Friday, April 3, 2026

The Wall Street Journal Stands Up For NATO

Yesterday,

A second Republican senator spoke out in defense of Nato on Thursday, joining Mitch McConnell and the Democrats, after Donald Trump said that he was “absolutely” considering withdrawing from the alliance after it refused to take part in the joint assault with Israel against Iran.

“Nato stood by America when we were under attack and came to our aid after the September 11th attacks. Their soldiers fought and died alongside our troops in Afghanistan,” said Thom Tillis, a Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, who co-chair the Senate Nato observer group.

McConnell and Tillis are both lame ducks who seem to be opposed to anything Trump has ever proposed, but by gum, The Wall Street Journal has their backs:

Could the Iran war do what even Vladimir Putin couldn’t and blow up the North Atlantic Treaty alliance? That’s no longer an idle question as most of Europe refuses to help the U.S., and President Trump responds by threatening to leave NATO. This would be the dumbest alliance breakup in modern history.

Several paragraphs of irrelevant blah-blah follow, but they don't explain why this would be "the dumbest alliance breakup in modern history". The writers finally wander back to the point:

A U.S. withdrawal from NATO would nonetheless serve only Russia, Iran and China. Blowing up NATO has been the main goal of Russian strategy since the alliance formed in 1949.

But NATO was formed as an anti-Soviet alliance, not an anti-Russian alliance. Putin would probably like to get rid of NATO, but it seems to me that, especially with Sweden and Finland joining, the original 1949 alliance is overextended -- the point of NATO in 1949 was to place territories that the US primarily had won back from the Nazis under the US nuclear umbrella. The calculation under Truman and Marshall seems to have been that this was something the US, primarily with the support of the UK and the Royal Navy, could afford.

The idea of adding Soviet satellites like Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia to NATO between 1949 and 1991 would have been wildly impractical, and NATO did nothing when Soviet tanks went into several of those satellites during that period. Adding the former satellites to NATO became cost-effective only when the Soviet Union collapsed and the potential for any type of revanchism became much more remote.

In addition, as of 1949, Iran was a Western ally, and China was much less of a factor. At the start of the Korean War, Truman was able to use the UN to provide a legal foundation and justify an international alliance against Soviet-backed North Korean and Chinese forces. Under those circumstances, he didn't need NATO.

The world has changed a lot since 1949. Iran is no longer aligned with the West, and China is a more formidable adversary than Russia. Meanwhile, the European powers have already factored in the disappearance of the Soviet Union; the decline or the Royal Navy since the 1990s has been a topic of discussion for weeks. And as we saw yesterday, the German defense minister effectively admitted that the only naval force the European NATO members can assemble is "a handful of frigates".

The Journal concludes,

The larger reality is that Russia and Iran are working together as an axis against the West. The two share weapons, especially drones and missiles, and Russia is providing intelligence to Iran about American targets. Mr. Trump is especially obtuse on this point, refusing even to acknowledge this Russian harm to U.S. troops, much less condemn it.

. . . This axis of adversaries that includes China wants to weaken the Western alliance and the free world. It wants the U.S. and Israel to fail to defeat Iran, and Russia to defeat Ukraine militarily and become the dominant power in Europe. If the Western allies let this happen, it will be the height of folly and an historic tragedy.

This at least is an effort to answer the question my old colleague Phil used to ask in meetings, "What problem are we trying to solve?" The Journal's answer appears to be that Iran, China, and Russia have formed a 21st-century Axis against the US, and we can solve this only with NATO's help. But even if we were to invoke Article 5 against Iran, or even Russia or China, the best NATO could provide would be "a handful of frigates", which wouldn't be much help at all.

Is it in our interest to live in a fantasy world where this isn't true? In addition, in 1949, the British controlled the Iranian oil industry via the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which was 51% owned by the UK government to ensure oil fuel for the Royal Navy. The UK at that time was also the leading NATO partner, and it was capable of acting to ensure its control. This is no longer a factor -- why try to pretend things haven't changed?

In other words, Trump has made what seems to be a realisic appraisal of the current world situation, which in part simply ratifies the NATO members' own appraisal of the Russian threat, or at least their appraisal that the US would decisively defeat a Russian threat without much need for other than token NATO assistance. Therefore, Trump is pursuing US policy goals in this changed environment using resources other than NATO.

It's also intriguing that the Journal throws Ukraine into the argument. As things stand, once it's become plain that neither Russia nor Ukraine wants to end that war, which is heading for a four-year stalemate, Russia in particular has been squandering ammunition, personnel, and equipment that it can't use against NATO. On the other hand, adding Ukraine to NATO simply adds one more country to the growing number that the US would be committed to defend without much serious assistance from other members.

Trump is simply making the realistic assessment presidents are expected to make.

posted by test @ April 03, 2026   0 Comments

Thursday, April 2, 2026

NATO And The Conventional Wisdom

Just like that, Real Clear Politics ran comments on the Iran war today from both Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson. As I've been saying, RCP reliably runs them as the conservative conventional wisdom, but they seldom add much insight to any issue, and sometimes they just get things wrong.

Hanson's point today is that the non-US NATO nations haven't been playing fair:

When NATO members in the past have operated unilaterally to defend their own national interests, they have often called on the U.S., as NATO’s strongest member, for overt help.

For nearly 40 years, the U.S. had offered logistical, intelligence, reconnaissance, refueling, and diplomatic support to the French in their unilateral and postcolonial efforts to protect Chad from Libya and, later, Islamists.

During the 1982 Falklands War, a solitary Britain faced enormous logistical challenges in steaming halfway around the world to eject Argentina from its windswept and sparse islands.

U.S. aid was critical to the effort.

. . . Currently, America has not asked NATO members to help bomb Iran . . . .

All the U.S. had initially asked for was basing support in disarming a common Western enemy that, for nearly half a century, has slaughtered American diplomats and soldiers and tried to kill a U.S. president and secretary of state.

But most NATO members could not even offer tacit help. Some damned the U.S. effort as either illegal or unnecessary.

But let's get real here. NATO was always an anti-Soviet alliance devised to contain Stalin and, to a lesser extent, Khrushchev. The Soviets removed Khrushchev themselves, largerly ending an expansionist threat to Western Europe. The two major "containment" conflicts of the Cold War, Korea and Viet Nam, didn't involve NATO. Nor did Soviet efforts to impose discipline within their sphere of influence in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

Neither US aid to France in defense of Chad nor aid to the UK against Argentina involved invocation of Article 5, which says that an armed attack against one member is an attack against all. That has been invoked only once, following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, in the Afghanistan-Iraq wars, which were post-Soviet, didn't much involve Russia, and were highly questionable affairs. It's also hard to imagine that the outcome would have changed at all if no other NATO countries had been involved.

The theoretical need for NATO faded once the Soviets themselves removed the expansionst Khrushchev. In theory, it completely disappeared after the Soviet Union collapsed. In practice, the Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that even a second-rate non-NATO power could fight the Russian military to a protracted standstill, to the point that the US could seriously question whether its interests were threatened at all in that conflict.

The US aid to France in Chad and the UK in the Falklands was a lagniappe, pure and simple. It imposed no obligation on France and the UK; the only claim Hanson can make is we were nice to them; how come they can't be nice to us? But this neglects the bigger point: NATO was an anti-Soviet alliance, when the Soviet Union has been gone for decades. NATO for the non-US countries was a distraction: each of them had national defense interests aside from any Soviet threat, which they'd neglected to consider, somehow assuming NATO would solve everything.

Ukraine, not a NATO member, posed one puzzle. A bigger one is the Strait of Hormuz:

The problem is that as a practical matter, no non-US NATO country or combination of countries has the capability to "go to the strait and just TAKE IT".

Germany’s defense minister on Monday ruled out sending naval forces to the Strait of Hormuz, saying such a move would risk dragging Germany into a conflict with Iran.

. . . He dismissed US President Donald Trump’s call for NATO allies to help secure the strategic waterway and stressed that Germany will push for a diplomatic solution and a swift end to the fighting.

"What does Donald Trump expect a handful of European frigates to accomplish in the Strait of Hormuz that the powerful American Navy cannot achieve alone? That is the question I ask myself," Pistorius said.

But that ignores the issue that the oil that can't get through the Strait of Hormuz to reach Europe is European oil. The US doesn't get oil via the strait. But Europe can only send a handful of frigates to defend its interests, yet it somehow expects the powerful American navy to act on its behalf, while sanctimoniously claiming the Iran war isn't its war. The problem is that even the most powerful non-US NATO countries can send only a handful of frigates to protect any national interests that can't be protected by invoking Article 5.

The problem is worse if US interests conflict with the rest of NATO. For instance,

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned Friday [January 16] that a decision on who owns Greenland doesn't belong to U.S. President Donald Trump.

. . . Carney urged NATO allies including the U.S. to “respect their commitments” as he stressed Canada’s support for Danish sovereignty over the strategically vital Arctic island, which Trump has threatened to seize.

"We are NATO partners with Denmark, and so our full partnership stands," Carney said in his first remarks on the intensifying diplomatic brouhaha. "Our obligations on Article 5, Article 2 of NATO stand, and we stand full-square behind those."

But even the Canadian armed forces are fully aware of the military reality behind any such insistence:

Canadian military planners recently conducted a rare conceptual war game simulating a US invasion of Canada, reportedly the first of its kind in about a century, according to a report by The Globe and Mail.

The scenario, described as highly improbable by officials and experts, was explored amid heightened rhetoric from US political figures. In the exercise, planners reportedly assessed that US forces could seize key Canadian strategic locations within a week, potentially in as little as two days.

Denmark itself wouldn't add much to an alliance with Canada to defend Greenland against the US:

Greenland is Denmark’s greatest strategic responsibility. Denmark’s military presence in Greenland, however, is minimal, consisting mostly of patrol units and surveillance. There are no fighters or air defenses or heavy ground forces. Instead, Denmark relies on administration, diplomacy, and—perhaps ironically—its alliance with the far more powerful United States. Sovereignty is asserted more through legal mechanisms than militarily.

. . . Denmark can be commended for assembling a capable and modern force, albeit one designed for coalitions and contribution not dominance. Denmark’s power lies in alignment, rather than autonomy, an arrangement of which US rhetoric may force reevaluation. Greenland underscores this reality: a defense posture that is dependent upon alliances is only as strong as those alliances are.

The problem at this point is simply that as long as Russia isn't now able to go even as far as the Soviet Union could in asserting control over countries in its own sphere, like Ukraine, as it once did in Hungary or Czechoslovakia, the value of NATO to the US as an anti-Soviet alliance fades. At the same time, the lagniappes the US has traditionally provided to NATO members become too expensive to keep handing out.

Meanwhile, those same NATO members are slowly waking up to the fact that they have national defense interests separate from those the NATO alliance was supposed to cover. And that becomes their problem, not the US's.

posted by test @ April 02, 2026   0 Comments

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Again, What's Going On In Iran?

As we wait for President Trump's address on Iran this evening, I continue to reflect on the X post above from several days ago. A big theme in the comment thread is that it's no surprise that the Revolutionary Guard is in control. On the other hand, no date is given for the reported exchange between President Pezeshkian and Revolutionary Guard Chief Vahidi, but at least one report claims that Vahidi has been eliminated: But other reports suggest he's still in charge, and conflicts with President Pezeshkian are continuing:

Rising tensions between the Pezeshkian administration and Iran’s military leadership have pushed the president into a “complete political deadlock,” with the Revolutionary Guard effectively assuming control over key state functions, informed sources told Iran International.

. . . Pezeshkian has repeatedly sought an urgent meeting with Mojtaba Khamenei in recent days, but all requests have gone unanswered, with no contact established.

Informed sources say a “military council” composed of senior IRGC officers now exercises full control over the core decision-making structure, enforcing a security cordon around Mojtaba Khamenei and preventing government reports on the country’s situation from reaching him.

But reports from a week ago said the Trump administration was talking, at least indirectly, with Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, but neither has been mentioned in the past several days. I asked the AI oracle, "Where do Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi stand in Iran's current political structure?" It answered,

In Iran's political structure as of early 2026, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi have both seen their roles expand significantly, emerging as central power centers during a period of severe regional conflict and leadership instability.

. . . Qalibaf is the Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Iran's Parliament). A former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Air Force and former Mayor of Tehran, he has long been a heavyweight in the conservative/hardline camp.

. . . Following severe degradation to Iran's senior leadership from military strikes, Qalibaf has moved far beyond his traditional legislative role. According to intelligence and media reporting, he is operating as one of the de facto leaders of the country's strategic decision-making and war effort.

. . . Araghchi serves as the public and international face of the Iranian regime. While the actual decisions regarding military posture and red lines are heavily dictated by the IRGC and top security councils, Araghchi manages the critical backchannels and diplomatic messaging.

I asked a follow-up: "What is Iran's President Pezeshkian's standing vis-a-vis Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf?" It answered,

The political standing between Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf (Ghalibaf) is defined by a shift from early cooperation to an escalating institutional and political rivalry. While they initially pursued a "honeymoon" period governed by the rhetoric of consensus to manage the country's governance, their relationship has grown increasingly adversarial.

. . . Amid the severe regional conflicts and military strikes impacting Iran, Qalibaf has emerged as a vocal and influential figure handling strategic posturing. He has taken an uncompromising, hardline stance against negotiations with the U.S. and Israel. Conversely, Pezeshkian's standing has been described as somewhat diminished or restricted to managing day-to-day state functions, particularly after facing pushback from hardline institutions when he attempted to extend diplomatic olive branches or apologies to neighboring Gulf states.

But this is worth exactly what I paid for it, nothing. Still, the comment thread after the first post I embedded above misses the big point: Israel clearly has penetrated and decrypted all of Iran's intra-government deliberations, to the point that their intelligence can leak specific exchanges between Iran's top figures and their subsequent remarks to staff. This report confirms that surmise:


Sources quoted by The New York Times overnight described a situation of deep dysfunction in Tehran, where decision-making has been severely disrupted following joint US and Israeli strikes. Officials said damage to communications infrastructure has fueled paranoia among senior figures, who now fear their conversations are being intercepted, leading many to avoid direct contact altogether. This has hindered coordination of military responses and stalled efforts to formulate positions in potential negotiations.

. . . Israeli officials speaking to The New York Times compared the situation in Iran to the breakdown experienced by Hamas in Gaza after its leadership was eliminated. They said communication challenges are forcing reliance on intermediaries and slow exchanges, complicating both military coordination and diplomatic efforts, and leaving uncertainty over who is authorized to make decisions on behalf of the Iranian government.

We should note that if Israeli intelligence can eavesdrop on their conversations, it likely can pinpoint their specific locations as well, and they know it. And based on recent remarks from Trump, the situation may have changed:

President Donald Trump told the New York Post on Monday that the U.S. is talking to new leaders in Iran, without providing more details.

"There has been total regime change because the regimes of the past are gone and we're dealing with a whole new set of people," Trump said. "And thus far, they've been much more reasonable."

Trump added that the U.S. is waiting to see if Iran's Parliamentary Leader Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf will work with the U.S., and he claimed that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei was "seriously injured."

"We're gonna find out," Trump told The Post when asked about Ghalibaf. "I'll let you know that in about a week."

Trump's implication seems to be either that Qalibaf, Vahidi, and Pezeshkian are no longer factors, or that their alignment and posture have significantly changed. As of last Thursday, nearly a week ago, Trump was saying,

“We estimated it would take approximately four to six weeks to achieve our mission; 26 days in, we’re extremely, really, a lot ahead of schedule. The Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated,” he said.

“They’re saying to people, ‘This is a disaster.’ They know it. That’s why they’re talking to us, and they wouldn’t talk otherwise, but they’re talking to us because they’ve got a disaster on their hands. They’re defeated. They can’t make a comeback,” he said.

. . . “They now have a chance to make a deal, but that’s up to them, and they’ll tell you, ‘We’re not negotiating. We will not negotiate.’ Of course, they’re negotiating. They’ve been obliterated,” he said. “Who wouldn’t negotiate?”


Let's hope his address tonight adds some clarity.

posted by test @ April 01, 2026   0 Comments

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Pope Leo, The Scriptural Conundrum, And Alan Dershowitz

I double checked this with AI, which replied,

Yes, Pope Leo XIV stated that God "does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war" during his Palm Sunday homily on March 29, 2026.

Speaking to tens of thousands in St. Peter's Square, the Pope condemned the ongoing conflict between the U.S., Israel, and Iran as "atrocious" and warned against using faith to justify violence.

. . . He cited Isaiah 1:15 to emphasize his point: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood".

But then I asked AI about Moses and the battle with the Amalekites:

According to Exodus 17:8-16, the Battle of Rephidim saw Joshua lead the Israelites against the Amalekites while Moses, Aaron, and Hur watched from a hill. The Israelites prevailed whenever Moses held up the "staff of God," but faltered when he lowered it due to fatigue. Aaron and Hur Supported his arms with a stone for sitting, allowing Joshua to secure victory until sunset.

A quick web search brings up the point that in Isaiah 1:15, God is specifically rebuking the later-stage Southern Kingdom of Judah, which had fallen into hypocrisy. This wasn't the case with Moses, Aaron, Hur, and Joshua, who were doing God's will. It's hard to avoid a conclusion that if your cause is in accordance with God's will, even when you go to war, God listens to your prayers.

But let's go to the specific wording of The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2309:

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. the gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. . . . the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. the power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

Let's consider very recent remarks by Alan Dershowitz, who by his account speaks frequently with Prime Minister Netanyahu, and whose viewpoint must certainly have influenced the prudential judgment of both Netanyahu and President Trump, whose mutual reponsibility it is to evaluate the moral legitimacy of the Iran war.

The military action undertaken against Iran, designed to prevent it from developing a nuclear arsenal, is the most significant since World War II.

This is a remarkable assessment, and it relies on what the meaning of "significant" is. The Korean and Viet Nam wars were longer and invoived far more forces on both sides, but they were fought to a stalemate, a result of a policy context of "containing" the Soviet Union, not defeating it. This likely won't happen with Iran, and it certainly isn't the US or Israeli intent. I think Dershowitz is correct in equating the moral significance of the Iran war with World War II in the area of averting potential widespread destruction of innnocent life.

Indeed, had similar preventive military action been taken against the Nazi regime in the 1930s, it might have saved as many as 50 million lives. If the military attack against Iran succeeds in preventing it from developing a nuclear arsenal, it too may prevent millions of deaths — we will never know how many.

We will only learn the deadly numbers if this attack fails and Iran develops and deploys nuclear weapons.

Preventive military actions are always controversial and often unpopular, because history is blind to the probabilistic future. If prevention succeeds, we never know its benefits. If it fails, we learn its costs the hard way.

What Dershowitz is saying here is that, weighing the circumstances, those who have responsibility for the public good have chosen to venture into war. He doesn't mention Clausewitz, but Clausewitz has a great deal to say about being blind to the probabilistic future -- it's simply part of war:

War is the province of uncertainty: three-fourths of those things upon which action in war must be calculated, are hidden more or less in the clouds of great uncertainty. Here, then, above all a fine and penetrating mind is called for, to grope out the truth by the tact of its judgment.

. . . Resolution is an act of courage in single instances, and if it becomes a characteristic trait, it is a habit of the mind. But here we do not mean courage in face of bodily danger, but in face of responsibility, therefore to a certain extent against moral danger.

Dershowitz brings up a question that strikes me as very close to Clausewitz's invocation of resolution as courage against moral danger:

Trump has said if the U.S. had not bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities back in June, Iran would already have a nuclear bomb and would have used it. That may or may not be accurate. We can never know for certain. But do we have to take that risk, and does Israel? Or are these two nations entitled — or perhaps obligated — to eliminate or at least reduce that risk by preventive military action? Should they have to wait until it is imminent, which may mean too late or almost too late to prevent it?

What Dershowitz is arguing is that we're never going to be completely certain about either the conditions that may have led to the war -- was Iran actually just weeks from building and deploying a nuclear weapon? -- or what the outcome may be -- will we be able finally to prevent Iran from ever doing this? -- but we have entrusted the elected leadership in both Israel and the US with the prudential judgment and the resolution to go to war.

But Dershowitz leaves aside the scriptural conundrum (and so does the pope): irrespective of the New Covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant is eternal and remains in effect. God still has a special relationship with Israel. It's a major mistake to ignore this.

posted by test @ March 31, 2026   0 Comments

Monday, March 30, 2026

Another Bad Idea From The UK: Mass Migration As Social Engineering

Another area of the UK's decline that I've begun to look at is immigration. This so-called "bitesize" piece from the BBC probably puts the best possible take on it:

After World War Two, a mass immigration of people coming to work in Britain began. Many of the early arrivals were from the West Indies, South Asia and Cyprus. The most famous arrival was of people from the Caribbean, mainly Jamaica and Trinidad, on the ship Empire Windrush in 1948. This is sometimes mistakenly referred to as the first arrival of black people in Britain.

- UK had a severe labour shortage after World War Two, especially in the transport network and the newly created National Health Service

- large areas of the main cities had been destroyed by aerial bombing and a programme of rebuilding began, needing workers

- for the above reasons, British governments actively invited people from the Commonwealth to come and work

- the economy of the Caribbean islands, seriously underdeveloped by Britain, was in crisis with high levels of unemployment[.]

Let's see if we can parse this out. From Econ 101, I dimly recall that a shortage of anything raises its price. A labor shortage ought to mean workers can ask for higher wages, except if you can increase the supply of workers, well then, they can't ask for higher wages. So it sounds to me as though as a matter of government policy, the UK elected to import cheap labor to keep wages down during a labor shortage. According to AI:

The British Nationality Act 1948 granted all Commonwealth citizens the right to live and work in the UK. This led to the arrival of the "Windrush generation" from the Caribbean to address severe labor shortages in reconstruction, transport, and the newly formed National Health Service (NHS).

Wait a moment. Isn't it incongruous that the UK had a Labour government from 1945 to 1951, that would notionally have been looking out for the benefit of the working class? Instead, it passed legislation to import cheap labor to keep wages down. In fact, this policy continued into the early 1960s:

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the UK actively recruited workers from overseas, for example, the NHS led mass recruitment drives for nurses from the Caribbean in the 1950s and doctors from the Indian subcontinent in the 1960s. These policies were driven by a recognition that migrant [which is to say cheap] labour was needed for post-war growth and public services.

. . . From 1962 onward, immigration controls were tightened on Commonwealth migration, via the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, further restrictions in 1968 and the Immigration Act 1971. These acts ended the open-door policy by requiring work vouchers or permits for Commonwealth citizens. However, it is notable that even as laws became stricter, legal immigration continued, in the late 1960s Commonwealth citizens were still admitted at tens of thousands per year.

. . . A major shift in UK immigration policy came with integration into Europe. The UK joined the European Economic Community in 1973, but the full effects on migration only emerged after the then Prime Minister, John Major, signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, joining the United Kingdom, without the consent of the people, to the newly formed European Union.

The principle of free movement of people was enshrined in EU law, allowing UK and other EU citizens to live and work in each other’s countries without visas. For Britain, EU free movement became particularly significant after the EU’s expansion eastward. In 2004, ten new countries, eight of them in Eastern Europe, (known as the “A8” countries) joined the EU.

The UK government under Prime Minister Tony Blair chose to allow immediate free movement access to workers from the new member states in 2004, rather than imposing transitional limits. This policy decision encouraged a large wave of legal migration from Eastern Europe to the UK.

Let's note that the overall national policy of keeping wages down via mass migration was facilitated by both Conservative (John Major) and Labour (Tony Blair) governments. In fact, this ought to represent a major betrayal of the working class by the Labour Party, which was founded by the Fabians as a way to temporize with working-class demands, but as we've seen, keeping the working class down was the actual Fabian agenda. Recent Labour immigration policy has in fact taken this even farther:

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and "rub the Right's nose in diversity", according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

. . . Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

. . . He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: "Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

Keeping wages down? That's so 1999!

The "deliberate policy", from late 2000 until "at least February last year [2008]", when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

A Home Office spokesman said [in 2009]: “Our new flexible points based system gives us greater control on those coming to work or study from outside Europe, ensuring that only those that Britain need can come.

“Britain's borders are stronger than ever before and we are rolling out ID cards to foreign nationals, we have introduced civil penalties for those employing illegal workers and from the end of next year our electronic border system will monitor 95 per cent of journeys in and out of the UK.

“The British people can be confident that immigration is under control.”

But even as the UK struggled to limit legal immigration, illegal immigration has soared:

In the year ending June 2025, there were 49,341 detected irregular arrivals, 27% more than in the previous year, and 88% of these arrived on small boats. Small boats have been the predominant recorded entry method for irregular arrivals since 2020, when detections on this method increased rapidly and detections on other methods declined (likely in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic making other methods of entry, such as air or ferry, less viable).

The illegal migrants are, of course, precisely those the UK doesn't need and presumably doesn't want, if the "points bsased system" is any indication -- but why does the UK nevertheless encourage them with incentives like migrant hotels?

What we're actually seeing is an official effort, only partly concealed, to destroy the traditional UK working class by keeping native-born wages down and importing third-world replacements, who at the same time will harass the native-born working class via techniques like rape gangs.

This is the country that brought us Fabian socialism. There's something deeply wrong here, and it's hard to avoid thinking it has to do with the UK class structure -- but under the current scheme of social engineering, it isn't the middle or upper classes that will be hurt. Instead of the working class sending the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie to the gulag, the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie are going to wipe out the traditional working class.

posted by test @ March 30, 2026   0 Comments

Sunday, March 29, 2026

A Detour Into Archbishops Of Canterbury

Yesterday I resumed my occasional ruminations on bad ideas that originated in the UK, in this case, Fabian socialism. This morning I ran into a piece on another bad idea from the UK that's had far less traction, the Archbishop of Canterbury: The posh plot to stick Mullally in Canterbury. As best I can tell, it breaks down the controversy in class terms, which is an almost exclusively intra-UK issue, when the occupant of the Canterbury see is at least politely said still to be the leader of world Anglicanism.

But here's the issue as outlined in the piece:

The BBC presented Sarah Mullally as a ground-breaker in its coverage of her installation as Archbishop of Canterbury. But the real ground-breaker in the Church of England was George Carey, the archbishop that Margaret Thatcher chose in 1990.

This is because Carey was non-U.

Carey was the first Archbishop of Canterbury since the Reformation not to have been educated at Oxbridge. Born as the son of a porter in London’s East End in 1935, he left school at 15 to work as an office boy at the London Electricity Board. He went to a secondary-modern school having failed his 11-plus.

. . . He did National Service in the RAF as a radio operator with a deployment in Iraq. After the RAF, he started pursuing a vocation to be ordained in the Church of England. Within 15 months he passed three A-levels and six O-levels, and won a place at King’s College, London, to study Theology. He came up against snobbery in the established Church of the 1950s, being told by a snooty cleric that he would never make it to ordination. But he was ordained in 1962, serving as a parish minister and theological educator. He became Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1987.

The idea of Carey as a potential regenerative force in both the Church of England and world Anglicanism was something I experienced as a then-Episcopalian. Our parish at the time brought in a morbidly obese lesbian rector as part of this grand transformation, as a result of which my wife and I stopped going to church for several years. One point the search committee found in her favor was that she was a personal friend of George Carey. Carey was in favor of ordaining women but a moderate on the issue of same-sex.

But even though the Church of England ordained women during his tenure, it was overall less a breakthrough than a distraction. The controversy over ordaining women on one hand drove about 700 Anglican priests out of the Church of England and into the Catholic Church, and currently, a majority of Church of England priests in formation are women. But after his retirement, a much bigger scandal arose over successive investigations of his coverup of abuse by priests and bishops:

During Carey's term as Archbishop of Canterbury, there were many complaints of serial sex abuse made against Peter Ball, the Bishop of Lewes and later of Gloucester until his resignation in 1993 after admitting to an act of gross indecency. Archbishop Carey wrote to the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Chief Constable of Gloucester police, supporting Ball and saying that he was suffering "excruciating pain and spiritual torment". In October 2015 Ball was sentenced to 32 months imprisonment for misconduct in public office and indecent assault; he admitted the abuse of 18 young men aged 17–25.

. . . [Carey's priestly faculties were revoked on 17 June 2020 after new evidence came to light about failures to consider child protection in regard to leading schools' children's activity and Bible camps run by John Smyth in the 1970s. [They were] then reinstated in January 2021.

On 4 December 2024 Carey submitted his resignation as a priest from the Church of England, writing "I wish to surrender my Permission to Officiate".

The piece at the first link, though, seems to want to make Carey into some sort of hero for promoting the ordination of women -- but his tenure did nothing to stop the trend of Anglican decline in the UK, the US, and Canada:

In 1970, the combined membership of [The Episcopal Church] and the Anglican Church of Canada came to 4,373,000. In 2015, the combined membership of TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada came to 2,537,000 and it has dropped considerably since then. In half a century North American Anglicanism has halved in size.

North American Anglicanism has been declining by some metrics for a long time, but much of the decline is recent. As late as the 1990s, membership in the American South grew and it was holding steady in the West. The Anglican Church of Canada’s decline only really picked up from the turn of the century. But it picked up with a vengeance. The Anglican Church of Canada’s membership nearly halved between 2001 and 2017.

Historical perspective matters, even when looking at recent history. The last Lambeth Conference at which the bulk of Anglicanism was represented was in 1998. TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada are profoundly different (and much smaller) now than they were then.

For the rest of the West the picture is mixed. The numbers for England, Scotland, and Wales are as bad or nearly as bad as for North America.

The odd thing is that the piece blames Mullaly's installation on a "posh plot" -- except that Carey's own project to ordain women, which came to fruition in 1992, made Mullaly's installation possible. There simply wouldn't have been a woman Archbishop without the non-U Carey. Where's the posh?

[I]n 1990 the Prime Minister made the appointment from two candidates submitted by the Crown Nominations Commission. The unsuccessful candidate was not disclosed but it is reasonable to believe that Mrs Thatcher chose Carey, an evangelical from a working-class background, in preference to the then Archbishop of York, John Habgood, an Oxbridge-educated theological liberal from an upper-middle-class background.

. . . Since Carey stepped down as Archbishop of Canterbury in 2002, the Church of England has been led by an Oxbridge academic in Rowan Williams, an Old Etonian oil executive in Justin Welby and now a female NHS executive in Sarah Mullally. Could any sensible person believe that an institution that has been so captured by middle-class neo-Marxists will ever again be led by a man from a working-class background?

George Carey was the true ground-breaker and, under God, Mrs Thatcher made it happen.

It seems to me that Whig vs Tory or U vs non-U have nothing to do with whether any Archbishop of Canterbury has been effective in recent decades -- that's a minor distraction intramural to the UK. If anything, though, it seems to me that Carey was complicit in implementing the same British bourgeois temporizing agenda as all his predecessors and successors. I wouldn't call them "middle-class neo-Marxists", though -- I think it would be more precise to call them respectable temporizers.

But hasn't this been baked into Anglicanism from the start? When I went through Episcopalian confirmation class about 1980, the big point that the priests made was about how Anglicans were able to resolve their differences through compromise. That's where it's always gotten them.

posted by test @ March 29, 2026   0 Comments

Saturday, March 28, 2026

Fabian Socialism 2.0

I remember a discussion question from somewhere at least 50 years ago that went something like this: "Which of the two British dystopian novels, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World or George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, seems most prescient of current conditions to you? Explain." I thought this was a good question at the time, but I never could come up with a definite answer, and as I revisit the question today, I'm actually more convinced that the answer is "neither".

Let's look at Brave New World. According to Wikipedia,

Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, on the other hand, also per Wikipedia, paints a different picture:

Much of the world is in perpetual war. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, has become a province of the totalitarian superstate Oceania, which is led by Big Brother, a dictatorial leader supported by an intense cult of personality manufactured by the Party's Thought Police. The Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and, through the Ministry of Truth, historical negationism and constant propaganda to persecute individuality and independent thinking.

We might say that Brave New World represents an apotheosis of consumer capitalism, while Nineteen Eighty-Four is a practical outcome of the Marxist-Leninist vision. On one hand, the Marxist-Leninist paradigm collapsed within half a century of Orwell's prediction. On the other, nobody seems especially eager to embrace the ultimate expression of consumerism, despite the widespread availability of plastic surgery and group therapy -- and intelligence-based social hierarchy these days is a joke: the punchline is Kamala Harris.

But both dystopias are aimed in particular at the UK. As best we can observe from an ocean away, the UK has turned into somnething utterly unlike either of the 20th century visions, and at least by some analyses, this was utterly unforeseen:

To analyze the nature and extent of Islamist ideological penetration in Britain, it is important to understand the demographic features of British Islam. Britain did not measure religion until the 2001 Census, and even then one’s religious affiliation was only a voluntary question. Britain did however measure migrants’ countries of origin and from these figures it is thought that the 1991 Muslim population was around 1.25 million. The 2001 Census indicated that 1.6 million people in England and Wales and just over 42,000 in Scotland identified themselves as Muslim. The voluntary nature of the question is likely to have led to a low figure and it is now thought that there are around 2 million.

This whole discussion, however, is sanguline; a quick web search brings up a number of Muslims in the UK closer to 4 million. In general, UK legacy media downplays the idea of conflicts in values between Islam and the UK, but in the current environment, Keir Starmer is actively appeasing Muslim voters on issues like anti-Semitism: This has brought me to the question of what's become of Fabian socialism, a peculiarly British idea that caught on elsewhere in the late 19th and erly 20th century in response to the idea of world proletarian revolution. A UK study guide gives a succinct explanation of the term:

Fabianism is a socialist movement that advocates for gradual reform and the peaceful transition to socialism rather than revolution. It emphasizes education, moral persuasion, and the use of democratic means to achieve social change, reflecting a belief in the power of reasoned argument and collaboration over violent upheaval.

. . . Fabianism differs from traditional forms of socialism primarily in its commitment to gradual reform rather than revolutionary change. While many socialist movements advocate for immediate and often radical changes to overthrow capitalism, Fabianism promotes a more measured approach, believing that social change can be achieved through education, moral persuasion, and democratic processes. This ideology emphasizes collaboration within existing political structures to create a more equitable society.

The standard definition goes on to give a roll call of relentlessly bourgeois figures connected with the movement: George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Charles Marson, Sydney Olivier, Oliver Lodge, Ramsay MacDonald, Emmeline Pankhurst, and Bertrand Russell, to the point that either consciously or subconsciously, these people recognized what would happen to the bourgeoisie in the event of world proleterian revolution, viz, the gulag, and they were above all intent on saving their own skins.

Thus they concocted a strategy of tempporizing indefinitely with the proletariat, offering cures of one sort or another to social ailments that seldom solved much except to keep the bourgeoisie in place. By the 21st century, as a practical matter, the US solved tbe problem of proletarian revolution, first by containing the Soviet Union, and then by allowing the Marxist-Leninist project to collapse of its own weight. It's worth pointing out that NATO and similar alliances were constructed as part of this containment strategy, but once the Marxist-Leninist model collapsed, they became irrelevant.

The next problem is that once the US strategy co-opted the threat of world proletarian revolition, the whole Fabian idea also collapsed. I think this was at the root of both Reagan Republicanism and Trump populism; the bottom line is that temporizing with radical demands in order to maintain a comfortable bourgeoisie should no longer be necessary. In other words, the whole Labour project has become as irrelevant as the Marxism-Leninism it was intended to supplant.

The response of Labour, it appears, has been to cast about for another group to temporize with, in this case, the Muslims. This isn't going to work; there's a different dynamic, and each temporization will only come off as weakness until the bourgeoisie is dhimmi, relegated to second-class status in return for a tac, otherwise characterizable as reparations. As I think about it, both Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are intensely UK bourgeois views of the social structure, both date from the mid-20th century, and the implicit prescriptions of both for the social compromise are no longer relevant.

I think this is why I could never quite work through the question of which was more prescient; neither was. Neither remotely saw Islam as a potential problem for the UK or the West in general.

posted by test @ March 28, 2026   0 Comments