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."