Jake Sullivan

pharmacist, 🌈

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@BarakRavid @axios Oh @guypbenson , why repost obvious BS like this…

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@BarakRavid @axios As if Trump would talk to you first, HAHAHA

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@pk13510 Hope you’ve had a good month or so. (Wish you’d reply to IM though)

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@monkieboy99 Are you swimming naked?

[CBS Sacramento @CBSSacramento]

For years, California leaders accused oil companies of price gouging at the pump, but a state investigation found no evidence of that. Instead, a CBS News California investigation found what's really driving the highest gas prices in the U.S. https://t.co/NTCE6Dx6kl

[James E. Thorne @DrJStrategy]

Food for thought.

Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride

For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface.

The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities.

Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

In that context, his reported blunt message to European and British leaders, you need the oil out of the Strait more than we do; why don’t you go and take it? Is not a throwaway line. It is the verbalisation of the antithesis. It openly reverses the traditional presumption that America will carry the burden while its allies emote from the sidelines.

In this dialectic, the prize is not simply the reopening of a chokepoint. The prize is a reordered system in which the United States effectively arbitrages and controls the global flow of oil. A world in which US‑aligned production in the Americas plus a discretionary capability to secure,or not secure, Hormuz places Washington at the centre of the hydrocarbon chessboard. For that strategic end, a rapid restoration of the old status quo would be counterproductive.

A quick, surgical “fix” of Hormuz would short‑circuit the dialectic. If Trump rapidly crushed Iran’s remaining coastal capabilities, swept the mines and escorted tankers back through the Strait, Europe and the UK would heave a sigh of relief and return to business as usual: underfunded militaries, maximalist green posturing and performative disdain for US power, all underwritten by that same power. The contradiction between their dependence and their posture would remain latent.

By declining to supply the synthesis on demand, and by explicitly telling London and Brussels to “go and take it” themselves, Trump forces a reckoning. European and British leaders must confront the fact that their energy systems, their industrial bases and their geopolitical sermons all rest on an American hard‑power foundation they neither finance nor politically respect. The longer the contradiction is allowed to unfold, the stronger the eventual synthesis can be: a new order in which access to secure flows, Hormuz, Venezuela and beyond, is explicitly conditional on real contributions, not assumed as a right.

In that sense, the delay in “taking” the Strait, and the challenge issued to US allies to do it themselves, is not indecision. It is the negative moment Hegel insisted was necessary for history to move. Only by withholding the old guarantee, and by saying so out loud to those who depended on it, can Trump hope to end the free ride.

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@RichardGrenell At least they didn’t link me as being THAT Jake Sullivan this time!

[SULLY @SULLY10X]

He made his mailbox smaller every day until the mailman noticed. 😂

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@ShannonBream @Uber Looks like maybe you got hacked? Hope you get your account back quickly!

[MAZE @mazemoore]

The Story of Alex Pretti.

Read by Elizabeth Warren.

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@MattWalshBlog You are not really this foolish! I hope this was some sort of an attempt at a joke!

[Katie Pavlich @KatiePavlich]

Excellent @Johnny_Joey

[MAZE @mazemoore]

2010. President Obama shoots down the whole "stop deportations and just let the illegal immigrants be" argument that the Democrat party is currently pushing.

[MAZE @mazemoore]

2018. While campaigning, Gavin Newsom says that if the next Governor of CA doesn't fix the affordability crisis and homelessness issue, that Governor will have been a failure.

Both problems got substantially worse on his watch.

Newsom is a failure

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@evanjstern Awesome to see you post here again. I’ll definitely watch it!

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@monkieboy99 Hahaha! That’s hilariously made!

[Steve Guest @SteveGuest]

MUST READ from the WSJ: “Something is profoundly wrong with the U.S. welfare system—a problem that runs far deeper and is more dangerous than the shocking fraud in Minnesota that has been making headlines… real federal welfare spending has soared by 765%, more than twice as fast as total federal spending, and now costs $1.4 trillion annually. Were that money simply doled out evenly to the 19.8 million families the government defines as poor, each household would receive more than $70,000 a year.”

[Jake Sullivan @jakesull]

@monkieboy99 White claw?

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The European Commission offered 𝕏 an illegal secret deal: if we quietly censored speech without telling anyone, they would not fine us.

The other platforms accepted that deal.

𝕏 did not.

[Chef Andrew Gruel @ChefGruel]

Here it is, the 3 ingredient ice cream. You still have time to make this.