International security – The Optimistic Conservative

Veterans Day 2025: A new age ahead

A tribute to America’s best at a turn of the tide.

[Apologies to all that this article is a day late. My all-purpose excuse is that I was saving a sailor from a burning space.]

Much changes from year to year now as one composes a Veterans’ Day post, and 2025 is no different. In 2024, I found myself wanting to include the groundwork of thoughts from earlier years, and instead of rewriting everything simply copied in the articles from 2022 and 2021, each of which had content that merited repeating.

Since I shifted from putting up the same article annually (with a few alterations), which was my practice from 2009 to the centennial in 2018 of the end of World War I, I’ve included links to that older treatment, and a copy of John McCrae’s iconic 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields.” The torch held high, and passed through the generations, has been a touchstone of visualization and inspiration since this series began. Has the torch from McCrae’s Dead in Flanders Fields been effectively caught, by each generation in its time? Pondering that is the exit question.

I will let earlier work speak for itself, for those inclined to review it. Continue reading “Veterans Day 2025: A new age ahead”

TOC Ready Room 14 August 2025: Gaza et al; Russian missiles; Perspectives on Qatar, Iran; Mental health; more

What’s wrong and right with the world – though today, mostly wrong.

It’s past time for another Ready Room, and I’m running with a random batch of topics that have been prominent recently (or at least of interest to me). The topics should explain themselves pretty well. I’ll introduce the first one, which is incident to Trump’s move to clean up the streets in Washington, D.C., with a minimum of commentary.

Back in January 2021, I wrote about the process of deploying the National Guard in the National Capital Region, which is in its entirety a designated federal reserve. (At the link, I recommend doing a word-find on “Title 32” to go directly to the relevant portion. It’s a multi-topic post.)

The whole NCR extends beyond the District of Columbia, but encompasses it and makes it in U.S. law a federal reserve 100% of the time. Continue reading “TOC Ready Room 14 August 2025: Gaza et al; Russian missiles; Perspectives on Qatar, Iran; Mental health; more”

“Establishment” for a better future: The historic need of our time

A better future won’t just establish itself.

This essay, while a long one, is considerably shorter than it could be, if I included a lot of quoted citations and deeper discussion of the technical aspects of some of the targeting sequences alluded to (in Iran and Yemen, and with the recent Ukrainian attack on Russia’s high-value strategic aircraft).

It takes forever to put those articles together, and my priority is to convey clearly a top-level point about the “meta-trend” of our thinking on matters like game-changing geopolitical developments, negotiations, and warfare and the uses of power in today’s environment.

I think the meta-trend will be seen more distinctly and usefully if the discussion focuses on that, and doesn’t try to make too many ancillary points. I don’t even want to talk about the ancillary points; I want to get us ahead of the action, inside the OODA loop, by pointing out how appreciating the meta-trend makes us smarter in the face of President Trump’s negotiating style, rather than being held back by overlaying our incorrect assumptions on his actions. Continue reading ““Establishment” for a better future: The historic need of our time”

Trumpschlacht debuts with vivid energy

Trump plays his own game.

An update is due on Trump’s pathbreaking movements in divers places over the past couple of weeks. As noted in the previous article on Trump and Qatar, the “Trump and Qatar” dynamic is coming in for heavy criticism. It isn’t my project to talk through what others are very competently treating from the complaints side, so I’ll confine this discussion, which I hope to keep abbreviated, to laying out more optimistic considerations.

The overall topic sits at the juncture of elements in diplomacy that we’ve all but forgotten how to talk about, after eighty years of what has essentially been stasis since World War II. The stasis has been characterized by international mechanisms enforced by U.S. dominance. Most Americans don’t even recognize today that the international mechanisms, including the UN and all its subsidiary bodies, were backed and instituted by the United States after the war, and have persisted in quiescent use because of our investment in them. Continue reading “Trumpschlacht debuts with vivid energy”

An eye to the main chance: The world that’s starting right now

In structural failure, opportunity.

President Trump is heading to the Middle East next week for a summit with the Gulf nations, and it doesn’t surprise me that he has a major announcement he plans to make before the summit begins. (Its dates are 13-16 May 2025.)

He indicated in comments made on Air Force One this week that it will be one of the biggest announcements made in a long time. I won’t speculate on the subject. Apparently the announcement fits in a particular category, on which there have been previous developments and/or announcements in the past. It could be a lot of things. It won’t necessarily be about the Middle East, at least not in a narrow, specific sense. Continue reading “An eye to the main chance: The world that’s starting right now”