Stuart Scheer

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

No one said that feminists won't pander for votes?

[Sloan Rachmuth @SloanRachmuth]

Good. Lord.

[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.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@Gandalf_da_Grey @DrJStrategy You are an idiot.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@BernieSanders You are a disgusting liar. Sanders.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@antonioguterres He is disgusting. He never says this about real victims, like Jews and Christians.

[Tristin Hopper @TristinHopper]

To any future historians reading this, this era will make a lot more sense if you remember that every name is the opposite of what it really is. The antifascists are fascists, the antiracists are racists, the fact-checkers are propagandists, etc. Hopefully this has been fixed by your time.

[Goldie Ghamari | گلسا قمری 🇮🇷 @gghamari]

Iranian here with a message for every single American who voted for President Trump:

Thank you.

God bless President Trump.
God bless the US Military.
God bless America. 🇺🇸

[𝐍𝐢𝐨𝐡 𝐁𝐞𝐫𝐠 🇮🇷 ✡︎ @NiohBerg]

🔴BREAKING:

We have the first footage of street parties breaking out in Tehran.

You don't understand our happiness.

[Sabrina (LionHearted) @LionHearted76]

@EndWokeness THIS . IS . COMPLETE . FAKE . BULL$HIT .

I thought Gov Newsom was a moron but he is so much worse. There is no level he will not stoop to. There is no level he will not pander to. And he thinks he can get away with it.

Now we know - Newsom is as stupid as he acts.

[Citizen Caller @CitizenCallerUS]

@EndWokeness Why do Democrats always say stuff like this?

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@amuse Both of them are psychopaths

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@UN The United Nations is where many problems of the world are started.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@SenSchumer Schumer, the mayor from your party is sponsoring this terrorism.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@LePapillonBlu2 Pay for it and you will have it.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Once you understand the incentive, the reason for the behavior becomes obvious: they are importing a left-voting bloc that depends on government handouts.

A prominent example of this in America is Ilhan Omar and her Somali voting bloc in Minnesota, an area which used to be primarily Nordic-German.

Importing voters is a CERTAIN path to a single-party supermajority and has ALREADY happened at the state level in California and New York. It also explains why those states have BANNED VOTER ID in order to accelerate a permanent socialist supermajority, destroying any semblance of democracy.

We stand on the precipice of disaster, an end to America.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@krassenstein You are guilty of these deaths.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@JeremyUnplugged This is not a Rabbi by any rational measure.

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@UN @Refugees Wrong

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@GBNEWS Yes

[Stuart Scheer @sscheer26]

@nyaraVT It is a win for gender equality.