even more true of international orders. As there is no such thing as international (public) law, enforcing an international order is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of those who actively support and enforce that order and those who seek to subvert it.

A vivid example of how central enforceability is to any international order is given by comparing the treatment of Germany after the two World Wars. Germany was treated far more harshly after the Second World War than after the First World War. The crucial difference was that the Versailles order was not enforceable by the victors and the Potsdam order was.

Update, 6 March: 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.

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