India’s relationship with China would dominate its foreign policy but for one thing

July 9th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallIndia’s relationship with China would dominate its foreign policy but for one thing, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World) — the Himalayas:

A glance at the map indicates two huge countries cheek by jowl, but a closer look shows they are walled off from each other along what the CIA’s World Factbook lists as 1,652 miles of border.

[…]

India’s response to the Chinese annexation of Tibet was to give a home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan independence movement in Dharamsala in the state of Himachal Pradesh.

[…]

As things stand, Tibetan independence looks impossible; but if the impossible were to occur, even in several decades’ time, India would be in a position to remind a Tibetan government who their friends were during the years of exile.

[…]

Another issue between them is the northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as “south Tibet.” As China’s confidence grows, so does the amount of territory there it says is Chinese. Until recently, China claimed only the Tawang area in the extreme west of the state. However, in the early 2000s, Beijing decided that all of Arunachal Pradesh was Chinese, which was news to the Indians, who have exercised sovereignty over it since 1955. The Chinese claim is partly geographical and partly psychological. Arunachal Pradesh borders China, Bhutan, and Burma, making it strategically useful, but the issue is also valuable to China as a reminder to Tibet that independence is a nonstarter.

[…]

There are numerous separatist movements, some more active than others, some dormant, but none that look set to achieve their aims. For example, the Sikh movement to create a state for Sikhs from part of both Indian and Pakistani Punjab has for the moment gone quiet, but it could flare up again. The state of Assam has several competing movements, including the Bodo-speaking peoples, who want a state for themselves, and the Muslim United Liberation Tigers of Assam, who want a separate country created within Assam for Muslims. There is even a movement to create an independent Christian state in Nagaland, where 75 percent of the population is Baptist; however, the prospect of the Naga National Council achieving its aims is as remote as the land it seeks to control, and that looks to be true of all of the separatist movements.

[…]

It is the world’s seventh-largest country, with the second-largest population.

[…]

It has nine thousand miles of internal navigable waterways, reliable water supplies, and huge areas of arable land; is a major coal producer; has useful quantities of oil and gas, even if it will always be an importer of all three; and its subsidization of fuel and heating costs is a drain on its finances.

[…]

For decades, India was suspicious that the Americans were the new British, but with a different accent and more money.

This inverts the historical pattern and creates local variety and global conformity

July 8th, 2025

The most important reason why historical towns produced beautiful architecture without design is vernacular architecture:

When Amalfi was built, everyone used local materials and styles out of practical necessity. If you were building a terraced farm and house, you had to use stone quarried nearby, volcanic ash mortar from the mountains, and local limestone plaster. There were no other options. Similarly, the architectural designs using those materials are kept uniform by greater ignorance of other styles and the physical properties of the few available materials.

Local conformity of style and material was enforced without laws or community meetings. Simultaneously, styles and materials varied greatly across communities. Local conformity was matched by a wonderful global diversity of styles.

Today, people have diverse tastes sourced from global media and more diverse buildings styles and materials available due to globalization. This inverts the historical pattern and creates local variety and global conformity. Within any city you will find dozens of clashing styles: colonial houses abut glass towers and fake-wood 5-over-1s. But across cities, variance is decreased and this same clash of styles is repeated over and over again.

You have a better measure of how hard your workout was than your watch or heart-rate monitor can provide

July 7th, 2025

A new study published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance compares seven different ways of calculating training load:

Four of them are variations on a concept known as TRIMP, which is short for “training impulse” and is based on heart rate measurements, using equations that account for lactate levels, breathing thresholds, and other details. A fifth uses heart-rate variability, and a sixth uses a subjective rating of effort. (Most fitness wearables, by the way, likely use a combination of the above methods, though their exact algorithms are typically proprietary.) The seventh method is the NASA questionnaire, which we’ll come back to.

The gold standard against which all these methods were compared is the “acute performance decrement,” or APD. Basically, you do an all-out time trial, then you do your workout, then you do another all-out time trial. Your APD is how much slower the second time-trial is compared to the first one, as a measure of how much the workout took out of you.

[…]

The performance test was running at VO2 max pace until exhaustion. When they were fresh, the runners lasted just under six minutes on average. After the one-hour easy run, their APD was 20.7 percent, meaning they gave up 20.7 percent earlier in the post-workout VO2 max run. After the medium-intensity run, the APD was 30.6 percent; after the long intervals, it was 35.9 percent; after the short intervals, it was 29.8 percent.

So how well were each of the seven training load calculations able to predict this APD? The short answer is: not very well.

[…]

The NASA questionnaire, on the other hand, bears a striking resemblance to the APD data, and the statistical analysis confirms that it’s a good predictor. In other words, it’s the only one of the seven calculations tested that, according to this study, accurately reflects how exhausted you are after a workout.

It’s called the NASA Task Load Index, or NASA-TLX, and was developed in the 1980s. It’s simply a set of six questions that ask you to rate the mental demand, physical demand, temporal demand (how rushed were you?), performance (how well did you do?), effort, and frustration of a task. You answer each of these questions on a scale of 1 to 100, then the six scores are averaged—and presto, you have a better measure of how hard your workout was than your watch or heart-rate monitor can provide.

Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants

July 6th, 2025

A Sinaloa drug cartel hacker was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday:

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”

The report said “the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done

July 5th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillAs Tom O’Neill (Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) flipped through “Jolly” West’s papers, he found signs that the CIA psychiatrist was associated with the JFK assassination:

According to a first-person account that Ruby produced with a ghostwriter—published in newspapers in a scenario close to Susan Atkins’s, and again involving Lawrence Schiller—Ruby “lost [his] senses” when he pulled out his gun. Next thing he knew, the cops had him pinned to the floor, and he had no memory of what he’d just done. “What am I doing here?” he asked. “What are you guys jumping on me for?” A psychiatric analysis solicited by Ruby’s defense attorneys said he’d suffered “a ‘fugue state’ with subsequent amnesia.”

On the advice of his attorney at the time, Ruby said he’d murdered Oswald to spare the widowed First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, the ordeal of testifying against Oswald at trial. Another of Ruby’s attorneys, Melvin Belli, later wrote that Ruby had “a blank spot in his memory,” and that any explanation he provided was simply “confabulating.” Potential justifications “had been poured like water into the vacuum in his pathologically receptive memory and, once there, had solidified like cement.”

Seemingly as soon as the story of Oswald’s murder hit the presses, Jolly West tried to insinuate himself into the case. He hoped to assemble a panel of “experts in behavior problems” to weigh in on Ruby’s mental state. He took the extraordinary measure of approaching Judge Joe B. Brown, who’d impaneled the grand jury that indicted Ruby. West wanted the judge to appoint him to the case. At that time, police hadn’t revealed any substantial information about Ruby, his psychological condition, or his possible motive. And West was vague about his motive, too. Three documents among his papers said he’d been “asked” by someone, though he never said who, to seek the appointment from Brown “a few days after the assassination,” a fact never before made public.

[…]

Once Dr. Smith was driving Ruby’s legal team, one of his first acts was to request a new psychiatric examination of Ruby. He had one candidate in mind: Dr. Louis Jolyon West, whom he noted in a court brief had enjoyed acclaim for his studies of brainwashed American POWs. Perhaps, Smith wrote, West could use his “highly qualified” skills as a hypnotist and an administrator of the “truth serum, sodium pentothal” to help Ruby regain his memory of the shooting. (West may have rewarded Smith for the plum assignment by helping him land a teaching position at Oklahoma.)

[…]

West emerged from Ruby’s cell to announce that the previously sane inmate had undergone “an acute psychotic break” sometime during the preceding “forty-eight hours.” Whatever transpired between West and Ruby in that cell, only the two of them could say; there were no witnesses. West asserted that Ruby “was now positively insane.” The condition appeared to be “unshakable” and “fixed.”

In a sworn affidavit accompanying his diagnosis, West described a completely unhinged man who hallucinated, heard voices, and had suddenly acquired the unshakeable belief that a new holocaust was under way in America. “Last night,” West wrote, “the patient became convinced that all Jews in America were being slaughtered. This was in retaliation for him, Jack Ruby, the Jew who was responsible for ‘all the trouble.’” The delusions were so real that Ruby had crawled under the table to hide from the killers. He said he’d “seen his own brother tortured, horribly mutilated, castrated, and burned in the street outside the jail. He could still hear the screams… The orders for this terrible ‘pogrom’ must have come from Washington.”

West said the trouble had started sometime in the evening before the exam, when Ruby ran headfirst into his cell wall in an apparent suicide attempt. But Ruby’s jailer, Sheriff Bill Decker, shrugged it off as a cry for attention. “He rubbed his head on the wall enough that we had to put a little Merthiolate [antiseptic] on it,” Decker told a reporter. “That’s all.”

From that day forward, every doctor who examined Ruby made similar diagnoses: he was delusional. West, however, was hardly the first to have evaluated him. By then nearly half a dozen psychiatrists, many equally renowned, had taken stock of Ruby’s condition, finding him essentially compos mentis. West had been briefed on these opinions, but in his hubris, he wrote that he’d hardly bothered with them, having been “unable to read them until earlier today on the airplane. Tonight, my own findings make it clear that there has been an acute change in the patient’s condition since these earlier studies were carried out.”

The change was too “acute” for Judge Brown’s liking. In the preceding five months, he’d spent many hours in the courtroom with Ruby, and he’d never witnessed anything resembling the behavior West described. Presumably it wasn’t lost on him that this was the same doctor who’d clamored to see Ruby months earlier. After the judge heard West’s report, he ordered a second opinion, saying, “I would like some real disinterested doctors to examine Ruby for my own benefit. I want to get the truth out of it.”

That opinion came from Dr. William Beavers, who examined Ruby two days after West. Beavers’s report to the judge, never before made public, confirmed West’s findings. Ruby “became agitated,” Beavers wrote, and “asked if I did not hear the sounds of torture that were going on.” Like Judge Brown, he was alarmed by the abruptness of Ruby’s disintegration. He considered the possibility that Ruby was malingering—but quickly ruled it out, explaining that it was “highly unlikely that this individual could have convincingly faked hallucinations.” Beavers wondered if Ruby had been tampered with or drugged by an outsider. “The possibility of a toxic psychosis could be entertained,” he wrote, “but is considered unlikely because of the protected situation.”

[…]

But the most relevant insight came from Dr. Jay Shurley, his good friend of forty-five years, who’d worked with West at Lackland Air Force Base and the University of Oklahoma. Shurley was one of the few colleagues who admitted that West was an employee of the CIA. I asked him if he thought West would’ve accepted an assignment from the CIA to scramble Jack Ruby’s mind.

“I feel sort of disloyal to Jolly’s memory,” Shurley said, “but I have to be honest with you, my gut feeling would be yes. He would be capable of that.” Calling West “a very complex character,” he explained, “he had a little problem with grandiosity. He would not be averse at all to having influenced American history in some way or other, whether he got the credit for it or not… Jolly had a real streak of—I guess you’d call it patriotism. If the president asked him to do something, or somebody in a higher office… he would break his back to do that without asking too many questions.”

“Even if it meant distorting American history?”

“I suppose so,” Shurley said. “He was a pretty fearless kind of guy.”

[…]

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy—better known as the Warren Commission, after its chairman, Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren—had some dubious members in its ranks. One was Allen Dulles, the former CIA director. Kennedy had fired him two years earlier, after he’d bungled the Bay of Pigs invasion. Another was the official CIA liaison to the group, Richard Helms, soon to become the agency’s director. A protégé of Dulles, Helms was the longtime secret employer of Jolly West, and one of the few agency officials aware of MKULTRA. But no one else on the commission—except, presumably, Dulles, who started the program—was aware that a CIA “asset” trained in mind control had assumed responsibility for the psychiatric care of Jack Ruby, whom the commission regarded as their “most important witness.”

In June 1964, Earl Warren and others from the group flew to Dallas to give Ruby a hearing in the interrogation room of the county jail. The bulk of his testimony was a morass of paranoid rambling. He begged Warren to get him out of Dallas. “The Jewish people are being exterminated at this moment,” he warned. “I know I won’t live to see you another time… Do I sound sort of screwy?” He demanded to speak with a Jew, whispering frantically, “You have to get me to Washington! They’re cutting off the arms and legs of Jewish children in Albuquerque and El Paso!”

[…]

The group was required to investigate the CIA as a routine suspect in the assassination of a sitting president. Neither Dulles nor Helms ever reported their knowledge of West’s employment by the CIA.

[…]

If the CIA wanted to shut Ruby up, what was it that he had on it? Burt Griffin, an attorney for the Warren Commission, appeared before the HSCA to say that he and his partner had nearly confirmed Ruby’s ties to gunrunning schemes by anti-Castro Cubans, who were shipping arms from the United States to Cuba in hopes of deposing the dictator.

At the time, Griffin had no idea that the CIA sponsored these gunrunning schemes. In March 1964—when Ruby was weeks away from his “examination” by Jolly West—Griffin and his partner approached Richard Helms, requesting all the information the CIA had on Ruby. They believed it was possible “that Ruby was involved in illegal dealings with Cuban elements who might have had contact with Oswald.”

Helms offered only a curt reply: “The CIA would be very limited in its possibility of assisting.” Griffin was baffled—this was someone who was supposed to be helping him. He appealed again. By the time Helms mustered a response, months had passed, and West had long since paid his fateful visit to Ruby. “An examination of Agency files,” Helms wrote, “has produced no information on Jack Ruby or his activities.”

As for Jolly West, he also did his part to keep Ruby untainted from any whiff of conspiracy. As the Warren Commission tried to divine Ruby’s motive, West sent a confidential letter to Earl Warren himself, a copy of which I discovered in the HSCA’s files. Dated June 23, 1964, and addressed to “My Dear Mr. Chief Justice,” West’s note contends that his “examinations” of Ruby gave him unique insight into the man’s “motivations for the murder.” (This despite the fact that West had said Ruby was “positively insane.”) He was confident that Ruby had acted in an “irrational and unpremeditated” manner when he shot Oswald, “wanting to prove that the Jews—through himself—loved their President and were not cowards.” Moreover, West asserted that Ruby “had never seen [Oswald] in his life” before his involvement in the Kennedy assassination broke. Without consent from his patient or his patient’s lawyers, West was offering confidential medical assessments tailored to political ends. “Please let me know if there is anything else that I can do to be of assistance,” he added.

They should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

July 4th, 2025

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Let us celebrate the 249th anniversary of the original Secession Day:

The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy

July 3rd, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsThe Grande Armée had been battered so badly at Eylau, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), that it could not follow up the victory, as it had after Jena:

Soult’s aide-de-camp Colonel Alfred de Saint-Chamans recalled after the battle, ‘The Emperor was passing in front of the troops; in the middle of cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” I heard many soldiers cry “Vive la paix!”, others “Vive la paix et la France!”, others even shouted “Pain et paix!” [Bread and peace!]’ It was the first time he had seen the morale of the army ‘a bit shaken’, which he put down to ‘the butchery of Eylau’.

The day after the battle, Napoleon announced in a bulletin that an eagle had been lost, and said, ‘The Emperor will give that battalion another standard after it has taken one from the enemy.’ The reason the unit wasn’t named was that in fact five eagles had been lost.

Pakistan lacks internal strategic depth

July 2nd, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallIndia and Pakistan can agree on one thing, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World) — neither wants the other one around:

This is somewhat problematic, given that they share a 1,900-mile-long border. Each country fairly bristles with antagonism and nuclear weapons, so how they manage this unwanted relationship is a matter of life and death on a scale of tens of millions.

India has a population approaching 1.3 billion people, while Pakistan’s is 182 million. Impoverished, volatile, and splintering, Pakistan appears to define itself by its opposition to India, while India, despite obsessing about Pakistan, defines itself in many ways, including that of being an emerging world power with a growing economy and an expanding middle class.

[…]

The two are tied together within the geography of the Indian subcontinent, which creates a natural frame. The Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea are respectively to the southeast, south, and southwest, the Hindu Kush to the northwest, and the Himalayas to the north.

[…]

The interior of the frame contains what are modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Bhutan. The latter two are impoverished landlocked nations dominated by their giant neighbors, China and India. Bangladesh’s problem is not that it lacks access to the sea but that the sea has too much access to Bangladesh: flooding from the waters of the Bay of Bengal constantly afflicts the low-lying territory. Its other geographical problem is that it is almost entirely surrounded by India: the 2,545-mile-long frontier, agreed to in 1974, wrapped India around Bangladesh, leaving it only a short border with Burma as an alternative land route to the outside world.

[…]

The area within our frame, despite being relatively flat, has always been too large and diverse to have strong central rule. Even the British colonial overlords, with their famed bureaucracy and connecting rail system, allowed regional autonomy and indeed used it to play local leaders off against one another. The linguistic and cultural diversity is partially due to the differences in climate—for example, the freezing north of the Himalayas in contrast to the jungles of the south—but it is also because of the subcontinent’s rivers and religions.

[…]

Pakistan tries hard to create a sense of unity, but it remains rare for a Punjabi to marry a Baluchi, or a Sindh to marry a Pashtun. The Punjabis comprise 60 percent of the population, the Sindhs 14 percent, the Pashtuns 13.5 percent, and the Baluchis 4.5 percent.

[…]

Baluchistan is of crucial importance: while it may contain only a small minority of Pakistan’s population, without it there is no Pakistan. It comprises almost 45 percent of the country and holds much of its natural gas and mineral wealth. Another source of income beckons with the proposed overland routes to bring Iranian and Caspian Sea oil up through Pakistan to China. The jewel in this particular crown is the coastal city of Gwadar. Many analysts believe this strategic asset was the Soviet Union’s long-term target when it invaded Afghanistan in 1979: Gwadar would have fulfilled Moscow’s long-held dream of a warm-water port. The Chinese have also been attracted by this jewel and invested billions of dollars in the region. A deep-water port was inaugurated in 2007 and the two countries are now working to link it to China. In the long run, China would like to use Pakistan as a land route for its energy needs. This would allow it to bypass the Strait of Malacca, which as we saw in chapter two is a choke point that could strangle Chinese economic growth.

[…]

In late 2015, China signed a forty-year lease on 2,300 acres of land to develop a massive “special economic zone” and an international airport in the port area. The Chinese will build a road from the port to the airport and then onward toward China—all part of a $46 billion investment to create the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor linking China to the Arabian Sea. Because both sides know that Baluchistan is likely to remain volatile, a security force of up to twenty-five thousand men is being formed to protect the zone.

[…]

In effect, Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbor, India.

The first was in 1947, shortly after partition, and was fought over Kashmir, which in 1948 ended up divided along the Line of Control (also known as Asia’s Berlin Wall); however, both India and Pakistan continue to claim sovereignty.

Nearly twenty years later, Pakistan miscalculated the strength of the Indian military because of India’s poor performance in the 1962 India-China war. Tensions between India and China had risen due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, which in turn had led India to give refuge to the Dalai Lama. During this brief conflict the Chinese military showed their superiority and pushed forward almost into the state of Assam near the Indian heartland. The Pakistan military watched with glee, then, overestimating their own prowess, went to war with India in 1965 and lost.

In 1984, Pakistan and India fought skirmishes at an altitude of twenty-two thousand feet on the Siachen Glacier, thought to be the highest battle in history. More fighting broke out in 1985, 1987, and 1995. Pakistan continued to train militants to infiltrate across the Line of Control and another battle broke out over Kashmir in 1999. By then both countries were armed with nuclear weapons, and for several weeks the unspoken threat of an escalation to nuclear war hovered over the conflict before American diplomacy kicked in and the two sides were talked down. They came close to war again in 2001, and gunfire still breaks out sporadically along the border.

[…]

The Kashmir issue is partially one of national pride, but it is also strategic. Full control of Kashmir would give India a window into central Asia and a border with Afghanistan. It would also deny Pakistan a border with China and thus diminish the usefulness of a ChinesePakistani relationship.

[…]

The Indus River originates in Himalayan Tibet, but passes through the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir before entering Pakistan and then running the length of the country and emptying into the Arabian Sea at Karachi. The Indus and its tributaries provide water to two-thirds of the country: without it the cotton industry and many other mainstays of Pakistan’s struggling economy would collapse. By a treaty that has been honored through all of their wars, India and Pakistan agreed to share the waters; but both populations are growing at an alarming rate, and global warming could diminish the water flow. Annexing all of Kashmir would secure Pakistan’s water supply.

[…]

Pakistan lacks internal “strategic depth”—somewhere to fall back to in the event of being overrun from the east—from India. The Pakistan-India border includes swampland in the south, the Thar Desert, and the mountains of the north; all are extremely difficult territory for an army to cross. It can be done, and both sides have battle plans of how to fight there. The Indian army plan involves blockading the port of Karachi and its fuel storage depots by land and sea, but an easier invasion route is between the south and the north—it lies in the center, in the more hospitable Punjab, and in Punjab is Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. The distance from the Indian border to Islamabad is less than 250 miles, most of it flat ground. In the event of a massive, overwhelming, conventional attack, the Indian army could be in the capital within a few days.

[…]

The Afghan-Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line. Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the colonial government of India, drew it in 1893 and the then ruler of Afghanistan agreed to it. However, in 1949, the Afghan government “annulled” the agreement, believing it to be an artificial relic of the colonial era. Since then, Pakistan has tried to persuade Afghanistan to change its mind, Afghanistan refuses, and the Pashtuns on each side of the mountains try to carry on as they have for centuries by ignoring the border and maintaining their ancient connections.

[…]

The Pakistan military and the ISI had to turn on the very Taliban leaders they had trained and formed friendships with in the 1990s. The Taliban groups reacted with fury, seizing complete control of several regions in the tribal areas. Musharraf was the target of three failed assassination attempts, his would-be successor, Benazir Bhutto, was murdered, and amid the chaos of bombing campaigns and military offensives, up to fifty thousand Pakistani civilians have been killed.

[…]

The Americans came up with a “hammer and anvil” strategy. They would hammer the Afghan Taliban against the anvil of the Pakistani operation on the other side of the border. The “anvil” in the tribal areas turned out instead to be a sponge that soaked up whatever was thrown at it, including any Afghan Taliban retreating from the American hammer.

[…]

So the Taliban bled the British, bled the Americans, bled NATO, waited NATO out, and after thirteen years NATO went away.

It recognizes human nature as it is and has been throughout the ages

July 1st, 2025

Roots of American Order by Russell KirkAn existential identity crisis now grips the American right:

A political movement once united by a commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift

[…]

An existential identity crisis now grips the American right. A political movement once united by a commitment to limited government, moral order, and a robust defense of American ideals now appears fractured, its purpose clouded by populist grievances and ideological drift. The urgency of this moment demands a return to first principles, along with a reexamination of what conservatism means and what it seeks to achieve in an age marked by cultural upheaval and political polarization.

Since the turn of the century, a once-robust definition of conservatism has gradually devolved into “anything that’s not ‘woke.’” This shift has been driven in part by the Democratic Party’s efforts to banish common sense as political heresy and clamp down on free speech. As the left quickly learned, abandoning the moderate middle provided ample substrate for new political coalitions on the right to develop and flourish.

[…]

By the time Donald Trump won his second term, much post-election analysis correctly framed his victory not as a triumph of conservative ideals, but as a mere repudiation of a decadent and debauched Democratic Party.

[…]

But now, as the left has captured major institutions and inverted traditional morality, conservatism is often reduced to mere opposition. It is, after all, easy to shout “no!” And it feels good, too.

[…]

Conservatism is not a rigid ideology promising utopia; it is a disposition?—?a state of mind grounded in timeless principles. It recognizes human nature as it is and has been throughout the ages, and points toward a distinct approach to governing ourselves. Conservatism values obedience to a transcendent moral order, reverence for tradition and our forebears, prudence in decision-making, humility regarding our place in history, and the pursuit of justice in a fallen world. These harmonious values make conservatism a timeless philosophy that aligns seamlessly with self-governance.

To understand these principles, and to understand how to implement them in the 21st century, there is perhaps no better guide than Russell Kirk’s Roots of American Order, first published a half-century ago in 1974.

Running away from it with equipment and weapons is a virtually impossible task

June 30th, 2025

Russian mil-bloggers have laid out basic counter-FPV tactics:

When encountering an enemy FPV drone, it is important to clearly understand that running away from it with equipment and weapons is a virtually impossible task, because an FPV drone can reach speeds of over 100 km/h.

Counter-FPV Tactics

When spotting an enemy FPV drone, it is important to first open fire with single shots. If there are bushes nearby that can be reached with one dash, it is imperative to use them as cover. FPV drones cannot overcome such an obstacle, clinging to the branches of a bush and falling, which, in turn, does not always lead to the detonation of the FPV drone’s warhead.

In the absence of bushes, another slightly less priority cover can be a tree trunk (also located at a distance of one dash), which can be used as a support when firing [Image 2 above].

It is important to remember that if an enemy FPV drone is hit, you must quickly leave the “drone meeting place”, moving as far away as possible and then taking up reliable cover, since the enemy will definitely send several more drones to the place where the previous one was shot down. If your legs are injured, without being able to take the necessary position behind cover [Images 1 and 2 above], you must also fight off the attacking (approaching) FPV drone using the nearest bush or tree trunk (leaning [images 3 and 4] your back on the tree trunk). Attempts to freeze, lie down and pretend to be dead will not help, since drones can hit both the wounded and the bodies of the dead.

Saddam Hussein feared a U.S. nuclear strike during the Gulf War

June 29th, 2025

Saddam Hussein feared a U.S. nuclear strike during the Gulf War — and not without reason:

Washington indeed hinted that nukes were on the table.

“I know if the going gets hard, then the Americans or the British will use the atomic weapons against me, and so will Israel,” Hussein told his advisors one month before his troops stormed into Kuwait, according to analysis of hours of audio tape by the Conflicts Records Research Center.

“The only thing I have are chemical and biological weapons, and I shall have to use them,” Hussein added. “I have no alternative.”

Ironically, Hussein’s willingness to even consider deploying his non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction was the major reason the Americans raised the prospect of deploying their own WMDs.

In April 1990, the Iraqi dictator had openly threatened to “burn half of Israel” with his chemical weapons in the event of an Israeli attack on Iraq.

Hussein had also prepared to target Saudi and Israeli cities with his country’s arsenal of Scud missiles. All of the missiles were armed with conventional explosive warheads.

According to internal Iraqi discussions that CCRC documented and translated, Hussein responded to an inquiry about potentially fitting some of the Scuds with chemical payloads. “Only in case we are obliged and there is a great necessity to put them into action,” Hussein consented.

Before the coalition launched its campaign to liberate Kuwait on Jan. 17, 1991, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker warned Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz against using biological or chemical weapons. Baker reminded Aziz that the United States had the “means to exact” vengeance and eliminate the Iraqi regime.

[…]

In destroying Iraq’s biological and chemical weapons infrastructure by conventional means—albeit at high cost—the coalition deprived Hussein of his main rationale for ever deploying the weapons of mass destruction.

It helped that Hussein clearly feared the Americans could use their own WMDs against Iraq if Iraq introduced chemical and biological weapons to the conflict.

In May 2010, Baker declined to state clearly that he had meant to imply to Aziz that America might nuke Iraq. “Of course, the warning was broad enough to include the use of all types of weapons that America possessed.”

Still, the vague threat worked. “Years later, when Saddam Hussein was captured, de-briefed and asked why he had not used his chemical weapons, he recalled the substance of my statement to Aziz in Geneva,” Baker said.

“It was not wise to use such weapons in such kind of war, with such an enemy,” Aziz told PBS in 1996. The interviewer asked if Aziz meant to imply that America could have dropped an atomic bomb on Iraq. “You can … make your own conclusions.”

The Curious Case of Jimmy Shaver

June 28th, 2025

Chaos by Tom O’NeillTom O’Neill explores (in Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties) the curious case of Jimmy Shaver:

After midnight on July 4, 1954, a three-year-old girl named Chere Jo Horton disappeared outside the Lackland Air Force Base, where Jolly West was stationed. Horton’s parents had left her in the parking lot outside a bar; she played with her brother while they had a drink inside. When they noticed her missing, they formed a search party.

Within an hour of Horton’s disappearance, the party came upon a car with her underwear hanging from the door. They heard shouting nearby. Two construction workers had been napping in a nearby gravel pit when a Lackland airman wandered out of the darkness. He was shirtless, covered in blood and scratches. Making no attempt to escape, he let the search party walk him to the edge of the highway. Bystanders described him as “dazed” and “trance-like.”

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He didn’t seem drunk, but he couldn’t say where he was, how he’d gotten there, or whose blood was all over him. Meanwhile, the search party found Horton’s body in the gravel pit. Her neck was broken, her legs had been torn open, and she’d been raped. Deputies arrested the man.

His name was Jimmy Shaver. At twenty-nine, he was recently remarried, with two children, no criminal record, no history of violence. He’d been at the same bar Horton had been abducted from, but he’d left with a friend, who told police that neither of them was drunk, though Shaver seemed high on something. Before deputies could take Shaver to the county jail, a constable from another precinct arrived with orders from military police to assume custody of him.

Around four that morning, an air force marshal questioned Shaver and two doctors examined him, agreeing he wasn’t drunk. One later testified that he “was not normal… he was very composed outside, which I did not expect him to be under these circumstances.” He was released to the county jail and booked for rape and murder.

Investigators interrogated Shaver through the morning. When his wife came to visit, he didn’t recognize her. He gave his first statement at 10: 30 a.m., adamant that another man was responsible: he could summon an image of a stranger with blond hair and tattoos. After the air force marshal returned to the jailhouse, however, Shaver signed a second statement taking full responsibility. Though he still didn’t remember anything, he reasoned that he must have done it.

Two months later, in September, Shaver’s memories still hadn’t returned. The base hospital commander told Jolly West to perform an evaluation: was he legally sane at the time of the murder? Shaver spent the next two weeks under West’s supervision, subject to copious psychological tests. They returned to the scene of the crime, trying to jog his memory. Later, West hypnotized Shaver and gave him an injection of sodium pentothal, “truth serum,” to see if he could clear his amnesia.

While Shaver was under—with West injecting more truth serum to “deepen the trance”—Shaver recalled the events of that night. He confessed to killing Horton. She’d brought out repressed memories of his cousin, “Beth Rainboat,” who’d sexually abused him as a child. Shaver had started drinking at home that night when he “had visions of God, who whispered into his ear to seek out and kill the evil girl Beth.” (This “Beth” was never sought for questioning.) At the trial, West argued that Shaver’s truth-serum confession was more valid than any other. And West was testifying for the defense—they’d hoped he could get an acquittal on temporary insanity.

Instead, West’s testimony helped the prosecution. Here was a psychiatric expert who believed wholeheartedly that Shaver had committed the crime, and who’d gotten him to admit it in colorful detail. While West maintained that the airman had suffered a bout of temporary insanity, he also said that Shaver was “quite sane now.” In the courtroom, he didn’t look that way. One newspaper account said he “sat through the strenuous sessions like a man in a trance,” saying nothing, never rising to stretch or smoke, though he was a known chain-smoker. “Some believe it’s an act,” the paper said, “others believe his demeanor is real.” West often treated Lackland airmen for neurological disorders. During the trial, it came out that Shaver had suffered from migraines so debilitating that he’d dunk his head in a bucket of ice water when he felt one coming on. He sought regular treatment, and the air force had recommended him for a two-year experimental program. The doctor who’d attempted to recruit him was never named.

Shaver’s medical history was scrutinized at trial, but little mention was made of the base hospital where West had conducted his MKULTRA experiments on unwitting patients. On the stand, West said he’d never gotten around to seeing whether Shaver had been treated there. I checked—Lackland officials told me there was no record of him in their master index of patients. But, curiously, all the records for patients in 1954 had been maintained, with one exception: the file for last names beginning with “Sa” through “St” had vanished.

Articles and court testimony described Shaver’s mental state just as West had described his experiments the previous summer: amnesias and trance states, a man violating his moral code with no memory of doing so. And West had written that he planned to experiment on Lackland airmen for projects that “must eventually be put to test in practical trials in the field.”

This was all the more difficult to ignore after I got the transcript of Shaver’s truth-serum interview. West had used leading questions to walk the entranced Shaver through the crime. “Tell me about when you took your clothes off, Jimmy,” he said. And trying to prove that Shaver had repressed memories: “Jimmy, do you remember when something like this happened before?” Or: “After you took her clothes off what did you do?”

“I never did take her clothes off,” Shaver said.

The interview was divided into thirds. The middle third, for some reason, wasn’t recorded. When the record picked up, the transcript said, “Shaver is crying. He has been confronted with all the facts repeatedly.”

West asked, “Now you remember it all, don’t you, Jimmy?”

“Yes, sir,” Shaver replied.

For West, this seems to have been business as usual, but it left an indelible mark on the psychiatrists who worked with him. One of them, Gilbert Rose, was so baffled by the Shaver case that he went on to write a play about it. When I reached Rose by phone in 2002, he said Shaver still haunted him.

“In my fifty years in the profession,” he said of the truth-serum interview, “that was the most dramatic moment ever—when he clapped his hands to his face and remembered killing the girl.” But Rose was shocked when I told him that West had hypnotized Shaver in addition to giving him sodium pentothal. After I read Rose citations from articles, reports, and the transcript, he seemed to accept it, but he was adamant that West had never said anything—hypnotism was not part of the protocol.

He’d also never known how West had found out about the case right away.

“We were involved from the first day,” Rose recalled. “Jolly phoned me the morning of the murder,” Rose said, giving me flashbacks to Shahrokh Hatami’s memory of Reeve Whitson. “He initiated it.”

West may have shielded himself from scrutiny, but he made only a minimal effort to exonerate Shaver. The airman was found guilty. Though an appeals court ruled that he’d had an unfair trial, he was convicted again in the retrial. In 1958, on his thirty-third birthday, he was executed by the electric chair. He maintained his innocence the whole time.

Z-Man has passed away

June 27th, 2025

John Derbyshire reports that his friend the Z-man (ZMAN, @TheRealZBlog) died Wednesday night or Thursday morning, apparently of natural causes:

As well as being a fellow dissident, Chris was a keen & very helpful supporter of my own efforts. He edited and hosted Radio Derb at his website from the destruction of VDare last July to June 6th this year, when I retired. Rest in peace, Z.

Addendum: Z-Man had this blog listed in his sidebar — under “Bad Thoughts”:

Z Blog  Sidebar.jpeg

As the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, casualty rates in battles increased

June 26th, 2025

Napoleon by Andrew RobertsAs the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars progressed, Andrew Roberts explains (in Napoleon: A Life), the casualty rates in battles increased:

At Fleurus they were 6% of the total number of men engaged, at Austerlitz 15%, at Eylau 26%, at Borodino 31% and at Waterloo 45%.

This was partly because with ever-larger armies being raised, battles tended to last longer — Eylau was Napoleon’s first two-day engagement since Arcole; Eggmühl, Aspern-Essling and Wagram in 1809, Dresden in 1813 were also two and Leipzig in 1813 went on for three — but mainly because of the huge increase in the numbers of cannon present. At Austerlitz the ratio was two guns per thousand men, but by Eylau this had leapt to nearly 4, and at Borodino there were 4.5. Eylau therefore represented a new kind of battle of the Napoleonic Wars, best summed up by Ney at its close: ‘What a massacre! And without any result!’

One who is underhanded and sows dissent

June 25th, 2025

Prisoners of Geography by Tim MarshallAt first it was known by the outside world as ISIL, Tim Marshall explains (in Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, but as the Arabic word for the Levant is al-Sham, gradually it became ISIS:

In the summer of 2014 the group began calling itself the Islamic State, having proclaimed such an entity in large parts of Iraq and Syria.

[…]

By the summer of 2015 many Arabs across the Middle East, including most of the regional media, were calling the Islamic State by another name, one which encapsulated how repulsive many ordinary people felt the organization to be—DAESH.

It is an acronym of sorts for the Arabic Dawlat al-Islamiya f’al-Iraq wa al-Shams, but the reason people came up with the name is because the Islamic State members hate the term. It sounds similar to the word daes—one who is underhanded and sows dissent. More important, it rhymes with negative words such as fahish—“ sinner”—and best of all, for those who despise the organization’s particular brand of Islam, is that it rhymes with and sounds a bit like jahesh—“stupid ass.” This is worse than being called a donkey, because in Arab culture one of the few things more stupid than a donkey is an ass.

[…]

In the battle for Tikrit the US Air Force found itself in the odd position of flying reconnaissance missions and limited air strikes, which assisted Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders who had been brought in to oversee the Iraqi assault on the town.

[…]

The US pilots, who flew the majority of the missions, suffered from not having American Special Forces forward air controllers calling in the coordinates for the strikes. As targets were frequently in the urban areas, the “rules of engagement” meant many planes returned to their bases without firing their weapons.

[…]

History bequeathed oil to “Iraq,” but the de facto division of the country means the oil is mostly in the Kurdish and Shia areas; and if there is no strong, unified Iraq then the oil money flows back to where the oil is found.

[…]

In the event of a split, the Shia are geographically best placed to take advantage. The region they dominate has oil fields; thirty-five miles of coastline; the Shatt al-Arab waterway; ports; access to the outside world; and a religious, economic, and military ally next door in the form of Iran.

[…]

The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the Jordan River to the Mediterranean coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate, this became Palestine.

For millennia the Jews had lived in what used to be called Israel, but the ravages of history had dispersed them across the globe. Israel remained for them the “promised land,” and Jerusalem, in particular, was sacred ground. However, by 1948 Arab Muslims and Christians had been a clear majority in the land for more than a thousand years.

[…]

The British looked favorably on the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine and allowed Jews to move there and buy land from the Arabs. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, Jews tried to get to Palestine in even greater numbers. Tensions between Jews and non-Jews reached the boiling point, and an exhausted Britain handed over the problem to the United Nations in 1948, which voted to partition the region into two countries. The Jews agreed, the Arabs said no. The outcome was war, which created the first wave of Palestinian refugees fleeing the area and Jewish refugees coming in from across the Middle East.

Jordan occupied the West Bank region, including East Jerusalem. Egypt occupied Gaza, considering it to be an extension of its territory. Neither was minded to give the people living there citizenship or statehood as Palestinians, nor was there any significant movement by the inhabitants calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. Syria meanwhile considered the whole area to be part of greater Syria and the people living there Syrians. To this day Egypt, Syria, and Jordan are suspicious of Palestinian independence, and if Israel vanished and were replaced by Palestine, all three might make claims to parts of the territory. In this century, however, there is a fierce sense of nationhood among the Palestinians, and any Arab dictatorship seeking to take a chunk out of a Palestinian state of whatever shape or size would be met with massive opposition. The Palestinians are very aware that most of the Arab countries, to which some of them fled in the twentieth century, refuse to give them citizenship; they insist that the status of their children and grandchildren remains “refugee,” and work to ensure that they do not integrate into the country.

[…]

Israel regards Jerusalem as its eternal, indivisible capital. The Jewish religion says the rock upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac is there, and that it stands directly above the Holy of Holies, King Solomon’s Temple. For the Palestinians, Jerusalem has a religious resonance that runs deep throughout the Muslim world: the city is regarded as the third most holy place in Islam because the prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven from that same rock, which is on the site of what is now the “Farthest Mosque” (Al-Aqsa). Militarily, the city is of only moderate strategic geographical importance—it has no real industry to speak of, no river, and no airport—but it is of overwhelming significance in cultural and religious terms: the ideological need for the place is of more importance than its location. Control of, and access to, Jerusalem is not an issue upon which a compromise solution can be easily achieved.

[…]

Iran is a non-Arabic, majority Farsi-speaking giant. It is bigger than France, Germany, and the UK combined, but while the populations of those countries amount to 200 million people, Iran has only 78 million. With limited habitable space, most live in the mountains; the great deserts and salt plains of the interior of Iran are no place for human habitation.

[…]

There are two huge mountain ranges in Iran: the Zagros and the Elburz. The Zagros runs from the north, nine hundred miles down along Iran’s borders with Turkey and Iraq, ending almost at the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf. In the southern half of the range there is a plain to the west where the Shatt al-Arab divides Iran and Iraq. This is also where the major Iranian oil fields are, the others being in the north and center. Together they are thought to comprise the world’s third-largest reserves. Despite this, Iran remains relatively poor due to mismanagement, corruption, mountainous topography that hinders transport connections, and economic sanctions that have, in part, prevented certain sections of industry from modernizing.

The Elburz range also begins in the north, but along the border with Armenia. It runs the whole length of the Caspian Sea’s south shore and on to the border with Turkmenistan before descending as it reaches Afghanistan. This is the mountain range you can see from the capital, Tehran, towering above the city to its north. It provides spectacular views, and also a better-kept secret than the Iranian nuclear project: the skiing conditions are excellent for several months each year.

Iran is defended by this geography, with mountains on three sides, swampland and water on the fourth. The Mongols were the last force to make any progress through the territory, in 1219–21, and since then attackers have ground themselves into dust trying to make headway across the mountains.

[…]

In fact, the US military had a catchphrase at the time: “We do deserts, not mountains.”

In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq War broke out, the Iraqis used six divisions to cross the Shatt al-Arab in an attempt to annex the Iranian province of Khuzestan. They never even made it off the swamp-ridden plains, let alone entered the foothills of the Zagros. The war dragged on for eight years, taking at least a million lives.

The mountainous terrain of Iran means that it is difficult to create an interconnected economy and that it has many minority groups each with keenly defined characteristics. Khuzestan, for example, is ethnically majority Arab, and elsewhere there are Kurds, Azeri, Turkmen, and Georgians, among others. At most, 60 percent of the country speaks Farsi, the language of the dominant Persian majority. As a result of this diversity, Iran has traditionally centralized power and used force and a fearsome intelligence network to maintain internal stability. Tehran knows that no one is about to invade Iran, but also that hostile powers can use its minorities to try and stir dissent and thus endanger its Islamic revolution.

Iran also has a nuclear industry that many countries, particularly Israel, believe is being used to prepare for the construction of nuclear weapons, increasing tensions in the region. The Israelis feel threatened by the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. It is not just Iran’s potential to rival their own arsenal and wipe out Israel with just one bomb: if Iran were to get the bomb, then the Arab countries would probably panic and attempt to get their own as well. The Saudis, for example, fear that the ayatollahs want to dominate the region, bring all the Shia Arabs under their guidance, and even have designs on controlling the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. A nuclear-armed Iran would be the regional superpower par excellence, and to counter this danger the Saudis would probably try to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan (with whom they have close ties). Egypt and Turkey might follow suit.

This means that the threat of an Israeli air strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities is a constant presence, but there are many restraining factors. One is that, in a straight line, it is one thousand miles from Israel to Iran. The Israeli air force would need to cross two sovereign borders, those of Jordan and Iraq; the latter would certainly tell Iran that the attack was coming. Another is that any other route requires refueling capabilities that may be beyond Israel, and that (if flying the northern route) also overfly sovereign territory. A final reason is that Iran holds what might be a trump card—the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf through which passes each day, depending on sales, about 20 percent of the world’s oil needs. At its narrowest point, the Strait, which is regarded as the most strategic in the world, is only twenty-one miles across. The industrialized world fears the effect of Hormuz being closed possibly for months on end, with ensuing spiraling prices. This is one reason why so many countries pressure Israel not to act.

[…]

In the sixth to the fourth centuries BCE the Persian Empire stretched all the way from Egypt to India. Modern-day Iran has no such imperial designs, but it does seek to expand its influence, and the obvious direction is across the flatlands to its west—the Arab world and its Shia minorities. It has made ground in Iraq since the US invasion delivered a Shia-majority government. This has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia and helped fuel the Middle East’s version of the Cold War with the Saudi–Iranian relationship at its core. Saudi Arabia may be bigger than Iran, and it may be many times richer than Iran due to its well-developed oil and gas industries, but its population is much smaller (28 million Saudis as opposed to 78 million Iranians) and militarily it is not confident about its ability to take on its Persian neighbor if this cold war ever turns hot and their forces confront each other directly. Each side has ambitions to be the dominant power in the region, and each regards themselves as the champions of their respective versions of Islam. When Iraq was under the heel of Saddam, a powerful buffer separated Saudi Arabia and Iran; with that buffer gone, the two countries now glare at each other across the Gulf.

[…]

This was the background to the shocking events of early 2016 when Saudi Arabia (a majority Sunni country) executed forty-seven prisoners in a single day, among them the country’s most senior Shia sheikh—Nimr al-Nimr. This was a calculated move by the ruling Sunni royal family to show the world, including America, that nuclear deal or no nuclear deal—the Saudis were going to face down Iran. Demonstrations broke out across the Shia Muslim world, the Saudi embassy in Tehran was duly ransacked and set on fire, diplomatic relations were broken between the two countries, and the scene was set for the continuation of the bitter Sunni/ Shia civil war.

Northwest of Iran is a country that is both European and Asian. Turkey lies on the borders of the Arab lands but is not Arabic, and although most of its landmass is part of the wider Middle East region, it tries to distance itself from the conflicts taking place there.

[…]

Its population is 75 million, and European countries fear that given the disparity in living standards, EU membership would result in a mass influx of labor. What may also be a factor, albeit unspoken within the EU, is that Turkey is a majority Muslim country (98 percent). The EU is neither a secular nor a Christian organization, but there has been a difficult debate about “values.”

In the 1920s, for one man at least, there was no choice. His name was Mustafa Kemal and he was the only Turkish general to emerge from the First World War with an enhanced reputation. After the victorious powers carved up Turkey, he rose to become president on a platform of resisting the terms imposed by the Allies, but at the same time modernizing Turkey and making it part of Europe. Western legal codes and the Gregorian calendar were introduced and Islamic public institutions banned. The wearing of the fez was forbidden, the Latin alphabet replaced Arabic script, and he even granted the vote to women (two years ahead of Spain and fifteen years ahead of France). In 1934, when Turks embraced legally binding surnames, Kemal was given the name Atatürk—“ Father of the Turks.” He died in 1938, but subsequent Turkish leaders continued working to bring Turkey into the West European fold, and those who didn’t found themselves on the wrong end of a coup d’état by a military determined to complete Atatürk’s legacy.

By the late 1980s, however, the continued rejection by Europe and the stubborn refusal of many ordinary Turks to become less religious resulted in a generation of politicians who began to think the unthinkable—that perhaps Turkey needed a plan B. President Turgut Özal, a religious man, came to office in 1989 and began the change. He encouraged Turks to again see Turkey as the great land bridge between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, and a country that could again be a great power in all three regions. The current president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, has similar ambitions, perhaps even greater ones, but has faced similar hurdles in achieving them. These are in part geographical.

[…]

In NATO terms, Turkey is a key country because it controls the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea through the narrow gap of the Bosporus Strait. If it closes the strait, which is less than a mile across at its narrowest point, the Russian Black Sea Fleet cannot break out into the Mediterranean and then the Atlantic. Even getting through the Bosporus takes you only into the Sea of Marmara; you still have to navigate through the Dardanelles Strait to get to the Aegean Sea en route to the Mediterranean.

[…]

Until a few years ago, Turkey was held up as an example of how a Middle Eastern country, other than Israel, could embrace democracy. That example has taken a few knocks recently with the ongoing Kurdish problem, the difficulties facing some of the tiny Christian communities, and the tacit support for Islamist groups in their fight against the Syrian government. President Erdo?an’s remarks on Jews, race, and gender equality, taken with the creeping Islamization of Turkey, have set alarm bells ringing. However, compared with the majority of Arab states, Turkey is far more developed and recognizable as a democracy. Erdo?a may be undoing some of Atatürk’s work, but the grandchildren of the Father of the Turks live more freely than anyone in the Arab Middle East.

[…]

The Arab Spring is a misnomer, invented by the media; it clouds our understanding of what is happening. Too many reporters rushed to interview the young liberals who were standing in city squares with placards written in English, and mistook them for the voice of the people and the direction of history. Some journalists had done the same during the Green Revolution, describing the young students of north Tehran as the “Youth of Iran,” thus ignoring the other young Iranians who were joining the reactionary Basij militia and Revolutionary Guard.

[…]

The second phase of the Arab uprising is well into its stride. This is the complex internal struggle within societies where religious beliefs, social mores, tribal links, and guns are currently far more powerful forces than “Western” ideals of equality, freedom of expression, and universal suffrage. The Arab countries are beset by prejudices, indeed hatreds, of which average Westerners know so little that they tend not to believe them even if they are laid out in print before their eyes.

[…]

When Hosni Mubarak was ousted as president of Egypt, it was indeed people power that toppled him, but what the outside world failed to see was that the military had been waiting for years for an opportunity to be rid of him and his son Gamal, and that the theater of the street provided the cover they needed. It was only when the Muslim Brotherhood called its supporters out that there was enough cover. There were only three institutions in Egypt: Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, the military, and the Brotherhood. The latter two destroyed the former, the Brotherhood then won an election, began turning Egypt into an Islamist state, and paid the price by itself being overthrown by the real power in the land—the military.