Shockingly Stupid: UK and France Considering Joint Custody of an Aircraft Carrier

Brace yourself for a new level of national stupidity and the planned erosion of national sovereignty from old Europe. According to this article from The Sun, planners in both the British and French defense ministries are considering plans to start sharing aircraft carriers. Short of arranging for weekend rotations of nuclear warheads, this joint custody of a front-line defense asset may be one of the stupidest cost-saving measures ever proposed. Reading it made me wonder if the world would be a more sensible place if I self lobotomized. This speaks to the tragic consequences of having an out-of-control entitlement state, where subsidizing unions, unreal benefits, and universal health-care plans, distort of the most important imperative of the state, the stewardship of national sovereignty.

If history is any lesson, this plan demonstrates a sheer ignorance of competing national interests and priorities. The French and British have very different global commerce and trade objectives. The two countries spent several centuries waring, and have only been de facto allies (tenuous one's at best), for spurts during the last century. The two have different linguistic, cultural, legal, and military heritages to contend with, on top of frequently shifting and changing short-term national objectives. This initial thoughts reflect the tip of the iceberg.  Hence, this plan must be a Europhile's and EU boosters wet-dream come true on paper as it strips down national identity, sovereign interests, well promoting a flacid European military command, and an excuse to further expand upon a bankrupt and unsustainable entitlement focused E.U.

With an erosion of external defense credibility, an internal rot can set in and seriously undermine the state and its ethos. Needless to say, a grim picture just got uglier. 

Frankly, I wrote off most of Europe years ago. It is just that these overt examples of retardation should be lessons to those paying attention on this side of the Atlantic.

If we in this hemisphere continue down this ridiculous path we have stupidly set ourselves on with out-of-control state-growth, will we start pooling our resources with the floating jalopies of the Mexican navy to save a few nickels to keep the stooges in the unions and AARP happy?

Robert Kaplan - Living With a Nuclear Iran

Sadly, the West has lost all resolve and gumption when it comes to containing and preempting belligerent states from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Like an ostrich with its' head in the sand, the feckless and passive attitudes currently reigning supreme in Washington, London, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris, are woefully neglectful of the pending problems and changing landscape on the surface. The reliably insightful Robert Kaplan has an excellent article, "Living with a Nuclear Iran," that paints a poignant picture how to handle this brave new world in the latest edition of The Altantic. We are in for an bumpy ride ahead and the deferring the tough choices of the present while pay some ugly dividends in the years to come.

"At the time of his writing Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, some analysts took Kissinger to task for what one reviewer called “wishful thinking”—in particular, his insufficient consideration of civilian casualties in a limited nuclear exchange. Moreover, Kissinger himself later moved away from his advocacy of a NATO strategy that relied on short-range, tactical nuclear weapons to counterbalance the might of the Soviet Union’s conventional forces. (The doctrinal willingness to suffer millions of West German civilian casualties to repel a Soviet attack seemed a poor way to demonstrate the American commitment to the security and freedom of its allies.) But that does not diminish the utility of Kissinger’s thinking the unthinkable. Indeed, now that the nuclear club has grown, and nuclear weaponry has become more versatile and sophisticated, the questions that his book raises are even more relevant. The dreadful prospect of limited nuclear exchanges is inherent in a world no longer protected by the carapace of mutual assured destruction. Yet much as limited war has brought us to grief, our willingness to wage it may one day save us from revolutionary powers that have cleverly obscured their intentions—Iran not least among them."

Mexico on the brink?

Tracy Wilkinson of the Los Angeles has a rather detailed and thoroughly disturbing article about how emboldened the drug cartels have become in  Northern Mexico.

"In coordinated attacks, gunmen in armored cars and equipped with grenade launchers fought army troops this week and attempted to trap some of them in two military bases by cutting off access and blocking highways, a new tactic by Mexico's organized criminals."

Is this not reminiscent of scenes out of Mad Max or The Road Warrior on some level? Mind you this isn't some post-apocalyptic Australian wasteland; it is only miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. Could you imagine a world where well-armed highway gangs are successfully going to toe-to-toe with large urban American police forces, or even the United States military without being utterly obliterated? For all of its virtue and splendor, Mexico remains a rather large experiment in Latin American dysfunction. The werewolf is concerned that if these problems aren't addressed and contained in short order, this problem will escalate into a severely malignant tumor along our border with Mexico with wide a wide ranging spectrum of negative repercussions. 

Towns being abandoned under order of death for the inhabitants, honest cops rarer than virgins in whorehouses, an impotent government hanging on by mere threads, with honest people terrorized and lives treated as mere pawns in the vicious games played by the drug cartels for profitable pipelines is becoming the norm in Mexico. This isn't the middle ages or Somalia, this is the Northern Hemisphere and the doorstep to the United States of America. Mexico City's claim to sovereignty grows weaker with each passing day. When will America step up -it will have to at some point- as we can't play the ostrich forever,  and find a General Pershing for the modern era (note it has been almost a century since his infamous foray's against Poncho Villa, who says history isn't cyclical?) and unleash a Marine Expeditionary Force on the repulsive cartels and put an put an end to their trade in misery, blood, and brutality? It's the clear the Mexicans are incapable of handling their own internal security, alas, this burden, like so many others will fall on our shoulders.

Along with waging a violent and brutal war on the cartels, -which honor and justice demand - what changes need to be wrought on this side of the border to undermine these cartels? Is legalization of hard drugs - which appeals to the werewolf's inner-libertarian, yet sits grotesquely uneasy with his moral compass and sense of right, a realistic solution? Whatever the US plan is, it needs to be multi-pronged, fast, a vicious. If this includes adjusting the demand in the states with regulation and legalization regime, along with destroying supply, (napalming cocoa fields), along with showing no mercy to the Cartels as we hunt them down, so be it. However, our chronic impotence on this issue speak to how poorly our society has evolved from days of yore. Like all festering wounds, this must be treating before gangrene sets in and limbs need to be amputated.

"Special students" managing our Special Relationship with the U.K.

Remember how Obama was supposed to enhance our prestige in the world? It seems more like the Obama approach to foreign policy is to undercut our allies and inflate our enemies. How does that help anything?

Anyways, true to historical precedent and in a shameless bid to distract voters from an imploding economy and sky-rocketing inflation via jingoistic nationalism, Argentina's cosmetically modified left-wing Madame-in-Chief, Christina Kirchner, has decided to resurrect the faux sovereignty concerns over the Falkland Islands.This is an example of international relations at its worst.

Nile Gardiner, over at the Daily Telegraph, a leading British daily, is rightfully indignant about how the Obama administration is claiming neutrality and dismissing legitimate British concerns.  Here are some on the record comments from the State Department concerning the matter at hand:

“We are aware not only of the current situation but also of the history, but our position remains one of neutrality. The US recognises de facto UK administration of the islands but takes no position on the sovereignty claims of either party.”

“There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

Beyond being brazen and ignorant, statements like these are deliberately destructive to one of the most valued and influential trans-Atlantic relationships. Credibility is the most important factor in international relationships and diplomacy. Without it, you're kaput. The deliberate and intentional erosion of credibility, especially when nothing seems to be gained, strikes the werewolf as one of the great foreign policy position blunders a nation can make. Beyond being embarrassing (which this is), attitudes like this are scary and harmful because they undermine generations of carefully constructed understandings and protocols, along with the most highly valued, but tough to measure currency of credibility. This shameful behavior is beyond Carter-esque in ignorance, it's Chamberlin-esque (as in Neville). It is a bad sign of things to come.