But if the Roman Empire (in the West) went down fighting, why did it collapse? Of course there is no simple answer to that question. The mass migrations of the fourth and fifth century clearly played a very large role, but then the Romans had defeated other such migrations (recall the Cimbri and the Teutones) before. There are strong indicators that other factors, unrelated to our current topic were also at play: the empire had been economically weakened by the Crisis of the Third Century, which may have disrupted a lot of the trade and state functions that created the revenue to fund state activity. At the same time, the Crisis and the more challenging security situation after it meant that Roman armies grew larger and with them the burden of paying and feeding the soldiers which further hurt the economy. Meanwhile, long exposure to Roman armies on the frontiers of the empire had begun to erode the initially quite vast qualitative advantage the Romans enjoyed; the gap between Roman and “barbarian” military capabilities began to shrink (although it never really vanished altogether in this period). But some of the causes do bear on our topic but in quite the other direction from what the Niall Fergusons of the world might assume.
Let’s start with the foederati.
After the Constitutio Antoniniana, there was no longer much need for the auxilia, as all persons in the empire were citizens, and so the structure distinction between the legions and other formations fades away (part of this is also the tendency of the legions in this period to be progressively split up into smaller units called vexillationes, meaning that the unit-sizes wouldn’t have been so different). But during the fourth century, with frontier pressures building, the Romans again looked for ways to utilize the manpower and fighting skill of non-Romans. What is striking here is that whereas in some ways […] the auxilia had represented almost a revival of the attitudes which had informed the system for the socii, the new system that emerged for using foreign troops, called foederati (“treaty men”) did not draw on the previously successful auxilia-system (which, to be clear, by this point had been effectively gone for more than a century). Instead, the Romans signed treaties with Germanic-speaking kings, exchanging chunks of (often depopulated, war-torn frontier) land in exchange for military service. Since these troops were bound by treaty (foedus) they were called foederati. They served in their own units, under their own leaders, up to their kings. Consequently, all of the mechanisms that encouraged the auxilia to adopt Roman practices and identify with the Roman Empire were lost; these men might view Rome as a friendly ally (at times) but they were never encouraged to think of themselves as Roman.
The reason for this different system of recruitment seem to be rooted in financial realities. The Roman army had already been expanded during the Crisis of the Third Century and only grew more under Diocletian and Constantine, probably by this point being between 400,000 and 500,000 men (compared to 300,000-350,000 earlier in the empire). Moreover, Diocletian had opted to reform the empire’s administration with a much more intensive, top-down, bureaucratic approach, which imposed further costs. Taxes had become heavy (although elites were increasingly allowed to dodge them), the economy was weak and revenues were short. The value of the foederati was that the empire didn’t have to pay them; they were handed land (again, in war-torn frontier zones) and expected to use that to pay for their military support. At the time, it must have seemed a brilliant work-around to get more military power out of a dwindling tax-base.
(I feel the need to note that I increasingly regard Diocletian (r. 284-305) as a ruinous emperor, even though he lacked the normal moralizing character flaws of “bad emperors”. While he was active, dedicated and focused, almost all of his reforms turned out to be quite bad ideas in the long run even before one gets to the Great Persecution. His currency reforms were catastrophic, his administrative reforms were top-heavy, his tax plan depended on a regular census which was never regular and the tetrarchy was doomed from its inception. Diocletian was pretty much a living, “Well, You Tried” meme. That said, to be clear, Diocletian wasn’t responsible for the foederati; it’s not quite clear who the first foederati were – they may have been the Franks in 358, which would make Julian (as a “Caesar” or junior-emperor under Constantius) the culprit for this bad idea – he had a surplus of those too.)
The problem, of course, is right there: the status of the foederati made it impossible for them to ever fully integrate into the empire. They had, after all, their own kings, their own local laws and served in their own military formations. While, interestingly, they would eventually adopt Latin from the local population which had already done so (leading to French, Spanish and Italian) they could never become Roman. That wasn’t always their choice, either! As O’Donnell (op. cit.) notes, many of these foederati wanted to be “in” in the Roman Empire; it was more frequently the Romans who were busy saying “no”. It is striking that this occurs in a period where social class in the Roman world was generally calcifying. Whereas citizenship had been an expanding category, after the Constitutio Antoniniana, the legal categories of honestiores and humiliores (lit. “respectable” and “humble” people, but in practice, “wealthy” and “commoners”) largely replaced citizenship as the legal dividing lines of Roman society. These were far less flexible categories, as economic social mobility in the ancient world was never very high. Even there, the tax reforms of Diocletian (with some “patches” under Constantine) began, for tax purposes, to tie tenant farmers (“coloni“) to their land, essentially barring both physical and economic mobility in the name of more efficient tax collection in a system that strongly resembled later medieval serfdom.
Nevertheless, the consequence of this system of organization was that as often as the foederati provided crucial soldiers to Roman armies, they were just as frequently the problem Roman armies were being sent to address. Never fully incorporated into the Roman army and under the command of their own kings, they proved deeply unreliable allies. Pitting one set of foederati against the next could work in the short-term, but in the long term, without any plan to permanently incorporate the foederati into Roman society, fragmentation was inevitable. The Roman abandonment of the successful older systems for managing diverse armies (on account that they were too expensive) turned the foederati from a potential source of vital manpower into the central cause of imperial collapse in the West.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
November 21, 2025
QotD: Why did the (western) Roman Empire collapse?
October 16, 2025
The Mexican-American War 1846-48
Real Time History
Published 16 May 2025In the early 19th century, the United States and Mexico share a massive cross-continental border, but US settlement in Mexico, expansionist ideals and religious differences put the young republics on a collision course. As tensions boil over into bloodshed, the tiny, inexperienced US army marches to a war which will forge the modern United States.
Chapters:
00:00 Texas Republic
05:06 Declaration of War
07:03 The US Army
09:26 British Muskets in the Mexican Army
16:19 The Mexican Army
18:24 The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma
21:38 California and New Mexico
25:11 US Volunteers
28:40 Battle of Monterrey
33:03 Expanding the War
36:59 The Pedregal Battles
40:18 Battles for Mexico City
43:42 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
45:14 Legacy
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October 9, 2025
QotD: Ontario and the Loyalists
In 1784, after the American Revolution, Loyalist settlers arrived with intention, bringing with them the legal traditions, religious institutions, and steadfast allegiance to the Crown that had shaped their former world. They sought to uphold a civilisational order rooted in monarchy, Church, and Law, and to establish a society founded on duty, hierarchy, and restraint. From these early Loyalist settlements, beginning at Kingston, a distinct political and cultural tradition emerged. It was neither British nor American. It became the foundation of a new people.
Today, the descendants of these settlers form the core of an ethnocultural identity known as Anglo-Canadian. Numbering over ten million across the country, and more than six million in Ontario, Anglo-Canadians are known for their enduring institutions: constitutional monarchy, common law, Protestant-rooted civic morality, and a national ethos shaped by loyalty and order. This cultural framework shaped Ontario’s development across every sphere of life.
Loyalists built the province’s schools, banks, and legal systems. They established its early industries, including agriculture, forestry, mining, and railroads, and later came to dominate the professional sectors of law, education, public administration, and finance. Their shining city, Toronto the Good, became the centre of Canadian banking and corporate life, while small towns across the province were anchored by courthouses, parish churches, and grain elevators.
Language and schooling played a central role in shaping the Anglo-Canadian character. Ontario’s education system, from common schools to universities, was built to transmit British values, civic order, and the English language. Protestant denominational schools and later public grammar schools taught the children of settlers to read scripture, study British history, and speak in the elite formal register of English Canada. Institutions such as Upper Canada College, Queen’s University, and the University of Toronto became pillars of elite formation, producing the clergy, lawyers, teachers, and administrators who carried the culture forward.
Culturally, Anglo-Canadians preserved a rhythm of domestic and seasonal life rooted in British tradition but adapted to the northern landscape. Autumn fairs, apple bobbing, and harvest suppers marked the calendar in rural communities. Roast beef, butter tarts, mincemeat pies, and tea with milk became the everyday fare of farmhouses and urban kitchens alike. Sunday observance, cenotaph ceremonies, school uniforms, and service clubs reflected a moral seriousness and civic sense inherited from the Loyalist project. It is this tradition that formed the structural spine of its political and cultural development.
Fortissax, “Loyal she Began, Loyal she Remains”, Fortissax is Typing, 2025-07-07.
September 16, 2025
Fenian Needham Conversion: Just the Thing for Invading Canada
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 May 2025The Fenian Brotherhood was formed in the US in 1858, a partner organization to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The groups were militant organizations looking to procure Irish independence from the British, and they found significant support among the Irish-American immigrant community. In November 1865 they purchased some 7500 1861- and 1863-pattern muskets left over from Civil War production, and used them to invade Canada in April 1866. The idea was to capture the country and then trade it to the British in exchange for Irish independence … but the invasion went quite badly. The Fenians briefly held Fort Erie, but were pushed out after a few hours and largely arrested by American forces.
The Fenians’ muskets were confiscated, but all returned by the end of 1866 in exchange for promised Irish-American support of embattled President Johnson. By 1868, the group was making plans for another attempt at conquering Canada. This time they would have better arms — they obtained a disused locomotive factory in Trenton NJ and set up the Pioneer Arms Works to convert 5,020 muskets into centerfire Needham Conversion breechloaders. These were given chambers that could fire standard .58 centerfire ammunition, or the .577 Snider ammunition that the Fenians expected to be able to procure once in Canada. Most of the guns also had their stocks cut, to allow them to be packed in shorter crates for transit. These usually have a distinctive “V” cut in the stock, which was spliced back together before use.
When the second invasion came in April 1870, it was again a failure. Only 800-1000 men turned out of the 5,000+ expected. They were scattered among several different muster points on the border, and the Canadians were once again aware of their plans. The most substantial fight was at a place called Eccles Hill, where the Missisiquoi Home Guard was ready and waiting for them with good Ballard rifles. Upon crossing the border, the Fenians were soundly defeated.
This second time, the guns were confiscated and not returned. Instead, the Watervliet Arsenal sold them as surplus in 1871. They were purchased by Schuyler, Hartley & Graham for commercial resale, and thanks to that several hundred remain in collector hands today.
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September 2, 2025
Too much empathy can be more dangerous than too little
Spaceman Spiff explains why boundaries matter, in so many different areas of modern life:
Empathy is a virtue many strive to demonstrate. But few will discuss its downsides. Why it is not universally good or useful. How it can be misdirected.
In some situations it is lethal. It can reflect a suicidal urge we now see in Western nations.
Much empathy in society is in fact sentimentality, which is dangerous. Sentimental ideas about mixing cultures, elevating poor performers through quotas, or tinkering with traditional gender roles have real world effects.
With such an emphasis on empathy, which many think of as niceness, we overlook the need for boundaries to maintain a functioning society.
This is the issue at the heart of much that is damaging us today.
Individual rights
We live in an era that champions individual rights to an almost autistic degree. This is a product of Western liberalism, which now seems to be entering its terminal phase as its effects ultimately destroy what made Western societies strong.
Since an individual’s rights trump everything we cannot easily enforce boundaries our ancestors could take for granted. Try challenging a gay pride parade or transgender material in schools on the grounds of public decency and the least you can expect is to lose your job.
Profound changes have happened just in the last few decades and all in the name of individual rights. The erosion of boundaries on behaviour is one of the most visible aspects of this.
Physical boundaries
The concept of boundaries is almost universal and spans everything from the mundane to the spiritual.
Most countries recognize the right to private property and inherent within this is the notion of boundaries. My car is mine and no one else’s, for example.
This is applied to our homes and gardens. These are ours and defendable from theft. Ultimately this in turn includes a neighbourhood or locale, even a region or state. All these things have visible boundaries that demarcate where they begin and end.
Most famously this applies to national borders, a traditional form of boundary in use for thousands of years. Failing to enforce this barrier is national suicide. The world is not like us and if it comes to us we will look like the world in return. Borders keep the barbarians out.
Everyone instinctively grasps these kinds of boundaries. We close our windows and have locks on our doors because of this understanding.
Using boundaries to exclude others feels natural.
Cultural boundaries
Less explicitly visible are cultural boundaries, often transmitted via tradition and convention. We have spent the last century attacking many of these as old fashioned, with little pause to consider why tradition emerges in the first place.
Marriage between men and women. Complementary gender roles. Sexual mores kept private. The sanctity of childhood, its innocence protected from intrusion.
As we removed constraints in the name of progress we destroyed much of the glue that held our societies together. We are now watching things unravel as people marry less and produce fewer children. We see widespread mental illness and anguish as the few basic certainties of life are destroyed in the name of progress.
People don’t know who or what they are when cultural boundaries are deleted. Women, men, natives, newcomers, the working class. Who are we really without some certainties in life?
August 23, 2025
“Trump … sees transshipment and nearshoring as sneaky workarounds”
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Jake Scott explains Donald Trump’s latest anti-trade moves:
President Donald Trump’s executive order of July 31st, effective August 7th, has upended global trade dynamics in a single stroke. Slapping a 40% tariff on all “transshipped goods” — products rerouted through third countries to dodge US duties — this is merely the natural development of his evolving protectionist agenda.
Just a week after the order, the move is a clear shot at China’s sprawling manufacturing empire, which has long exploited methods like transshipment and “nearshoring” to skirt American tariffs in general, and Trump’s tariff policies in particular.
While applied globally, China stands to take the biggest hit (and likely already is), with its vast factory networks and knack for rerouting goods through Southeast Asia, Mexico, and beyond. This isn’t just a tariff hike; it’s a calculated escalation in Trump’s ongoing crusade to reshape US trade policy and the global economy in the United States’ favor. But ripple effects that bruise consumers are already visible — and this move is likely to strain relationships with key allies as well.
The new tariffs build on Trump’s first-term strategy — so extensive that it now has a Wikipedia entry — when he wielded America’s economic heft like a sledgehammer to renegotiate or smash trade deals he deemed unfair. Back then, Chinese firms sidestepped US tariffs by setting up shop in countries like Vietnam and Mexico, funneling goods through these hubs to mask their origins.
This nearshoring strategy buoyed many economies that had pre-existing arrangements with the United States or were treated more favorably than China, such as Canada and Latin American nations. It is also seen as a natural part of globalization: shipping parts from where they are constructed (like China), assembling them in developing nations (like Mexico), and then exporting to high-value markets (like the United States). Nearshoring has a long history, but the fragility of extended global supply chains was exposed in the Covid pandemic; since then, manufacturers have sought to mitigate their damage.
The US trade deficit with China (roughly $295 billion) has long been a sore point for Trump, who sees transshipment and nearshoring as sneaky workarounds. The 40% duty on these goods, layered atop existing tariffs, aims to plug this loophole. As Stephen Olson, a former US trade negotiator, noted in the New York Times, China will likely view this as a direct attempt to “box them in”, potentially souring already tense talks.
August 12, 2025
German-Soviet Invasion of Poland 1939
Real Time History
Published 8 Aug 2025Germany and the Soviet Union both regarded the Polish state as a creation of the post-WW1 system, and both had claims on Polish territory. In the summer of 1939, Adolf Hitler decided to invade Poland in a fait acompli against the Allies. In a secret agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union they agreed on dividing up the Polish state and Eastern Europe.
(more…)
July 4, 2025
QotD: US-Canadian conflict before Confederation
The Aroostook War (1838–1839) drew no blood. The conflict concerned the Maine-New Brunswick border and was resolved amicably by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. A quarter of a century later the Fenian Raids (1866–1871) saw the Irish-American Fenian Brotherhood make multiple non-state sanctioned attacks in British North America in an effort to sway Britain to withdraw forces from Ireland.
The other far more consequential military struggles between the two North American friends and neighbours occurred first in the late eighteenth century, and second in the early nineteenth century. During the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783), which saw limited involvement of areas north of the 49th parallel, British North America thwarted a particularly serious invasion by the Americans in 1775 known as The Battle of Quebec.
It was fought during a snowstorm on December 31, 1775 (one of few battles fought in such miserable conditions during the revolutionary war). The American intention was to conscript the British colony, which today forms the province of Quebec (and also included parts of Ontario) into their struggle against the British. The Patriots of the Thirteen Colonies had earlier that year begun rebelling against British taxation and governance. They surmised that the French-speaking Quebec settlers, disaffected with the imposition of British rule as it was laid out in the 1763 Treaty of Paris (which ended the Seven Years War), would join the American cause. A significant miscalculation, to say the least.
The battle was fought on two fronts against a British garrison of 1800 soldiers led by British commander, Governor Guy Carleton. The combined total of American troops was only 1200. The first front was commanded by Brigadier General Richard Montgomery, who led his troops in an attack of the Lower Town from the south. The second assault occurred from the north and was led by Colonel Benedict Arnold (who would later become an infamous American traitor).
Montgomery and several officers were killed instantly on their initial advance. This sparked a retreat amongst his remaining soldiers. Arnold had slightly more luck. His army penetrated northern defences but were stymied in the narrow streets of Quebec. During fighting Arnold was wounded, after which he handed the command to Daniel Morgan. After hours of fighting, Morgan and his men were forced to surrender. The Americans lost the battle decisively ensuring Quebec would remain a loyalist stronghold.
The second of the two significant conflicts involving British North America and the Thirteen American Colonies was the infamous War of 1812 – a more well-known period of antagonism between proto-Canada and her American neighbours.
Here is a topline summary with some extra history concerning the U.S.-Canada border (the world’s longest undefended border), from Terry Glavin:
The War of 1812 — which the Americans still pretend they won — was officially concluded with the Treaty of Ghent in 1814. Then came the Rush-Bagot Pact of 1817 and the Convention of 1818, which set the border at the 49th parallel.1
The War of 1812 took place during Britain’s struggle against Napoleonic France. The two most famous Canadian battles from this tragic conflict were the Battle of Queenston Heights and the burning of York (now Toronto) – British troops would even the score of the latter by burning Washington D.C.
The war was unpopular. Like today, there were too many bonds between the Americans and proto-Canadians. But also like today, with Canada and the United States once again bickering over trade and various political interests, the disagreements were accompanied by a reluctance to engage in hostilities.
From Pierre Burton’s War of 1812:
At the outset, it was a gentleman’s war. Officers on opposing sides met for parlays under flags of truce, offered hospitality, exchanged cordialities, murmured the hopes that hostilities would quickly end.2
No matter what time period we are examining, we can never forget that Britons, Canadians and Americans are all first cousins. Yes we disagree from time to time, sometimes we even fight. But always over some unfortunate political dispute, and never for each other’s annihilation.
In 1812, for a variety of reasons, the Americans, especially a minority of hawkish elites in Washington, felt they had no other choice but to invade the north. Some of them felt it would be easy. An aggravating factor concerned Britain’s support of Indian tribes in the north west, at a time when the Americans were aggressively expanding into that region. But also, during their imperial contest with France, the British were impressing sailors in the American navy (forcing them to join British forces), because they considered them traitors of the British crown. Further, they blocked key trade ports under Napoleon’s control, disrupting trade between America and France.
Isn’t it curious how trade so often appears as the rift in Canadian-American relations? Further examples include: the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 which allowed for free trade of natural resources between the American and British colonies. However, the Americans abrogated that treaty in 1866 partly out of frustration at perceived British support of the confederacy after the Civil War. A post-confederation trade war with the Americans ensued after Canada’s first Prime Minister John A. MacDonald adopted the National Policy in 1879, which imposed high tariffs to protect Canadian industry. Triggering the Americans to respond with tariffs of their own.
James Pew, “Canadians and our ties to Americans”, Woke Watch Canada, 2025-03-30.
1. Because of the day that’s in it – by Terry Glavin
2. Pierre Berton’s War of 1812.
June 5, 2025
German judges seem to be dedicated to ensuring that the government never changes policy, regardless of voter preference
The times I despair of the pathetic Canadian government, I look to Germany where eugyppius helpfully explains that German judges are even more dedicated to thwarting the will of the voters than Canadian judges are (and that’s a major achievement):
At the start of May, CSU Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt effectively abolished asylum as a path into Germany, empowering federal police to push back all illegal migrants at our national borders.
There ensued a period of messaging chaos, in which Chancellor Friedrich Merz assured our neighbours and the EU that nothing much was happening, while Dobrindt quietly insisted that yes, indeed, he was serious. He gave police orders to step up border checks and to send back all illegal migrants regardless of asylum claims – save for pregnant women, the underage and the sick.
These new borders policies have yet to exercise any significant influence on asylum statistics. It is relatively easy to cross into Germany despite the police spot checks, and we don’t yet know how many asylees are managing to evade them.
The deeper legal issues are much more significant right now. We want to know whether Dobrindt’s intervention is workable in theory, and whether our judges will swallow it. Unfortunately, he is already under siege from asylum advocates on the left and the broader migration industry, who have set and sprung a very telling trap, with the aim of getting courts to overturn even these preliminary and quite meagre interventions.
To understand the issues here, we need a brief legal primer: According to German law (the so-called Asylgesetz), foreigners who enter Germany from “secure” states do not get to claim asylum. They are to be sent straight back to wherever it is they came from. Because Germany is surrounded entirely by secure states, that should really be the end of this insane problem. Alas, this sensible law has been superseded since 1997 first by the Dublin Convention, and later by the Dublin II and now the Dublin III Regulation. The latter forbids the Federal Republic from using her own laws, holding that foreigners entering Germany from secure third states must be welcomed pending a procedure to establish which EU member state is actually responsible for them. Effectively, this means that almost all of these aspiring asylees remain in Germany indefinitely, because deporting people who do not belong here is beyond the meagre capacities of our enormous bureaucracy.
Dobrindt sought to get around Dublin by appealing to Article 72 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which allows member states to set aside EU regulations when this is necessary to maintain order and security.
Many have eyed this Article 72 strategy for a long time, but nothing is easy, particularly not in countries unduly enamoured of “the rule of law”, which is a lofty euphemism for “the rule of obscure crazy people in robes for whom nobody ever voted and who enjoy lifetime appointments”. These days the government cannot do anything at all except what it was already doing (and sometimes not even that), or unless it is obviously stupid, expensive and inadvisable, because lurking around every corner is a clinically insane judge eager to explain why sensible things are not allowed. In recent years, our extremely learned and far-sighed judiciary has explained why combating climate change is anchored in the German constitution and why basically everybody is entitled to exorbitant social welfare. All that remains for them is to explain why everybody on earth is also entitled to live in Germany and draw benefits from the state, and they will have completed their suicidal triad.
On Monday, 2 June, the Berlin Administrative Court struck the first blow in this direction. Effectively, they called the whole basis for Dobrindt’s new border policy into question, issuing what amounts to a preliminary injunction in the case of three Somalis (two men and one woman) who had crossed from Poland into Germany on 9 May. Federal police intercepted the trio at the train station in Frankfurt an der Oder; they claimed asylum and the police, in line with Dobrindt’s order, sent them back to Poland anyway. Lawyers from the advocacy organisation Pro Asyl then helped them bring suit in Berlin, and the court intervened in their favour. They get to be professional asylees in Germany now.
May 28, 2025
The Throne Speech
On his Substack, Paul Wells reports on the first Throne Speech delivered by the reigning monarch since the 1970s:
Mark Carney joins our visiting King in the traditional Making of the Small Talk.
Photo by Paul Wells from his Substack
We’re like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, or I guess, since the new PM is said to prefer British spellings, Charlye Brownne with Lewsey’s Foote Ball. Each generation of Canadian leadership tries to find a new way to make throne speeches exciting. These attempts are forever doomed, because no generation of Canadian leadership is exciting and because the format — a statement of intent from a dignitary who is forbidden to harbour autonomous intent — tends to short-circuit the delivery.
This time the delivery mechanism was the King of Canada, Charles Philip Arthur George, popping over from his secondary residence at Buckingham. His French tops Mary Simon’s, though his Inuktitut is shaky. He did his best to sound excited, or resolute, about the CBSA’s “new powers to examine goods”.
A quarter-century ago the reliably impish John Fraser told me he was preparing a book called Eminent Canadians that would survey recent developments in four Canadian institutions. The institutions he’d selected were the office of the Prime Minister; the Globe and Mail; the Anglican Church; — and here Fraser urged me to guess the fourth. Canadian institution? I dunno, the armed forces? The NHL? “The Crown”, Fraser said with a twinkle. Thus was I prepped for this week’s extended round of you-know-he’s-really-the-king-of-Canada browbeating.
This throne speech was like many before it, though out of deference for the deliverer it was on the short side, 21 pages tucked inside wide margins. In substance it was a paraphrase of Mark Carney’s already-semi-legendary Single Mandate Letter for cabinet ministers. There were sections on redefining Canada’s relationship with the United States; on internal trade; on crimefighting and national defence; and on “spending less and investing more”, which, I mean, we’ll see.
The mandate letter seems to have supplanted the Liberal election platform as the main blueprint for Carney’s action. The two aren’t wildly incompatible, but the mandate letter/throne speech is streamlined and puts stuff in different order.
I saw two surprises big enough to make me write today, but first I want to point to a few elements that are worth noting in the less-surprising stuff. That’s right, I’m trying to be useful, not just smart-assed, so here’s a way to thank me. […]
First, Carney (through His Majesty) makes claims for the “new economic and security relationship with the United States” that seem unrealistic. He expects “transformational benefits for both sovereign nations”. But surely any cross-border negotiation can only be, at best, an exercise in damage control? Any security costs that would be newly borne by Canada would represent a net cost. Trade arrangements short of the substantially free trade we’ve enjoyed for 40 years will also represent a net cost. The point of seeking “one Canadian economy” and taking relations with third countries more seriously is to offset the cost of a degraded Canada-US relationship, no?
Under “more affordable”, the throne speech repeats campaign promises for income-tax cuts and cuts to GST on new homes. The list of tangible financial benefits to individuals doesn’t go much past that. “The Government will protect the programs that are already saving families thousands of dollars every year. These include child care and pharmacare.” “Protect” is an old Ottawa word meaning “not extend”.
The goals for the “one Canadian economy” now include “free trade across the nation”, at both federal and provincial levels of government, “by Canada Day”. Which is 34 days away. The staffing and mandate of another new entity, a single-wicket “Major Federal Project Office”, may end up mattering more to this government’s success and Canada’s prosperity than the name of the PM’s next chief of staff, so put an asterisk next to that.
The government repeats a mysterious claim I’ve found shaky since Carney became a Liberal leadership candidate. It “will take a series of measures to catalyse new investment to create better jobs and higher incomes for Canadians. The scale of the Government’s initiative will match the challenges of our times and the ambitions of Canadians.” The challenges of our times, at least, are large.
So again: if the Canada Infrastructure Bank, the Canada Growth Fund and the Freeland-Sabia investment tax credits are sufficient to catalyse (British spelling) new investment, why duplicate them?
And if they haven’t worked, why keep them?
April 26, 2025
A proposal for cutting the Channel crossing phenomenon
In The Conservative Woman, David Wright suggests a concrete plan to stem the tide of “refugees” arriving in the south of England from Calais and other French Channel ports:
Illegal Channel crossings by rubber dinghies overloaded predominantly with young men have been an increasingly worrying trend for many years yet successive governments have made no serious or workable attempts to do anything about it.
Migrant crossings are up by more than 40 per cent on last year and a record for daily arrivals has been set. A total of 705 migrants in 12 boats crossed the Channel on Tuesday April 15, days after the previous record of 656 was set the previous Saturday. The total number of arrivals in 2025, at 8,888, is 42 per cent higher than at the same point last year and 81 per cent higher than at this stage in 2023. More arrivals were recorded in January to April than in the equivalent four-month period in any year since data on Channel crossings began in 2018.
The French authorities are providing lifejackets to ensure migrants can cross the Channel safely. The jackets are returned to the French once the migrants have been escorted to the mid-point of the Channel and are rescued by the British authorities, so that they can be re-used for future crossings.
We have seen French police on the beach at Calais standing idly by while migrants board dinghies to Dover.
[…]
The boats should be painted grey, a small gun mounted on the foredeck, and manned with recently retired RN personnel. (There would be no shortage of volunteers.) A small support base should be built in Folkestone harbour, initially using Portakabins for rapid start-up, with fuelling facilities, a small workshop, an accommodation block and a canteen. This could be achieved relatively quickly and at a modest cost to the defence budget. These boats would be tasked with patrolling the Dover Strait every day from dawn to dusk, three or four at a time. Drones could also be used to detect dinghies and direct the patrolling boats to them. They would not need to be at sea in weather too rough for small smuggler-boat crossings.
They should be tasked to intercept the smugglers wherever they are in the Channel, approaching our shores, over the mid-way line or just leaving French beaches, and turned back and escorted. On approach to the smugglers’ beach the Border Force vessel should stand off and launch a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) manned by four staff who would escort them until they grounded on the beach. With two of them standing guard with weapons the others, using box cutters, would slash long holes in the rubber dinghies and remove the outboard motors and drop them into the water to render them unserviceable. On completion the RIB should return to its vessel and the vessel withdraw to resume patrol. Input from serving senior naval officers would be needed to provide detailed operating procedures. Once deployed this division would be under the command of a senior serving officer.
Of course, French President Emmanuel Macron would immediately be protesting. But he hasn’t got a leg to stand on. France is a signatory to the Schengen Agreement which requires migrants/asylum seekers to be processed in the first safe country they enter. Not only that but Britain has paid France almost half a billion pounds to stop the migrants arriving at the beaches and boarding dinghies to Dover.
France has not only done nothing but trouser this cash while its navy continues to escort the dinghies into UK waters and hand them off to our Border Force or the RNLI.
April 25, 2025
Is Anschluss Back on the Menu? – Rise of Hitler 15, March 1931
World War Two
Published 24 Apr 2025March 1931 sees President Hindenburg unleash a controversial emergency decree, suspending key civil liberties to crush political violence in Germany. Meanwhile, Hitler promises legality but openly prepares the SA for the “Third Reich”, and the Nazi coalition in Thuringia collapses dramatically. Germany’s proposed customs union with Austria sparks international alarm — could this trigger another European conflict?
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April 7, 2025
Those brave, rare contrarians willing to risk everything by … criticizing Trump?
Chris Bray is deeply concerned that a free society seems unable to produce even a mild array of differing political opinions these days:
I was at a small independent bookstore today, the exact kind of place that’s supposed to curate a culture of argument and criticism. The prominently displayed books about politics and current events were Timothy Snyder’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, Jason Stanley’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, Anne Applebaum’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, and a bunch of other books by prominent journalists and professors about … okay, try to guess.
On the other side of that exchange, the books by public intellectuals offering a favorable or even neutral view of Trump and the Trump era were … not there? Maybe I just missed them. So every prominent figure moving to the cultural foreground from academia and “mainstream” journalism — every brave contrarian, every freethinking intellectual warrior rising against the prevailing fascist sentiment of the age to speak in his own voice as a free person — thinks and says the same things, the same ways, with the same evidence and the same framing and the same tone and in the same state of mind. They’re so free and brave and iconoclastic that they’re essentially identical, chanting in intellectual unison.
Forget Trump for a moment and answer this question in general: If you’re living through an era in which every prominent journalist and academic and artist says exactly the same fucking thing all the time, what kind of moment are you living in? Would you call people who all chant in unison the resistance?
Any engagement with these books reveals their emptiness. Snyder, Stanley, Applebaum, whatever: pick a book, then pick a page. See if it makes sense. Here, I spent a few nauseating minutes today with brave Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction to the paperback edition:
ICE is novel: It was created after 9/11, by the same law that created a bureau tasked with border protection: a “special force, created in an anti-democratic moment”.
I can’t calibrate the degree to which this person is a fool or a liar, but let’s go with both. The Border Patrol was created in 1924, and was itself the successor agency to a different organization that was created in 1904. You can read that history here. The post-9/11 organization that supposedly created this novel American institution merely reorganized a century-old American institution, making it not the least bit novel. Before ICE, we had INS. Yes, we had a border before 2003, and we policed it. This isn’t a novel concept at all, as it has operated in any form of practice.
You can go through that single amazing paragraph sentence by sentence and tear every last bit of it apart, at the lowest, simplest factual level. The argument isn’t wrong: all of it is wrong, every layer of fact and interpretation. This man is an absolutely enormous jackass. And he’s … important. An important public intellectual, you see.
April 3, 2025
1947 Newscast: Spies, Aliens, and Collapsing Empires! – W2W 18
TimeGhost History
Published 2 Apr 20251947 is a pivotal year: The British Empire crumbles as India and Pakistan gain independence amidst violence and mass migration. Truman launches a Cold War against Soviet communism, while spies infiltrate governments worldwide. Nations sign treaties reshaping Europe; Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier, and rumours swirl of aliens crashing at Roswell. Join us for the headlines that reshaped history!
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March 31, 2025
QotD: The problem of defending the late Roman Empire
In particular, Roman forces could no longer be entirely sure they would possess escalation dominance in any given theater. Indeed, during the Crisis, with legions being peeled to fight endless internal wars between rival claimants had meant that major frontier problems might go under-resourced or even entirely unaddressed for years. While the reign of Diocletian (284-311) marked a return to Roman unity, quite a bit of damage had already been done and by the end of the third century we see changes in patterns of fortification that reflect that.
The changes seem fairly clearly to have been evolutionary, in part because many older legionary forts remained in use. Some of the first things we see are traditional “playing-card” forts but now with the neat rectangular shape disrupted by having the towers project out from the walls. The value of a projecting tower […] is that soldiers on the tower, because it projects outward, can direct missiles (arrows, javelins, slings, etc) down the length of the wall, engaging enemies who might be trying to scale the wall or breach it. Of course a fortress that is now being designed to resist enemies scaling or breaching large stone walls is no longer worried about a raid but rather being designed to potentially withstand a serious assault or even a siege. Defensive ditches also multiply in this period and increase in width, often exceeding 25ft in width and flat-bottomed; the design consideration here is probably not to stop a quick raid anymore but to create an obstacle to an enemy moving rams or towers (think back to our Assyrians!) close to the walls.
Over time, forts also tended to abandon the “playing-card” proportions and instead favor circular or square shapes (minimizing perimeter-to-defend for a given internal area). And while even the original Roman marching camps had been designed with a concern to make it hard for an enemy to fire missiles into the camp – using the trench to keep them out of range and keeping an interval (literally the intervallum, the “inside the wall”) between the vallum and the buildings so that any arrows or javelins sent over the walls would land in this empty space – later Roman fortresses intensify these measures; we even see fortresses like the one at Visegrád incorporate its internal structures into the walls themselves, a measure to make the troops within less vulnerable to missile fire in a siege; this style becomes increasingly common in the mid-fourth century. Finally, by the fifth century we start to see the sites of Roman forts changing too, especially in the western part of the empire, with forts moving from low-land positions along major roadways (for rapid response) to hilltop sites that were less convenient for movement but easier to defend (in the East, a lot of the focus shifts to key heavily fortified cities – essentially fortress cities – like Nisibis (modern Nusaybin), Amida, Singara and Dara.
In short, Roman forts in this late period are being designed with the ability to resist either serious assaults or prolonged sieges. This in part reflects a lack of confidence that the Romans could always count on being able to immediately force a field battle they could win; while Roman armies retained the edge through most of this period, the main field armies were increasingly concentrated around the emperors and so might be many days, weeks or even months away when an incursion occurred; local forces had to respond elastically to delay the incursion much longer than before until that army could arrive.
Now of course the downside to a focus like this on single-site defense (“point defense” in its most basic form) is that the enemy army is given much more freedom to move around the countryside and wreck things, where they would have been engaged in the older observe-channel-respond defense system much more quickly (Luttwak terms this “preclusive” defense, but it isn’t quite that preclusive; the frontier is never a hard border). But of course the entire reason you are doing this is that the shifting security situation means you can no longer be confident in winning the decisive engagement that the observe-channel-respond defense system is designed for; you need to delay longer to concentrate forces more significantly to get a favorable outcome. Single-site defenses can do this for reasons we’ve actually already discussed: because the army in the fort remains an active threat, the enemy cannot generally just bypass them without compromising their own logistics, either their supply lines or foraging ability. Consequently, while some forts can by bypassed, they cannot all be bypassed (a lesson, in fact, that the emperor Julian would fail to learn, leading to disaster for his army and his own death).
And so the enemy, while they can damage the immediate environment, cannot proceed out of the frontier zone (and into the true interior) without taking some of these forts, which in turn will slow them down long enough for a major field army to arrive and in theory offer battle on favorable terms.
While it is easy to discount these shifts as just part of the failure of the Roman Empire (and we’ll come back to this idea, often presented in the form of a misquotation of George S. Patton that “fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man” though what he actually said was merely that the Maginot line was such), they contributed meaningfully to the Roman ability to hold on to a vast empire in an increasingly more challenging security environment. At pretty much all stages of its development, Roman fortification on the frontiers was designed to allow the Romans to maintain their territorial control with an economy of force precisely because the Roman Empire could not afford to maintain overwhelming force everywhere on its vast perimeter. Rome wasn’t alone in deploying that kind of defensive philosophy; at any given point the northern frontier of China was guarded on much the same principles: the need to hold a frontier line with an economy of force because no state can afford to have overwhelming force everywhere. In both cases, the need for defense was motivated in no small [part] by the impossibility of further offensive; in the Roman case, further extension of the limes would simply create more territory to defend without actually creating more revenue with which to defend it (this is why the Roman acquisition of Dacia and much of Britain were likely ill-conceived, but then both operations were politically motivated in no small part) while in the Chinese case, the logistics of the steppe largely prohibited further expansion.
This Roman system, combining local single-site defenses (which included a proliferation of walled towns as the population centers of the western empire frantically rebuilt their walls) with concentrated mobile field armies really only began to fail after the Battle of Adrianople (378), where to be clear the fortification system worked fine, the error came from the emperor Valens’ stupid decision to attack before his co-emperor Gratian could arrive with reinforcements (Valens was eager to get all of the credit and so he takes all of the blame).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part II: Romans Playing Cards”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-11-12.
