The next naval war may be decided not by the ship that looks the most impressive, but by the side that can lose ships and keep fighting. The Defiant is clearly intended to be a tool of statecraft, a physical manifestation of American resolve reminiscent of the Great White Fleet of the early 20th Century. The Trump administration’s drive to revive domestic shipbuilding is admirable, but the plan calls for 250,000 new workers to be recruited in the next decade, a figure that is unlikely to be achieved

Navy Lookout - Independent Royal Navy news and analysis

The strategic logic and industrial peril of Trump’s battleship plan for the US Navy - Navy Lookout

The announcement of the Defiant-class battleship signals a sharp reorientation of US naval force structure, moving away from distributed lethality ...

idk, idc & idgaf.

“China takes advantage of our liberal institutions — and our comparatively open economies — only to undermine them.”

UnHerd

How China co-opted the green movement

Defense requires speed. Defense requires authority. Defense requires decisions that do not depend on a fresh round of consensus at the moment of crisis. The EU cannot do that. And it seems neither can NATO. It cannot be redesigned into that without becoming something else. For defense purposes, it is broken. The system invites international conflict because it signals hesitation. Adversaries do not need to guess. They can just download the meeting notes. NATO, it is now obvious, is the military version of the EU. Without the US at the helm, it’s just another deliberative body.

Who’s Responsible for European Security?

by Benjamin Cook (intro by Tom Cooper)

The Shah had his secret police, but you knew who they were. You could recognize them. Whereas Khomeini said, we are going to create a secret police of thirty million, which was more or less the whole population. An important part of this huge mistake [during the revolution] was the confusion around Khomeini as a religious leader. What many people missed was that he was not just religious. He had a political religious ideology that he wanted to impose. Khomeini had this whole theory of religion taking power over society. Khomeini attacked this idea of giving the women the right to vote, saying that women are supposed to stay at home. It was a misogynistic attack, but none of the left groups took it seriously, or even criticized him for that. He was always who he was. All the opposition groups were happy with him because he was radically against the Shah. There’s a common misconception that he was lying and got people to believe him. But we must take responsibility. We lied to ourselves.

How Iran’s Theocrats Allied With — and Then Crushed — the Left

Sociologist Chahla Chafiq was a 25-year-old Marxist activist during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Now in exile in France, she looks back on the tens...

@Global Sports Central North Korean women winning U-17's world cup🤔