Best Of

On topic, sort of.

Matt Gurney: 'We will never fucking trust you again'
Some blunt talk for our American neighbours at the Halifax International Security Forum.
https://www.readtheline.ca/p/matt-gurney-we-will-never-fucking
..The forum is an annual gathering of senior military officers, defence and intelligence officials from across the free world, and representatives from the media, think tanks, large companies and civil society organizations whose work relates to defence and security issues or in some way seeks to promote and preserve a healthy democratic world. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, the event is a major part of Canada’s “soft power” offering to our allies — we host the big party and show everybody a good time. The actual schedule is split between on-the-record panel talks or presentations, off-the-record sessions, and informal time for mingling and schmoozing. I am grateful to have been invited to participate again this year.

Especially this year. I’ve been going to the forum for years, and the event always had a strongly American flavour.

Not anymore! Yankee went home.

Like, literally. He was ordered to go home, or stay there. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to avoid a series of high-profile annual defence summits. That includes Halifax, and others in places like Munich and Singapore, and even inside the United States itself. The reason, according to the Pentagon’s press apparatus, was that, and I swear to God this is the actual quote, such events promote “the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States.”

Oh. Well, then...

..Let me be clear about one thing: there were indeed a great many Americans at the forum in Halifax. I don’t want to suggest otherwise. There was a large Congressional Delegation, or a “CODEL,” present at the forum, as there is every year. If anything, I think this year had an unusually large CODEL. And it was a bipartisan one, too. But I noticed something interesting. They were all senators. No House reps. I can’t help but suspect that’s because they’re either planning to retire (some have said already they will) or because the longer six-year term afforded senators gives them some ability to withstand White House anger that House reps, with two-year terms, don’t have.

There were plenty of other Americans from private companies, think tanks, academia, and many former and retired U.S. government officials. And I’m going to be extremely careful in how I describe this: I have a pretty good hunch that some U.S. military officers were indeed in attendance, because — gosh! what a coincidence! — they just happened to be in Halifax on vacation at the exact same time the forum was taking place...

..I was glad to see these Americans and had many fascinating chats with them. But I have to tell you all, dear readers, that the lack of official U.S. military and government representation was very obvious. And those brave Americans who did attend did not have an easy time...

...I worry that I might have been a bit brash with my American dining companions that night. (If any of them are reading this and if I was, sorry. Lot goin’ on over here.) But before I could worry about it too much, a senior military officer from a major (non-American) allied nation drove a stake right through the heart of the matter.

America has blown 80 years of accumulated goodwill and trust among its allies, our American moderator was told. A rock-steady assumption of allied defence and security planning for literally generations has been that America would act in its own interests, sure, but that those interests would be rational, and would still generally value the institutions that America itself worked so hard to build after the Second World War. America’s recent actions have destroyed the ability of any ally to continue to have faith in America to act even within its own strategic self-interest, let alone that of any ally.

The officer then said that even a swift return of America to its former role won’t matter.

Because “we will never fucking trust you again.”

The Americans at the table seemed somewhat startled by the heat of that pronouncement. I agreed with it entirely. So, it seemed to me, did most of the non-Americans.

This wasn’t the only such moment at the forum this year, but it was, to me, the most interesting. And it was still being talked about the next day. “Thank God,” one allied official said to me. “Someone had to tell them.”

If there’s one thing I think people should take from my visit to Halifax, it’s that. America’s former role is gone. And I think that Americans themselves are having the hardest time of all coming to terms with what that might actually mean in the long run.

That so needed to be said.

The US government is not even acting in the USA's strategic interest. It is drunk on ideology (or maybe just drunk), believing its own hype about the Great Replacement Theory. And, quite clearly, the administration has been bought by Russia, a power with irredentist ambitions in Europe and Central Asia.

A fair test of who reads the header before commenting! Also, nice idea but Britain is nowhere near Canada and the Royal Navy is nowhere near big enough to defend Canadian waters.

We need a bigger Royal Navy

We've just decided to increase spending on families who don't work by £4bn.

Most of the families affected by the two child cap have got an adult in work.

Or are you thinking of pensioners?

"We need to improve our terrible birthrate and stop relying on immigration"

Also

"We need to stop helping out people in work on modest salaries who have larger families"

"We need to find a way of coping with a declining population"

Why try to think of ways of trying to get people to do something they don't want to, and instead face up to reality?

On average women end their child-bearing years wishing that they had one more children then they had. We should be working out what is preventing them from having the children they want to have.

My best guess is that it's down to women not finding the right person to have children with - so this is set to get worse as the incel generation matures, as we can see in South Korea with a complete collapse in the birth rate as women reject the patriarchal expectations they face.

So you have two options. Either make it easier for women to have children alone, or address the ways in which male culture and society more generally is hostile to women and motherhood.

Maybe people are being fussier about who they marry. You no longer need to be married to live a fulfilling life with lots of sex. You may never meet the right person. Why should you?

Maybe it is down to choices. Those women are choosing to have careers, travel, whatever. Of course it comes with a cost, all choices do.

As someone who has not had children, and does not think his life would be any better if he had them (but different of course) it seems to me that the breeders on here don't understand that people might have good, rational reasons for making the decisions they do

I am referencing here survey data - in aggregate people are not having as many children as they want. You seem to be the one not understanding other people.

I have one child, but I always expected to have more. It did not happen for me, for various reasons. I also know people who chose not to have children - and good luck to them. I have no desire to force such people to have children. I'm talking about those people who would like to have children and don't for whatever reason.

Growing up I simply assumed that I would marry & have children. Neither of those things happened; and not by any deliberate choice. I'm sorry I don't have children but there's no regret involved because it wasn't a choice. Likewise I've always been sorry not to have a life partner but again there's nothing to regret. At least I didn't put any children through the trauma of divorce.

Your contribution to protecting the environment and combatting climate change is, like mine, thereby got off to such a flying start that no amount of cycling and recycling and eating vegetables would ever enable any parent to catch us up.

That argument is completely wrong-headed.

If we are to get to net zero, three we will be at net zero per capita, and it won't matter how many children people have had.

You can't get to net zero by reducing the population unless you kill everyone.

Nonsense

The nonsense is the convenient lie, told by governments, businesses and NGOs, that combating climate change is a matter of personal morality rather than at heart a problem of industrial waste management and regulation.

We didn’t congratulate people for not spreading cholera before modern sanitation, or blame sup-prime borrowers for the financial crisis. Making it about personal consumer choices just lets governments and industry off the hook.

Scary article in the FT today about the sheer scale of Russian hybrid warfare activity against Europe.

Intelligence chiefs and police forces have foiled plots to derail crowded trains, burn down shopping centres, discharge a dam and poison water supplies. And these are just the ones we know about.

https://www.ft.com/content/2084e87d-d491-4852-8449-f90b73d4788b?shareType=nongift

I can't believe we still allow the Russians to have an embassy or any other official activity in London. Or that the Belgians are still messing around about confiscating those assets. Or that our aid to Ukraine is still so pitiful compared with what is needed.

We are still at 1936-7 levels of complacency about the Russian threat. We should follow Roosevelt and proclaim an unlimited national emergency until Russia is defeated in Ukraine and ourselves as the arsenal of democracy.

This post makes good points about the Ajax disaster.

https://x.com/MilitaryBanter/status/1997728259585233266
Questions should also be raised when the programme is described as a firm-price contract of approximately £5.4 billion, and when delays are framed as “not over budget, just late.” For example: who funded the User Validation Trials (UVT) at Millbrook Proving Ground? These trials were required to independently demonstrate to General Dynamics (GD) that issues existed with the vehicle. GD did not cover the cost; the public did. Taxpayers ultimately paid to provide evidence that the platform had faults.

GD’s response to the identified vibration issues was a “comfort pack,” which mounted crew controls and seating on rubber isolators to reduce vibration exposure. The company then asserted that the issue was resolved. During UVT, however, the permitted use was heavily constrained—initially about 90 minutes of driving per day, later increased to six hours per day when Initial Operating Capability (IOC) was declared. How this was considered a viable operational capability remains unclear.

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) and GD still do not have clarity on the long-term impact that vibration may have on the vehicle’s electronic architecture, weapon systems, engine, and other components. Despite this, IOC was declared.

Responsibility is shared between MOD Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) and GD. The programme has been under significant political pressure. When GD was placed in contractual default and nearly £1 billion in payments was withheld, the company emphasised the potential risk to roughly 700 local jobs and about 5,000 jobs globally that were said to depend on the AJAX programme. This led to ministerial pressure on the MOD to continue pushing the programme forward.

The "jobs" argument is a dreadful one.
There is no job security in failing programmes.

Pumping more billions into what is extremely likely to be a vain effort to resolve a fatally flawed design will, of course, mean less funding elsewhere for more productive and sustainable programs.

Government can support employment. This is just about the worst way to go about it.

FPT: I would make a broader point that any specific government intervention to "support jobs", except at a UK-wide or perhaps regional scale, is usually bad policy. The purpose of something like Ajax should be to provide the army with a new armoured vehicle - no more, no less.

"Supporting jobs" = supporting low productivity. We want massive drone factories with only a few dozen employees. We want railways built quickly and efficiently. We want an NHS that depends less on doctors and nurses and more on technology and wider public health interventions. There are national security motivations for retaining production in the UK - but they should be linked to outcomes (e.g. new warships built per year, anywhere in the UK), not the number of people employed on the Clyde.

A Labour MP was making the jobs argument in the Commons just yesterday in favour of ploughing on with the rolling disaster.
If it's that important they'd be better off cancelling the contract, buying the redundant factory off GDLS for a nominal price, and retooling it to manufacture the CV90.

Spending billions on propping up failure ends only one way.

A fair test of who reads the header before commenting! Also, nice idea but Britain is nowhere near Canada and the Royal Navy is nowhere near big enough to defend Canadian waters.

We need a bigger Royal Navy

We've just decided to increase spending on families who don't work by £4bn.

I think this is the third time I've pointed out to you that the majority of households affected by the two-child limit are in work.

Unfortunately, work simply isn't enough to keep many families out of poverty - particularly large ones. And there are some cases where a mother decided to have a large family because there were two decent jobs and a stable relationship - and have ended up single and destitute instead. This effects all of us - poverty is strongly associated with long-term health, education, crime outcomes. If I get mugged today, it will almost certainly be by someone from one of these kinds of backgrounds.

James Marriott:

"The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.

And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.

These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.

The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.

Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print."

https://jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-dawn-of-the-post-literate-society-aa1

Good morning.

Thank @TheScreamingEagles for publishing my piece.

I wrote it demonstrate that there *is* a viable geopolitical possibility for the UK (and Canada) that breaks from a seeming choice between ever-greater US subordination, dependence on a dysfunctional EU, or dwindling into irrelevance.

I don’t encourage a full merger, but something akin to the EU, with alignment of foreign and trade policy, a common market, freedom of movement, military integration, and shared energy and industrial policy. Currencies might remain separate but central banks would co-ordinate (unlimited currency swaps etc).

I read that UK and Canada are “too far apart” but I’d just ask people to look at a map and the breadth or length of the other global powers of the current era: US, China, Russia, India.

The combined entity would have a population up there with Russia’s or Japan’s (with more favourable demographics), and be a top 4 or even 3 economic, military, and trading power.