Rolf FALTER

Born in Leuven, historian, journalist, grandfather. Worked for university, media, Belgian govt, EU. Lectured on history,media and journalism.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

The MAGA crowd in Washington has decided that since Europeans don’t sufficiently appreciate Trump, the American bases on the continent must go. This is the strategic reasoning of a man who burns down his own kitchen.

American bases in Europe were never a favour. They are the logistical spine of every war the United States fights east of Gibraltar. Ramstein moves the cargo, Aviano launches the jets, Rota services the ships. Without them the Pentagon does not project power into the Middle East. It projects PowerPoint.

The fantasy assumes the alternative is aircraft carriers gliding majestically into the Persian Gulf. That era is ending. A modern carrier is a thirteen-billion-dollar trophy that can be reduced to scrap by a couple of hundred cheap missiles fired from the Iranian coast. China noticed.

The other fantasy is that America simply fights from home. Picture the alternative: twenty thousand transatlantic sorties shuttling spare parts, munitions, fuel bladders, mechanics and replacement pilots from Norfolk and Dover to wherever the war happens to be. A C-17 burns through roughly 35,000 dollars of fuel every hour it flies, and the round trip from the American east coast to the Gulf is the better part of a day. Multiply that by every bolt, every missile, every spare engine. The war becomes a sustained airborne traffic jam with the bill arriving by the second.

So you need land, specifically land near the war. Modern combat aircraft are not Spitfires you fuel up and send off with a wave. An F-35 demands an entire Walmart of spare parts, a small city of technicians, climate-controlled hangars and a supply chain stretching halfway round the planet. Drones need operators, networks, satellites and a steady diet of components no carrier can store. Modern war arrives by container ship and lives in a warehouse.

Close the bases, and Washington loses the warehouses. Lose the warehouses, and the next confrontation with Iran is either fought by phone or fought from Kansas with a flight schedule that bankrupts the Treasury before the first missile lands.

MAGA thinks shutting Ramstein punishes Europe. It punishes America. Europe will be inconvenienced. America will be unarmed.

And so, after a thousand insults, a thousand sneers, a thousand late-night posts about freeloading allies, Europe is quietly drafting the politest letter in diplomatic history. It thanks America for its service. It wishes the troops a safe journey home. It suggests, with great warmth, that Washington might now turn its attention to its neighbours in Latin America, where a fading superpower can busy itself with whatever a fading superpower busies itself with.

Spain had its century. Britain had its empire. The Soviets had their parades. Each ended the same way: as a shadow of itself, with the historians left to argue, volume after volume, about precisely when the rot set in and why nobody noticed in time. America is welcome to join them on the shelf.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you like what you read, please follow Gandalv on Substack:
https://t.co/2TO5x2O8nI

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Een pagina-grote recensie van mijn jongste boek DE UNIE DIE NOOIT WAS in @nrc door Europa-expert en hoogleraar Hendrik Vos, in één adem met het jongste boek van Caroline De Gruyter: aangenaam nieuws om een nieuwe week goed te beginnen. Hier de link:

https://t.co/nwXLygsSKQ

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Lees dit artikel op De Morgen https://t.co/j7wKiyl3uE

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Vorige week woensdag, de 8ste, heb ik me in het hart van Den Haag aan een poging gewaagd om voor een geïnteresseerd publiek in minder dan een uur het complex communautair verleden van België uit te leggen. Voor wie geïnteresseerd is, hier de link:
https://t.co/OTuPeorwhE

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Inmiddels alweer bijna een maand geleden nam Maarten Rabaey van De Morgen een interview van mij af. Aanleiding was de verschijning van mijn boek 'DE UNIE DIE NOOIT WAS', maar Maarten maakte er meteen een actualiteitsinterview van.
https://t.co/9rqyC53pqL

[Barney Panofsky's Best Intentions @mynamesnotgordy]

10/10. No notes.

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Aan de vooravond van Pasen waag ik me aan oefening in een toch nog vrij optimistisch scenario voor na het afdruipen van Amerika in Iran: https://t.co/i2ZxC9wCDw
Veel leesplezier, en Zalig Pasen

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next.

Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades.

George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks.

The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order.

No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide.

A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute.

The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no.

The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it.

https://t.co/dAOBBMsgDS

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Ik heb vandaag Hoofdstuk 22 van mijn nieuwste boek DE UNIE DIE NOOIT WAS (https://t.co/W0ZODIVfsD) integraal op de blog van mijn website gezet. Het gaat over de migratiecrisis van 2015: https://t.co/sw9EZQjy7Z

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

The patterns of trigonometry

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

BREAKING: Zelensky just landed in the UAE and signed a defence cooperation agreement with President MBZ.

The deal on the table changes everything about this war. Ukraine is offering Gulf states 1,000 drone interceptors per day. Each Sting interceptor costs $2,100. Each Patriot missile it replaces costs $3.9 million. In exchange, Ukraine wants the Patriot missiles the Gulf states are burning through, because Kyiv cannot get enough of them to stop Russian missiles.

Read that again. The country America refused to arm fast enough is now arming America’s allies with a weapon that costs 1,857 times less than the one America cannot produce fast enough.

The National reported on March 27 that Zelensky told reporters: “We’d like to quietly receive the Patriot missiles we have a deficit of, and give them a corresponding number of interceptors.” AFP confirmed the UAE agreement on March 28. Eleven countries have formally requested Ukraine’s drone defence expertise per Zelensky’s own count. Over 200 Ukrainian military specialists are already deployed across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan.

Here is the arithmetic that should terrify every Pentagon procurement officer on earth.

The United States fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first four days of the Iran war per a US Congressional study cited by the Jerusalem Post. That is eighteen months of Lockheed Martin’s annual production consumed in 96 hours. Each of those 943 shots cost $3.9 million. Total expenditure: $3.68 billion in four days on defensive interceptions alone. Iran produces 10,000 Shahed drones per month per Reuters. Each drone costs $20,000 to $50,000. The cost exchange ratio is 114 to 1 in Iran’s favour per Military Times.

Ukraine’s Sting interceptor inverts this arithmetic entirely. At $2,100, the cost ratio flips from 114-to-1 against America to roughly 10-to-1 against Iran. Ukraine can supply 1,000 per day. That is 30,000 per month against Iran’s 10,000 Shaheds per month. For the first time in this war, the defender’s production rate exceeds the attacker’s production rate at a fraction of the cost.

And the country that built this weapon is the same country that Trump publicly rejected. “No, they are not helping. We do not need their help. We know more about drones than anyone else” per Fox News. He doubled down: “The last person we need help from is Zelensky.” Meanwhile the Pentagon notified Congress of plans to redirect $750 million in Ukraine-bound Patriot missiles to Gulf states per House of Saud reporting. America is simultaneously refusing Ukraine’s cheap solution and cannibalising Ukraine’s expensive one.

Zelensky framed this explicitly. He told The National: “No matter how many Patriots, THAADs, or other air-defence systems are in the Middle East, that alone is not enough for fully effective air defence.” He told the UK Parliament: “When it comes to shooting down massive Shahed attacks, only Ukrainian experience can really help with this today.”

The Pentagon is spending $3.9 million per interception, raiding Swiss fighter jet accounts to cover shortfalls, and diverting Ukraine’s own Patriot supply to the Gulf. Zelensky is offering the same result for $2,100 and producing 1,000 units per day. The market has a word for this kind of disruption.

The $2,100 drone is the most important weapon in this war. And the country that built it is the one America said it did not need.

Full analysis - https://t.co/32ixeQpfif

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

This seems a good initiative. Can we swallow our European pride and ask these four governments humbly if we might help?

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Twee weken geleden interviewde Adriaan Cartuyvels van Het Belang van Limburg mij over mijn nieuwste boek DE UNIE DIE NOOIT WAS, dat sinds een ruime week te koop is. Hierbij de link naar het verhaal op mijn website:

https://t.co/9rqyC53pqL

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

https://t.co/3jLwk6gWdo

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Hoe meer je de oorlog in Iran tracht te analyseren, hoe minder je een fatsoenlijke uitweg vindt voor het Amerika van Donald Trump. Zeker nu Teheran ook wat wapens krijgt van Moskou en Beijing. Een poging om dat perspectief uit te diepen via deze link:

https://t.co/i2ZxC9wCDw

[Van Cauwelaert @cauwelaert]

Als dwaasheid de overhand haalt....

[Rolf FALTER @rolfalter]

Vandaag in Het Belang van Limburg: een interview over het verleden van Europa en over de pijnlijke toestand van het continent vandaag, naar aanleiding van het verschijnen van DE UNIE DIE NOOIT WAS (sinds gisteren in de boekhandel):
https://t.co/t2G8EyvNZn

[Tansu Yegen @TansuYegen]

Life for a girl dad can feel this fast sometimes🤍

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

While the United States spends billions bombing Iran and the world watches oil prices crash, China just published the most consequential economic document of the decade. Nobody is paying attention. That is the point.

The 15th Five-Year Plan, unveiled at the National People’s Congress on 5th March, is 141 pages. It mentions artificial intelligence over 50 times. It targets 70% AI penetration across the Chinese economy by 2027 and 90% by 2030. It designates humanoid robotics as a core pillar industry with output doubling over five years. It commits to space-Earth quantum communication networks, nuclear fusion timelines, and brain-computer interfaces. It sets AI-related industries at a target value exceeding 10 trillion yuan, approximately $1.38 trillion. And it declares “extraordinary measures” for rare earths and semiconductor self-reliance.

This is not an economic plan. It is a war plan for a war the United States is not fighting because it is too busy fighting the wrong one.

The US response to Chinese technological competition is the CHIPS and Science Act, signed in 2022. It appropriated $52.7 billion for semiconductor manufacturing, including $39 billion in direct grants and a 25% investment tax credit that expires this year. It has spurred over $640 billion in private investment across 140 projects in 30 states. It created half a million jobs. By any measure, it is the most significant US industrial policy in a generation. And it covers exactly one sector of an economy-wide technological competition.

China’s plan covers every sector. AI across the entire economy. Robotics as industrial backbone. Space infrastructure. Quantum computing. Rare earth processing dominance maintained and strengthened. The CHIPS Act is a rifle. The 15th Five-Year Plan is an arsenal.

The rare earth dimension is where the plans intersect with the war. China controls 90% of global rare earth processing. Every F-35 joint strike fighter requires 920 pounds of rare earth materials. Every Patriot missile battery, every THAAD interceptor, every guided munition being expended over Iran at a rate of thousands per week depends on materials that China processes. The “extraordinary measures” in the Five-Year Plan are not defensive. They are the tightening of a supply chain that the US military cannot function without.

In April 2025, China imposed export controls on all 17 rare earth elements. The January 2027 DFARS deadline requires the Pentagon to eliminate Chinese rare earth dependency from defence procurement. That leaves a 10-to-15-year vulnerability window during which the United States is simultaneously waging a war that consumes rare-earth-dependent munitions at historic rates and attempting to build alternative supply chains that do not yet exist.

The Iran war is consuming the interceptors. China is tightening the supply chain that builds the interceptors. The Five-Year Plan is the document that formalises the tightening into national strategy.

Trump posted “Death, Fire, and Fury” on Truth Social. Xi Jinping published a 141-page plan to ensure that the materials required to deliver that fire and fury remain under Chinese control for the next fifteen years.

One leader is fighting a war. The other is winning the peace. And the 141 pages that will determine which strategy prevails were published the same week the bombs started falling.

Full analysis - https://t.co/eMrt5qYYst