What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz, yet? By John Konrad, a merchant ship captain.

Every TV analyst in America is talking about minesweepers and carrier strike groups. They are asking the wrong questions. The binding constraint on Hormuz was never a minefield or insurance. It is the US Navy’s willingness and ability to reopen it.

Every talking point suggests the White House and Navy are working hard to reopen the strait but progress is slow. A new posts on Truth Social suggests we may have to consider a new hypothesis.

 

What if the White House has no intention of reopening the Strait of Hormuz?

When the seven P&I [liability insurance for shipowners covering people, cargo, and third-party damage.] clubs belonging to the International Group issued 72-hour cancellation notices for war risk coverage in the Persian Gulf on March 5, they did not just raise costs. They made transit impossible.

P&I clubs insure roughly 90 percent of the world’s ocean-going tonnage. Without their coverage, ships cannot sail. Port authorities will not let them dock. Banks will not finance the cargo. Charterers will not book the vessel. The entire system, from loading berth to discharge terminal, is underwritten by a chain of contracts that begins with a club in London, Oslo, or Tokyo. When the clubs pulled war risk extensions, that chain broke. Not for a few ships. For the global fleet. …

VLCC [Very Large Crude Carrier, 200,000+ tonnes] charter rates quadrupled to nearly $800,000 per day. Over 1,000 vessels are now trapped in the Persian Gulf, burning charter costs with nowhere to go. By March 3, only four ships crossed the Strait, down from a seven-day average of seventy-seven.

 

Trump’s insurance play:

Then Trump did something that almost nobody in the press understood.

He ordered the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation [DFC] to create a $20 billion maritime reinsurance facility, with Chubb as lead underwriter, making the United States government the insurer of last resort for Gulf shipping. A sovereign nation positioned itself as the backstop for war risk insurance on the world’s most critical maritime chokepoint. The DFC facility, coordinated with US Central Command and Treasury, offers hull, machinery, and cargo coverage on a rolling basis to eligible vessels.

The United States now controls the on/off switch for the Strait of Hormuz. Not through naval firepower. Through insurance.

Read the latest MARAD advisory carefully: U.S.-flagged, owned, or crewed commercial vessels operating in these areas should maintain a minimum standoff of 30 nautical miles from U.S. military vessels.

And read this part of the DFC announcement again… “coordinated with US Central Command.”

They cannot pass without the Navy permission.

The green light has not appeared.

 

Trump’s Maritime Dream That Was:

To understand why this matters, you need to understand what Trump built and what was destroyed.

Trump came into his second term determined to restore American maritime power. He assembled the greatest collection of maritime minds in key government positions since Nixon. He put Mike Waltz, creator of the SHIPS for America Act [a push to rebuild U.S. shipbuilding and grow its commercial fleet for economic and military resilience; hHina currently builds 50% of ships globally but the US less than 1%], as head of the National Security Council. He created a Maritime Office in the White House. He appointed maritime advocates to key positions throughout the administration. He signed a sweeping Maritime Executive Order in April 2025 directing a Maritime Action Plan across Defense, State, Transportation, and Homeland Security.

He started targeting chokepoints: Panama, the Red Sea, Suez, the Greenland-UK Gap. He launched investigations into Gibraltar and Spain. He created USTR [US Trade Representative] actions to tariff Chinese-built and operated ships. …

Trump’s Maritime dream was quashed, mostly by the Europeans:

The ambition was real.

So was the pushback.

Shipowners lined up outside USTR to protest the China shipping tariffs. Nearly every economist on the planet lined up against the maritime tariff proposals. The entire U.S. tech sector asked for China concessions, and what did China want in return? A pause to USTR.

Then Signalgate. The media leaked a private conversation about attacking the Houthis and reopening the Red Sea. The operation was stunned. Signalgate forced a reorganization. Waltz was moved to the UN. The Maritime Office was downsized. The NSC was gutted.

That was the moment every maritime initiative began to stall.

What collapsed: Panama did not follow through on free transits for U.S. ships. CMA CGM’s $20 billion commitment evaporated as the company ordered vessels from China and India instead. Congress stalled on the SHIPS Act. The UK traded the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, to Mauritius for a sweetheart deal, putting a critical naval base at risk. Key Navy appointees were slow-rolled or blocked in the Senate.

Then it came to a head at the International Maritime Organization in London. In April 2025, sixty-three countries voted to approve the Net-Zero Framework, a global carbon pricing mechanism on every ship over 5,000 tons. What did Trump’s negotiators ask for? That America’s tiny fleet of merchant ships be exempt. Europe refused, claiming American maritime interests are “irrelevant” and that we lack the leverage or votes.

The U.S. walked out. In October, at the adoption vote, Trump called it a “Global Green New Scam Tax on Shipping.” Trump played hardball. The State Department threatened sanctions against any country that voted yes. Fifty-seven countries voted to delay.

A pyrrhic victory. The carbon tax was dead in the water, but we did not get exemptions for U.S. ships, and the White House began losing the wider war for chokepoints and maritime trade with the City of London, Europe and China.

Then two body blows in quick succession.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, invalidating the “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs and the China, Canada, and Mexico trafficking tariffs. An estimated $160 billion in tariff revenue, gone. Trump imposed 15 percent global tariffs under Section 122, but those are capped at 150 days and require Congressional extension.

His most powerful tariff tool was taken away by the courts. If you cannot tariff your way to compliance, you need another form of leverage.

And then the Golden Fleet.

In December, Trump announced a new class of Trump-class battleships at Mar-a-Lago: 30,000 to 40,000 tons, armed with hypersonic missiles, railguns, lasers, and nuclear cruise missiles. Twenty to twenty-five hulls. The most ambitious surface combatant program since World War II.

 

 

Within 72 hours, every national security think tank and academia – which all have close ties and funding with NATO nations – lined up to kill it. … Every defense analyst competed to be quoted saying it was impossible. …

The Leverage Hypothesis:

Now connect the dots. …

The European shipping community and political establishment spent the past year dismissing, undermining, and mocking every Trump maritime initiative. They scoffed at the USTR tariffs. They laughed at the SHIPS Act. They blocked the IMO exemptions. They refused to take American maritime policy seriously.

Now their energy supply runs through an insurance facility controlled by Washington.

“Let their navies figure it out.” Except everyone knows they cannot. European naval forces are too small, too slow, and too poorly equipped for sustained convoy escort operations through a contested strait. All the European navies combined could not send more than three ships at a time to defend the Red Sea. An entire German task force sailed around Africa to avoid it.

Eventually Europe will have to capitulate to get the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. insurance backstop, to fully reopen the Strait.

What does “capitulate” look like? The IMO carbon tax. Greenland. Tariff concessions. The SHIPS Act. Every maritime policy priority that Europe and China have been blocking for the past year.

I had a long discussion with a senior Department of Energy official yesterday on background. I cannot share details but it is clear that the conventional Strait of Hormuz calculus, the one every cable news analyst is running, is wrong. The administration is not thinking about this the way CNN thinks they are.

Precedent:

There is a historical precedent that sharpens this hypothesis.

The last time the U.S. Navy escorted tankers through Hormuz was Operation Earnest Will during the Iran-Iraq Tanker War in 1987-88. Foreign tankers that wanted U.S. Navy protection had to reflag into the U.S. registry. Kuwaiti supertankers flew the American flag to get American escorts.

Trump has already said the Navy will escort ships through Hormuz “if necessary.” If the same reflagging requirement applies, every European and Asian tanker that wants a U.S. escort would need to fly the American flag. …

Hormuz becomes the forcing function for everything Trump’s maritime agenda could not achieve through legislation or diplomacy.

Meanwhile, Iran is selectively letting ships through. Turkish, Indian, Chinese, and some Saudi tankers have been permitted to transit via Iranian territorial waters. About eighteen tankers, mostly Chinese, have done so according to Lloyd’s. Western-allied ships are blocked.

The “closure” is really a sorting mechanism. Iran decides who trades and who does not. Unless the U.S. Navy reopens it for everyone. On America’s terms.

That’s the decision the world has to make, let Iran pull up a tollbooth or stop blocking Trump’s maritime plans.

The Domestic Calculus:

But what about the homeland? Pundits are certain this strike just cost Republicans the midterms and possible the next presidential election.

Maybe. But maybe there is an alternative Hormuz hypothesis.

While TV oil analysts focus on the global price of oil, the real experts in Houston are watching something different: the fracturing of the global energy market.

The real threat is not $200 oil. It’s a fracture of the system. It is cheap energy in export nations and ruinous energy costs in places far from reserves. It’s $2 oil in the Persain Gulf, $20 dollar oil in the Gulf of America and $2,000 oil in the UK.

One global price only works if there is a surplus of tankers to arbitrage differentials. Before the Iran strikes, that surplus was razor-thin. Now, with supertankers stuck in the Gulf, it is gone. …

Domestically, diesel is stabilizing and natural gas prices are falling as LNG that would normally be exported stays trapped at home. Trump issued a 60-day Jones Act waiver and opened Venezuelan oil sales to U.S. companies via a new Treasury license for PDVSA. These are exactly the moves you make if you are trying to drive U.S. prices down while the global market fractures.

Tankers charge by the day, so long-haul routes become comparatively more expensive. Venezuelan crude on short Gulf runs becomes far cheaper for U.S. refiners than Middle Eastern crude routed around the Cape of Good Hope for European or Asian buyers.

Look at who benefits. The three most powerful industry lobbies in the U.S. are tech, Wall Street, and energy. Tech gets cheaper LNG for data centers. Wall Street gets volatility and panic to extract trading profits. Energy companies were just given Venezuela and renewed Gulf access.

Meanwhile, California has been closing refineries and blocking pipelines, forcing gasoline imports from South Korea on ships with dayrates that are skyrocketing. Govenor Newsom, the leading canidate for President in 2028, is irrate. New England imports LNG and diesel by ship. If Hormuz stays closed, prices spike in those states. Deep blue states. Red state energy costs fall. Blue state costs rise. Europe capitulates on major policy disputes between now and the midterms. …

I want to be transparent: this political analysis is speculative. The relationship between energy prices and voting behavior has fragile links. But the directional logic is clear, and I would bet the White House sees it.

What the Navy Is Telling You

Look at what the Navy is doing. Or rather, not doing.

The U.S. Navy is in no rush to solve this problem. They are methodically, deliberately, taking their time. Army battalions are not mobilizing. The Marines called in from Japan are slow-steaming across the Pacific; it could be weeks until they are ready. Minesweepers are still far from the battlespace. Carriers are slowly rotating, not surging.

 

 

Someone at the top told them to take their time. That signal has to be coming from the White House.

Every day, approximately 1,000 trapped vessels are not available for charter. Every day, European energy dependence deepens. Every day, the DFC reinsurance facility becomes more central to the global shipping system. Every day, the case for concessions on tariffs, the IMO, Greenland, and the SHIPS Act becomes harder for Europe to refuse.

And what does the Navy get for playing along? Support for battleships and stronger allies willing to spend money building their own destroyers when it becomes clear to the world how weak their navies have become.

What I Am Arguing, and What I Am Not

I am not arguing that Trump planned this from the beginning — the P&I club withdrawal was a cascading system failure that no central planner could have predicted or orchestrated — but it is possible. What I am arguing is that the administration has, whether by design or adaptation, assembled the tools to exploit this moment. …

The strongest version of this thesis is not “Trump is playing 4D chess.” It is that the administration holds more options than anyone realizes, and the insurance mechanism, not the Navy, is the real lever of power. …

America just does not care about ships or how long it takes to reopen Hormuz or what happens to Europe as a result.…

The Endgame

He has one. But maybe he cannot say it out loud.

Because the endgame is leverage. And you do not announce leverage. You apply it. …

But do not ask “what is the endgame” as if nobody in Washington has an answer. The answer is on the balance sheets of every P&I club in London, in the empty berths of every European naval base, and in the 1,000 ships sitting dead in the water, burning money, waiting for a green light that may not come until the price is right.

An interesting take. Let’s see what happens. Naturally the legacy media ignores this hypothesis, because their narrative is that Trump is merely a buffoon and a fool — even though he keeps outsmarting them.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific, David Archibald

For roughly five hundred years, the global trading system has been underwritten by Western naval power. By David Hilton at XYZ.

The Portuguese opened the ocean routes in the fifteenth century. The Dutch and the British turned those routes into commercial highways. In the twentieth century, the United States Navy inherited the task of keeping the oceans open.

Global capitalism was never simply a matter of markets and finance. It was also a matter of security.

Merchants will ship goods across oceans only if they believe those goods will arrive safely. That belief depends on naval patrols, international law, and an intricate web of maritime insurance markets centred historically in London.

Trade, in other words, requires both protection and trust. For centuries, the Western maritime powers provided both. …

Periods of open maritime trade have been the exception, not the rule:

Since World War II at least, the Western world has lived inside the illusion that global integration is permanent. Goods flow effortlessly across oceans. Supply chains stretch thousands of kilometres without serious interruption. Distance itself seems to have been conquered.

Cheap energy and secure sea lanes created that illusion.

Yet history offers a more sobering perspective. Large trade networks have collapsed before. The Bronze Age trading system disintegrated around 1200 BC. The Roman Mediterranean fractured in late antiquity. The Silk Road periodically vanished for centuries when political and military conditions made long-distance commerce too dangerous. …

Iran’s attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure and its effective closure of Hormuz represent more than a regional escalation. They mark a signal event in the slow unravelling of the economic order that has shaped the modern world.

 

The Straits of Hormuz (looking NNE into Iran)

 

Collapse is slow at first:

The consequences will not appear overnight. Civilisational systems rarely collapse in a single dramatic moment. Instead, they begin to strain. Prices rise. Supply chains falter. Governments scramble to stabilise markets that were once taken for granted. …

For the past half century, the industrial world has lived within a system built on cheap energy, secure sea lanes, and a financial architecture tied closely to the global oil trade. That system produced extraordinary prosperity, but it also created an illusion of permanence.

Now the foundations are beginning to crack.

Modern civilisation likes to imagine that its problems are primarily political or technological. Yet the deeper structures of history are often logistical. Empires rise when they master the movement of energy and goods across distance. They falter when those flows become uncertain.

The tankers burning in the Persian Gulf are therefore more than images of regional conflict. They’re a planetary blood clot blocking the most important coronal artery of our civilisation.

The Solution To Our Fuel Crisis. By David Archibald, who has over 50 years in and out of the oil industry. His first oil industry role was as a juggie on a seismic crew in the Channel Country of far western Queensland in 1974.

The fuel crisis is another thing that should be blamed on John Howard. As prime minister 25 years ago, he announced that Australia didn’t have to worry about fuel security as long as we were a net exporter of energy, including coal and uranium. That hasn’t worked in practice.

When you are short of diesel, everything comes to a stop until you fix that shortage. Without diesel you can’t do anything at all, so it concentrates the mind on the most important task….

Diesel is the economy. Half of the Country’s diesel consumption is in two states, Queensland and Western Australia, which combined have a quarter of our population. …

 

 

Monthly refinery production of diesel, assuming we can get supply of heavier crude oils, is a third of what it was 15 years ago. The production fall in 2021 was the closure of the Kwinana refinery, an unforced error.

Australia is delinquent with respect to our obligations to store liquid fuels as a signatory to the International Energy Agency. We are the only country to be delinquent. We are also the most diesel-intensive economy in the OECD. …

100% dependent on imported fuel:

Australia’s fuel supply situation is worse than it appears. We produce 21% of the inputs into our liquid fuel supply, but we export the same amount. That is because most of our domestic liquids production is on the west coast, where we don’t have any refineries. And most of that produced on the west coast is condensate, which the remaining refineries on the east coast aren’t configured to process.

So, we are effectively 100% reliant upon imported crude oil and imported refined product. …

There used to be an oil refinery run by BP at Kwinana, but that was closed in 2021. It had a capacity of 140,000 barrels per day. It was running at a profit and didn’t need upgrading. At the time, BP was run by a bloke called Bernard Looney, who “became CEO in February 2020 and served until September 2023, during which time he spearheaded a strategic pivot toward renewable energy and set net-zero ambitions.” In effect, the Kwinana refinery was sacrificed on the altar of global warming. As a modern refinery with the ability to handle a range of crude types it would have a replacement cost approaching $6 billion. The WA and Federal Governments could have stopped the refinery’s closure but they both worship at the same altar of global warming.

The nearest refinery is the Viva refinery in Geelong, 3,300 km to the east. …

Solution:

The first thing to do to fix our fuel problem is to utilise the oil and condensate we are producing but not refining. Onshore and offshore, Western Australia produces 50,000 barrels of oil and 250,000 barrels of condensate per day. The condensate is a byproduct of gas production for the LNG plants 1,300 km north of Perth.

The solution is simple. Install distillation columns to take the diesel, petrol and jet fuel out of the condensate and export the remainder. …

The whole 300,000 barrels per day of oil and condensate would yield 120,000 barrels per day of petrol. West Australian petrol consumption is 23,000 barrels per day so the balance of 100,000 barrels per day could be shipped to the east coast. …

Unnecessary fuel specifications should be relaxed to reduce capital costs. Sulphur specs, for example. Most Australian soils are sulphur-deficient and the more sulphur that falls from the sky, the better. Nothing is achieved by requiring low-sulphur diesel in the middle of nowhere. …

The next thing to do to secure Australia’s fuel security will be to develop the Pavo oilfield, which is located 100km off Port Hedland. This is a 109 million barrel oilfeld discovered in 2022. … Pavo is a simple, uncomplicated development. It is in 88 metres of water and has a low gas to oil ratio. …

For Western Australia, the proposal outlined above totalling $24.4 billion is the best possible near-term outcome. For the three million residents of the State, the per capita cost is only $8,815 (what they spend annually in Bali, on average) and well worth it for things that will operate with a positive cash flow. When the oil and gas fields run out, as they will, liquids production can switch to applying the Bergius liquefaction process to the lignites that exist in a belt from Salmon Gums, north of Ravensthorpe, wrapping around the Yilgarn Craton towards the South Australian border. When the lignites run out, as they will, the feedstock for the Bergius plant will switch to the eucalypts of the high rainfall forests of the southwest. Ideally this conversion from useless wood to precious liquids will be powered by breeder reactors.

Choices are more constrained on the east coast. There is no easy oil and gas left but there are plenty of coalfields from Cape York to the southern margin of the continent, and then around into South Australia. There is also plenty of oil shale …

The solution for the east coast is installing Bergius coal liquefaction plants. There is plenty of coal that is too low grade for export, either due to ash content or water content, which would be ideal because it is next to worthless. There was a Japanese research Bergius plant in the Latrobe Valley that operated until 1991. Victorian brown coal has a high reactivity and thus a low residence time. This Japanese effort determined a price hurdle of US$40 per barrel for development in 1991 dollars (oil was US$24 per barrel at the time). That equates to US$95.20 in 2026 dollars which is less than the current Brent price of US$102 per barrel.

To quote from the movie Aliens: “The readouts are all in the green.”

Yes we can:

There are no impediments to Australia becoming completely autarkic in liquids fuel production, petrochemical precursors and LPG, and ammonium sulphate for fertiliser. Well, no impediments apart from the current State and Federal Governments. But those can be overcome by the will of the People, once the People have suffered enough to get organised.

Record January migration intake. By Kevin You at The IPA.

Records continue to be smashed with this government’s promise to cut migration in absolute tatters, as half a million would-be migrants arrived on a net basis over the twelve months to January — the highest in recorded history …

Recent claims that net overseas arrivals are coming down seek to mislead Australians into thinking that there are fewer migrants in the country than before. This is false. The number of migrants in Australia is still growing to record levels month after month …

The Australian way of life is the envy of people the world over. But Australia’s migration programme must be planned for, have the consent of the community, and be targeted toward areas of economic need. The federal government has been failing on all three counts.”

Why didn’t the legacy media mention it?

We had it all. We had a great country. By Rowan Dean in The Spectator.

We had it all. We had a great country. We had solid and reliable leadership. We had a great economy. We were respected and admired around the world. We called it as we saw it. We were loyal to our allies and our friends. We laughed and had fun. We made great music and great films. We dominated on the sports field. We made good use of the abundance of natural resources this land is blessed with, to further the opportunities for every one of us to enjoy the good Aussie life. Most of us didn’t give a rats about political correctness and all the pathetic fads of the hand-wringing lefty crowd.

We threw it all away. And today we are paying a very heavy price. Paying the price for the vanity and treacheries of a lesser breed of politicians from both sides of the political divide who put their own personal egos and personal enrichment ahead of their sworn duty to serve the people of this nation. And now we are led by donkeys and cowards. …

But back to the Howard government’s 30th anniversary dinner. …

I said to several senior Liberals at the beginning of the evening that the real test for the Libs would be whether or not the evening began with a Welcome to Country. And I am pleased to announce … it did not! …

But, as usual, no mention or praise for the greatest politician of our era, Donald J Trump. You could sniff the TDS wafting through the warm night air. …

Peter Costello’s speech was the standout, and there can’t have been a single guest at the ‘do’ who wasn’t asking themselves why on earth this man had never been Prime Minister, and why we’d had to put up with Turnbull and Morrison instead. Indeed, it was clear Mr Costello was thinking much the same thing.

At the heart of Peter Costello’s speech was the astonishing fact that on April 20, 2006, 20 years ago next month, Australia was completely free of all debt. Peter Costello as Treasurer had paid off Labor’s outrageous — and hidden! — 96 billion dollars’ worth of debt and on April 20, 2006, Australia virtually alone in the world had zero debt. On April 20 this year we will have a trillion dollars’ worth of debt.

What’s more, as Peter Costello explained, ever since he left the job taxes have been going up at 1 per cent per person per year, and at the same time, government spending has been going up at 2 per cent per person per year. Meaning, as he explained, the problem isn’t the tax system. We don’t need to be paying any more tax. The problem is the spending, stupid.

And Jim Chalmers has shown he either doesn’t have a clue about how to cut spending, or he couldn’t give a damn. Either way, every single day this Labor government gorges itself on greater and greater debt as it pushes the Australian dream further and further out of reach for anyone who’s not part of the Labor elites.

Overall, the mood in the room was that in Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan the Coalition has the best team since the Abbott if not the Howard years.

Why does Australia only have 30 days fuel when we solemnly agreed to hold 90 days? Anthony Albanese. By Craig Kelly.

Back in 2012, Australia first plunged into outright, shameless breach of its IEA [International Energy Agency] treaty obligations — that sacred 90-day fuel reserve meant to shield the nation from fuel shortages, food chaos, economic collapse, and outright vulnerability in any global crisis.

Guess who was the Federal Minister for Infrastructure and Transport with the responsibility at the time?

Anthony Albanese.

Yes, that Albo — the smug, sanctimonious fraud now parading as Prime Minister, preaching “energy security,” “resilience,” and “protecting Australians” while we’re still the ONLY IEA member nation in chronic, decades-long breach. …

Albanese was Infrastructure & Transport Minister from 2007 to 2013. …

He had the portfolio. He had the power. He had the warning lights flashing. He did sweet FA. Zilch. Nada. The breach began under Labor’s watch with Albanese in the driver’s seat.

Now, as PM, he gaslights the nation during oil price spikes, Middle East wars, supply panics, and threats of actual shortages — pretending he’s some guardian angel, while the nation is starting to pay the penalty for his incompetence and failure.

The Abbot/Turnbull/Morrison Governments didn’t rectify the situation.

Angela Merkel in 2026: Admits she flooded Germany with third world foreigners for votes, to prevent the AfD from winning. By Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021.

In 2015, Merkel let over one million asylum seekers enter Germany, primarily Syrian refugees. Merkel is childless.

From an interview on March 3, 2026, in the ARD-Hauptstadtstudio in Berlin for the hr (Hessischer Rundfunk) podcast “Freiheit Deluxe” hosted by Jagoda Marinić.

Angela Merkel admitted she flooded Germany with third world foreigners for the votes.

She said it was to stop the AfD party!

 

Angela Merkel admitted she flooded Germany with third world foreigners for the votes.

She said it was to stop the AfD party! pic.twitter.com/OTf0PDoLYd

— illuminatibot (@iluminatibot) March 16, 2026

 

She says the elites could not allow the AfD to win.

Commenters:

In the gallery of Greatest German Villains, she will have only one superior. …

Need votes? Ship blokes! …

The AfD “represent things that quite simply are incompatible with the fundamental principles of our constitution,” so they import followers of the Quran. …

So, hypothetically, if we said she was complicit in every crime committed by those ‘migrants’, that would be accurate. …

Merkel also used to be an informant in Eastern Germany when it was part of the Eastern Bloc. Never place your trust ever from a former intelligence officer. …

Angela Merkel’s father was one of the only pastors allowed to preach in East Germany and his children weren’t blocked from jobs or education, she speaks fluent Russian, she imported millions of foreigners… She has been a communist apparatchik. …

AfD was born in 2013 as eurosceptic party in protest vs Greek bailouts and received <5% national vote (no Bundestag seats). Two years later, in 2015, Mutti’s open-border policy during refugee crisis prompted AfD to shift to an anti-immigration stance, fueling its takeoff. …

AfD is a symptom of Merkel’s bad governance.

Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought back against the Moslems. By Teddy Roosevelt, US President 1901 to 1909, from his book, Fear God and Take Your Own Part,  1915.

Christianity is not the creed of Asia and Africa at this moment solely because the seventh century Christians of Asia and Africa, in addition to being rent asunder among themselves by bitter sectarian animosities — and sectarian intolerance and animosity stand for most that is evil in Christianity — had trained themselves not to fight, whereas the Moslems were trained to fight.

Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan, and the Christian religion would be exterminated.

Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared. From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor.

From the book, Fear God and Take Your Own Part, by Theodore Roosevelt, New York, George H. Doran Company, copyright 1915.

hat-tip Scott of the Pacific

Falling birthrates for thee. By Payton Alexander.

Not comprehensively wrong, just “premature,” over at the NYT

 

People today forget or simply can’t believe how depraved [Paul] Ehrlich really was:

Demanded that the FCC require TV shows to depict large families in a negative light, so that parents with multiple children would be shamed and ostracized by society.

Proposed forcibly sterilizing millions of Americans by poisoning the water supply to make them infertile. He couldn’t think of a drug to do it “safely,” but wanted to do it anyway.

Supported actual forced sterilization campaigns in India and China, where millions of people were forced to undergo vasectomies and tubal ligations for having too many children. Ehrlich even proposed sending U.S. military helicopters in to abduct people from remote villages to be sterilized. Truly sick stuff!…

Warned that population growth would lead to starvation, but also proposed cutting off food aid to “overpopulated” countries to reduce their populations… by starvation.

But the left is harsher on large families if they’re white:

 

Alyssa Rosenberg:

When I was the letters editor at The Washington Post, it was consistently shocking to me how many letters we got suggesting it would be a good thing for the human race to just go extinct.

Brad Lemley:

I remember hearing Jordan Peterson in 2017 state that the green movement was fundamentally “anti-human.”

I had never heard the term “anti-human” before, and it was striking because I realized that essentially every leftist policy could be so described.

As a liberal myself, it was shocking that I had internalized much of this anti-human value structure. The moment Peterson gave it a name I suddenly saw it and realized I needed to be pro-human from that point forward.

The government will shut down any nationalist group by labeling them as Nazis. By Stephen Wells at XYZ, about the recently shut-down National Socialist Network (NSN) in Australia.

How it started, so naively:

The origins of the NSN date back to 2015 where two naive young men followed the democratic process to peacefully protest the building of a mosque in one of Melbourne’s suburbs. There they watched old ladies being bashed by Antifa and the police stand by and do nothing. One of the men, Blair Cottrell, gained a million followers on Facebook and briefly appeared on TV a few times, where his calm demeanour and logical answers to baited questions showed him to be a political threat. He subsequently was banned from further TV appearances, had his Facebook account closed and even had his bank accounts closed. …

The NSN dressed in black. Initially because when they first cobbled together a protest with a bunch of friends, black was the only colour clothing they all had that matched. …

 

 

The other young man, Thomas Sewell, had begun organising a political group. The police found excuses to obtain warrants to raid the member’s homes, doxx them to their family and employers as “Nazis” and basically scare 99% of its members into never doing anything political again. It should be pointed out that no one in this movement in 2015 who went on to join the NSN considered themselves to be Nazis when they first began politically organising. …

They didn’t start out as Nazis, but were labelled thus for being nationalist. Yes they shared some policy alignments with the Nazis, but name me a political party that doesn’t. Their real crime in the eyes of the globalists was to be apologetically nationalist (and thus defended whites).

The NSN, in its day, didn’t just protest mass non white immigration. It also protested the cancellation of Australia Day, attacks on free speech, drag queen story hour, the influence of Jewish lobby groups on our politicians and the protection by the Chinese Government of a criminal that had mutilated an Australian baby. …

The NSN didn’t focus on Anti-Semitism, rather the media and politicians chose to label any protest they did as Anti-Semitic …

The NSN did of course praise the ideology of the NSDAP [Hitler’s Nazi Party] which Mr Delaney notes “has an appeal to a Gen Z audience”. He is also correct that “this choice comes with immense strategic baggage.” That, “it allows hostile media and government entities to instantly frame the movement as a foreign import — a mere replica of a historically defeated ideology”. …

Being labelled and vilified for something you are not can cause one to look at what you are being labelled as and consider it in earnest. This is what happened with Thomas Sewell who became the leader of the NSN. Being persecuted whilst being labelled a Nazi led him and others to investigate history and challenge the doctrine that they had grown up with. …

Another white nationalist group:

In Perth in 2020 there was a community building White Nationalist group that were 99% focused on building a parallel community. Movie nights, hiking, camping, chess tournaments. Organising, in-group leadership and responsibilities.

They did a single banner drop over a freeway protesting the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and Australia’s counterterrorism police raided half of the membership, doxxed them to employers and family as Nazis. It’s a standard tactic.

The members all had a naive view of how the world works and how “democratic” Australia is and simply couldn’t handle the overt tyranny. They crumbled and the organisation failed. …

How it ended:

The NSN, on the other hand didn’t fail. Its objective all along was to expose the hypocrisy and illusion of liberal democracy in Australia. It followed the rules. It obeyed the law. …

The NSN disbanded just before new “hate group laws” were passed that would have made all of their previous legal activity retrospectively illegal and made future peaceful political activity impossible. … It was always going to be shut down.  …

Build ANY effective Nationalist movement including using your own “Australia First” philosophy. If it gets beyond a certain size it will be either subverted or shut down.

The lie about our globalist government that they exposed:

The lie of living in a democracy was exposed to everyone in Australia, even if many still refuse to accept it.

The NSN didn’t focus on Anti-Semitism, rather the media and politicians chose to label any protest they did as Anti-Semitic

The NSN also succeded in another area. That of historical revisionism. By being peaceful and lawful, but being branded as terrorists anyway, they made many more people question what else they have been lied to about by the Government.

How the modern world works? Enshittification.

hat-tip Z

This Is How the Iran War Goes Global. By Niall Ferguson in The Free Press.

17 days into the conflict, the U.S.-Israeli campaign has run into a very old problem: control of a strategic waterway.

Despite being entirely outgunned, despite having lost control of its own airspace, the Islamic Republic retains sufficient firepower to attack shippers in the Strait of Hormuz, deterring them from moving through it …

Meanwhile, Iran’s aggressive missile-building program was a Chinese-enabled project. …

Which brings us to the next great global choke point: the Taiwan Strait.

More than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors, and 99 percent of the chips used for cutting-edge AI training, are manufactured in Taiwan. Taiwan imports 97 percent of its energy supply in the form of oil, LNG, and coal. This makes the Taiwan choke point far more important in relative terms than the Strait of Hormuz has ever been for global energy markets.

The temptation of Xi:

The rational strategy for Xi is not an amphibious invasion or blockade of Taiwan. It is to wait for Taiwan’s January 2028 election in the hope of a Chinese Nationalist Party victory and a decisive shift toward Beijing’s goal of “One Country, Two Systems.” However, there is a growing tail risk that he is tempted to act more boldly, taking advantage of yet another American imbroglio in the Middle East.

Rather than risk a kinetic confrontation in the Middle East, Xi’s best option is to deploy Chinese coast guard vessels and assert Beijing’s right to collect customs duties and regulate the flow of goods to Taiwan. He can present this as consistent with international law, satisfying many countries and companies — especially those with significant business interests in the People’s Republic of China.

True, Taiwan is recognized as a “separate customs territory” by the World Trade Organization, defined in the 1994 Marrakesh Agreement as meaning Taiwan has “full autonomy in the conduct of its external commercial relations.” In 2001, China agreed that Taiwan and Hong Kong would enjoy this status. However, as former State Department counselor Philip Zelikow has argued, China could simply revoke it for Taiwan, just as Trump revoked it for Hong Kong in 2020. China could also then apply its export controls to goods leaving Taiwan, again citing American precedents for doing so.

Should China make such a “gray zone” move, it would immediately become apparent that the biggest choke point in the world is not the Strait of Hormuz; it is the Taiwan Strait.

Questions:

The administration is now trying to salvage a plan that seems to be, like Churchill’s in 1915 [at Gallipoli], disintegrating on contact with the enemy. It may still be salvageable. The Islamic Republic may yet oblige Trump by expiring. I do not rule that out.

However, if Trump’s advisers do not keep their wits about them, they may overlook the fact that they have created a huge strategic opportunity for China and Russia — especially if they act in concert. Washington may miss, amid the mood music of a superpower summit, the preparations for a coup de main that would upend the international economy and the world’s geopolitical order.

The Strait of Hormuz is blocked. For how long?

The Strait of Taiwan is open. For how long?

Australian Navy so defunct that Trump didn’t even ask us for help — we’d just be a liability. By Greg Sheridan in The Australian.

That the Albanese government has gone out loud and proud to announce, without even being asked, that it’s certainly not going to send an Australian navy ship to help keep the Strait of Hormuz safe for international shipping is much more significant than it looks, and bespeaks a shocking Australian impotence. …

Though we are the biggest island nation in the world, our navy is effectively defunct. Donald Trump announced a long list of nations he would like to contribute to escorting cargo vessels through the Strait of Hormuz. We weren’t on it. …

It’s notable that despite Australia being the second or third closest ally to the US, after Britain and, all things considered, probably Japan too, we weren’t asked for a naval contribution. This is because the Americans know that as a military force the Australian navy is essentially non-existent at the moment.

Details:

In our surface fleet we notionally have seven Anzac-class frigates, though they are so old that to send them into harm’s way now would rank surely as a species of elder abuse, and three Hobart-class air warfare destroyers.

The frigates each have eight vertical launch cells, just eight. Many modern destroyers have well over 100.

The Iranians fire missiles and drones at ships. The Anzacs deploy fairly short-range Evolved Sea Sparrow Missiles in their vertical launch cells. In terms of self-defence, that’s pretty much it. In the conflict with the Houthis in the Red Sea, the US Navy mainly used much longer-range SM2 and SM6 missiles. That’s because if you miss an incoming missile with a long-range shot you can have another go with your short-range defence systems. If you miss with a short-range effort, you’re dead.

Nor do the Anzacs have sophisticated counter-drone systems. The Ukrainians, Iranians and Houthis have all shown that drones can be used to devastating effect against conventional navy ships. If our Anzac frigates ever did fire off their missiles they would be exhausted and in need of replenishment in five minutes. The commander of any US taskforce would regard the Anzacs as a liability, just another ship the Americans had to defend.

Of our three Hobart-class destroyers, one is in a long-term upgrade and therefore out of action. Of the other two, perhaps one could be sent. They are optimised for air defence, not what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. They have 48 VLS [tubes] each, about half a US Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. Beyond that they have Phalanx Gatling guns, which can be a last line of defence against incoming drones. They don’t have complex counter-drone systems. …

Uniparty to blame, but Labor worse:

Our absolute lack of defence capability is the greatest national scandal of our time. It’s bipartisan in creation. The previous Coalition government was almost as bad as the Albanese government in defence.

Australians should recognise the decisions we’ve made. Just as we’ve decided to keep barely a month’s worth of fuel in reserve so that we couldn’t withstand any interruption to supply, so we have decided not to have any meaningful defence capability. …

The Albanese government has actually cut defence spending. It has imposed a $1.5bn “efficiency dividend” (honestly, you can’t make this stuff up) on defence, which it had not imposed before, and the entirely fictional “dividend” goes back to consolidated revenue, it’s not kept by defence. …

By 2027-28 defence spending, on the government’s own figures, will still be just 2.05 per cent of GDP.

If we ever lose the US alliance we are completely defenceless. No doubt Beijing will never want to do this, but in terms of sheer military capability China could do everything to Australia that the US has done to Iran. The difference is, unlike Iran, we couldn’t fight back. And unlike Iran, we’d run out of fuel in five minutes.

Australia relied for protection and existence on the British Navy until 1941, and after than on the US Navy. Without the US Navy, Australia is basically undefended.

Muslim pirates stole an entire Irish village into slavery. By Proudofus.uk.

A hundred and seven men, women and children. Taken from their beds. Sold in North Africa. Only two ever came home.

It was 1631. And it was normal.

For thousands of years, the sea belonged to pirates. Barbary corsairs [Muslim privateers and pirates who operated from the North African coast] enslaved over a million Europeans. They raided as far as Iceland.

No nation on Earth could stop them.

So Britain built the largest navy in history. And went hunting.

They smashed the slave ports of North Africa. Three thousand people walked free in a single day. They chased pirates across the South China Sea.

Ocean by ocean, the hunting grounds went silent.

Britain built 46 bases to keep them that way. Every shipping lane on Earth. Protected.

Today, 80% of everything you own arrives by sea.

Britain didn’t just rule the waves. She freed them.

 

Pirates stole an entire Irish village.

A hundred and seven men, women and children. Taken from their beds. Sold in North Africa.

Only two ever came home.

It was 1631. And it was normal.

For thousands of years, the sea belonged to pirates. Barbary corsairs enslaved over a… pic.twitter.com/D7n0rKqGzm

— Proudofus.uk (@ProudofusUK) February 28, 2026

 

The Barbary Pirates operated primarily from ports in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, Salé, and Rabat. The line “To the shores of Tripoli” in the U.S. Marine Corps Hymn refers to the First Barbary War (1801–1805), specifically the Battle of Derna in 1805. This was the first time U.S. Marines fought on foreign soil.

The (1801–1805) was a conflict between the United States and the Barbary State of Tripoli, sparked by the refusal of U.S. President Thomas Jefferson to pay increased tribute demands. The war arose from longstanding practices in which North African states — Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and Morocco — captured American merchant ships, held crews for ransom, and demanded payments to prevent attacks. The war ended with the release of American captives without further tribute, though piracy continued under other Barbary rulers until the Second Barbary War.

The Barbary pirates captured hundreds of thousands of Europeans between the 16th and 19th centuries, primarily through naval raids on ships and coastal villages across the Mediterranean, the English Channel, and as far north as Iceland and Ireland.

Primary targets: Sailors, fishermen, and coastal villagers, with Italians, Spaniards, and British being the most commonly captured.

Major raids: Included the 1551 enslavement of the entire population of Gozo (5,000–6,000 people), the 1631 Sack of Baltimore in Ireland (100 villagers taken), and repeated attacks on Cornwall and the Canary Islands.

Purpose: Captives were sold into slavery in North African markets in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, used as laborers, galley slaves, or concubines.

Scale: Historian Robert C. Davis estimates 1 to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved during this period, though some scholars question the exact number.

The slave trade declined after the First and Second Barbary Wars (1801–1805, 1815–1816) and the French conquest of Algeria (1830–1847), effectively ending the Barbary corsairs’ dominance by the 1830s.