Notes on the News
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Austria-Hungary
12 min read
The article explicitly compares the EU to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, noting that even the Habsburgs could send troops to Prague. Understanding this historical empire's structure, its challenges governing diverse nationalities, and its eventual dissolution provides crucial context for understanding the author's argument about why the EU cannot act as a unitary state.
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Cross-Border Interbank Payment System
11 min read
The article references CIPS as part of the financial infrastructure bifurcation that would result from secondary sanctions on China. Understanding China's alternative to SWIFT helps readers grasp why Western financial leverage is diminishing and why secondary sanctions would accelerate de-dollarization.
Having read my account of the mood in France, a reader sent me an email with two questions. First, he asked, why are the French panicking now?
After all, last February, Pete Hegseth and JD Vance flew to Europe, accompanied by Jack Posobiec of Pizzagate fame. Hegseth told our allies that as far as the he was concerned, they were effete pansies, and if they sent their silly little euroweenie troops to Ukraine, they’d be on their own. After eviscerating NATO’s deterrence, he told them to pony up anyway: The vig was now five percent.
Vance then lectured a gathering of European security analysts about a collection of outrages he’d read about on Gateway Pundit. He chastised them for failing to smooth the far-right’s path to power. (The speech was not well-received.) NATO has been pining for the fjords ever since, he wrote, so how come the French only just noticed?
His second question concerned European economic diplomacy. Europe, he thought, could “end this war on reasonably favorable terms if they could only concert their economic diplomacy by way of secondary sanctions to stop countries like India and China from buying Russian huge amounts of Russian fossil fuels.” This could be done much faster than rebuilding the French army. What was stopping them from doing so?
It’s just hard to believe that European diplomats are so dumb that they would prefer to spend the whole wad on a kinetic solution to the problem than make a few trade balance sacrifices to get a non-kinetic one. It suggests something of a moral delusion on their part.
He thought I should publish the email I sent him in response. I wasn’t sure—I wrote it in haste—but he said so three times, and he’s a good judge of these things, so I’ve published it below, at his urging. (I’ve edited it a bit and added a few points that I didn’t think of when I first sent it.)
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My response:
American commentary, I notice, is shot through with many misunderstandings of Europe, but one error in particular seems to be leading to all kinds of analytic mishaps. Americans seem to think of the EU as a unitary state,
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