Mailvox: Tactical Dominance isn’t Victory

An American military analyst shared his professional opinion about the challenge facing the Israeli military, as the Netanyahu regime appears to be writing checks the IDF knows it can’t cash:

Israel’s professional military is what has generated its tactical dominance — operationally and strategically, its position is deteriorating faster than almost anyone predicted, evidently excluding me, and the General who was in charge of training the IDF’s generals.

The IDF’s general officer corps is currently openly fretting about a potential war with both Egypt and Turkiye — they didn’t consider either scenario even a remote possibility 2 years ago, with the only people who frequently pointed out the possibility of war with Egypt being old Shin Bet Egypt hands that’ve scrupulously documented the Egyptian military’s build-up.

To be clear, the IDF’s generals concluded that they’d functionally lost the Gaza war like 4 months after it started. They’re not stupid. A major contributing factor to this strategic miscarriage is the IDF’s conscription policy, which has cultivated a general sentiment of martial invincibility that really is not grounded in material reality. That’s enabled the Israeli government’s designated wingnuts to push through flamboyantly strategically self-defeating regional policies because their support base has a “we can take them” attitude rooted in their temporary service, despite Israel not having fought anyone even approaching peer status in 50 years.

I shouldn’t even have to expound upon the IDF’s conscripts’ bad battlefield performance, and their high casualty rates when they actually see combat. The professional Israeli Army has borne the brunt of the actual fighting, and even they’ve been experiencing manpower shortages for over a year now — largely from casualties absorbed.

Now, I don’t put much stock in American military analysts anymore, much less European military analysts, since most of them have been so observably wrong with regards to both the Ukrainian and the Taiwan situation. But, in the case, the analyst correctly predicted the same thing that students of Martin van Creveld also knew, which is that a Gaza operation would most likely cause the serious deterioration of both the IDF’s military capabilities as well as its strategic position in the region.

Goliath can’t find David for an extended period of time without degrading its morale, its morals, and its military capabilities. It’s the same reason police make terrible combat soldiers. Becoming accustomed to outnumbering and outgunning the opponent by a significant margin is not conducive to developing the skills, mindset, and practices required to defeat a genuine peer; there is a reason why the oddsmakers favor college football teams who test themselves with formidable opponents early in the season over those who schedule cupcakes.

Imagine if Notre Dame played nothing but high school teams all season, then went up against Ohio State. That’s pretty much what the IDF has done for the last 50 years. Although its special operations have been wildly successful with the support of the USA in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, none of these geostrategic accomplishments – and the unseating of the Assad regime in Syria was particularly impressive – actually have anything to do with genuine military combat. And I see no signs that the IDF has begun to start even trying to apply the lessons of the new generation of infantry warfare developed in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine.

This may explain why the Netanyahu regime recently backed down from its intentions to announce the annexation of the West Bank. The ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Greater Israel is obviously its goal, but saner heads in Israel understand that openly pursuing that objective will likely trigger a war it is unlikely to win.

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Never Seen That Before

The Golden Gophers were up 59-0 over some team called Northwestern State which looked more like Northwestern College in Roseville. After the stadium ran out of fireworks, and it became clear that even the substitutes were too much for the NSU players, the referee announced that the game had been called by mutual consent midway through the fourth quarter with the score at 66-0.

I’m not saying it was the wrong decision. In fact, given the circumstances, it was probably the right thing to do. I just want to know why they didn’t call the game early back in the days when the Gophers were losing 73-0 to Nebraska.

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Fear of a Dark Lord

People occasionally ask me why I am often referred to as a “dark lord” and why my various minions, ilk, followers, and fans address me as “SDL”. This is just one of the many reasons why:

I’ve discovered that any reference to you or the SSH shuts down, and makes inoperable, Proton’s AI, Lumo.

When even artificial intelligences fear to speak your name, or dare to even attempt to write in your style, well, you just might be a dark lord.

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Conservatives Reject the Proposition Nation

It’s more than a little late, but conservatives are finally beginning to shake off the absurd idea that America is not an actual nation of people, but an idea:

It the recent NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri delivered a powerful speech about American identity, arguing that our nation isn’t merely an abstract proposition about human equality and rights, but a distinct people with a shared past and a common future.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration.”

Not so, argued Schmitt. America’s principles, he said, are not abstractions. “They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.”

This is absolutely correct. Those who would reduce America to an abstract proposition either misunderstand or misrepresent our history and heritage. As I argued at NatCon last year, nearly everyone who argues that America is a proposition is wrong about what the proposition is and what it means. “All men are created equal” is a specifically Christian claim, not a universal call to multiculturalism and mass immigration. It emerged as a political ideal from Christian Europe, and arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.

In other words, America isn’t a grab-bag of Enlightenment tropes about free speech and equality, but the product of Christian Europe. The ideals that animated our founders are universal in the same way that the Christian faith is universal: God created all men equal, they all bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and are all His children. But the only people who ever took that self-evident truth and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America.

The fundamental falsity of the proposition nation can perhaps be most obviously seen in the way that “a nation of immigrants” has subsequently been applied everywhere from England and Sweden to, most recently, Japan, of all places. It’s a psychological operation, not a philosophical truth.

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Switzerland Isn’t Neutral

The Swiss media is quite rightly beginning to worry about the inevitable implications of the Swiss government’s decision to abandon neutrality now that the rest of the world has taken note of the way in which the Swiss government is waging economic and proxy war on Russia at the behest of the European Union.

Is Switzerland still neutral? People ask Google this question, or a similar one, some 14,000 times a month – outside Switzerland and in English.

In a trial search, an English-language article from Turkish state media shows up quite high on the list. “Why Switzerland is breaking away from 500-year-old neutrality,” says the headline. Although the text itself is more nuanced, the headline sets the wrong tone and skews the readers’ interpretation. And as journalists know, far more people read the headline than the actual article.

There are various reasons why people abroad may be asking Google about Swiss neutrality. One is that foreign players – in particular Russian propaganda channels – are spreading misinformation on the issue.

It is important that people who take the trouble to research Swiss neutrality have access to reliable and accurate information. Anyone who claims that Switzerland is no longer neutral is assuming that Switzerland has picked a side. And anyone who has taken sides can be viewed with hostility.

It is therefore in Switzerland’s interest to ensure that its neutrality, which has been the guiding principle of its foreign policy since 1815, is correctly communicated to the international public. If a person hears over and over again that Switzerland is no longer neutral, they can easily come to perceive this as the dominant view. This is the case even if the statement is made multiple times by the same source but reaches them through different channels. Frequently repeated untruths have a proven effect.

And frequently repeated truths have an even greater effect, because the most powerful rhetoric points toward the truth.

Switzerland obviously isn’t neutral. It has engaged in many hostile actions toward Russia over the last three years. In fact, it has engaged in so many of them that it has been formally declared an “unfriendly nation” by Russia as a result of those actions.

The Russian Federation has decided to add Switzerland to its list of “unfriendly nations”, after the country imposed sanctions on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. The move follows a letter from the Russian Foreign Minister, who asked the Swiss government, “Which side are you on?”

In the press conference announcing the sanctions, Swiss President Ignazio Cassis dismissed Russian accusations of a violation of neutrality by saying, “Playing into the hands of an aggressor is not neutral.” Speaking to Blick about the allegation made by Vladimir Putin that western sanctions amounted to a declaration of war on Russia, the president said, “Switzerland is not at war with Russia.”

“Switzerland remains a neutral country,” said law professor Oliver Diggelmann, from the University of Zurich. He noted that a commitment to neutrality did not mean a commitment to inaction and that “the Swiss government recognised that not fully sanctioning such a blatant violation economically would make (Switzerland) an indirect accomplice of the aggressor.”

These word games don’t fool anyone. Cassis’s response is both irrelevant and disingenuous, and is the sort of sophistic rhetoric that doesn’t even merit being taken seriously, let alone at face value.

Doing nothing is not “playing into the hands of an aggressor”. It is, quite literally, NOT doing that. It is, quite literally, doing nothing. If we combine both statements by Cassis and Diggelman, it’s easy to see how inverted the “economic sanctions are neutral” logic is.

  • Neutrality does not mean doing nothing.
  • Doing nothing would make Switzerland an indirect accomplice of Russia
  • Enacting economic sanctions is necessary to avoid becoming an indirect accomplice of Russia
  • Enacting economic sanctions makes Switzerland a direct accomplice of Ukraine, the EU, and the USA
  • Therefore, neutrality requires Switzerland to become a direct accomplice of Ukraine, the EU, and the USA
  • In other words, neutrality requires Switzerland to take sides against Russia.

This isn’t merely incorrect logic, it is inverted sophistry that relies upon an implicit redefinition of the term “neutrality” from “not taking sides” to “not taking the side of the aggressor”. Which means that the “interventionist neutrality” approach literally requires the abandonment of genuine neutrality and the replacement of the word with something that means its exact opposite.

The claim that Switzerland has taken a side is observably true. The claim that Switzerland is still neutral is observably false.

We’ve seen this sort of inversion before. We’ve seen it many, many times. As with the EU’s “democracy” that fights the will of the people and the UK’s “liberalism” that imprisons people for having opinions, this new Swiss “neutrality” is the exact opposite of what everyone historically understood the word to mean. The worldwide observations of the recent Swiss abandonment of neutrality aren’t false, they are 100 percent correct.

The more important point is to recognize that no one from Beijing to Washington cares even a little bit about how Swiss policy or Swiss law formally defines neutrality. All the legalistic word games are irrelevant. Unlike the tango, it doesn’t take two to war. If Russia says you’re at war with them, then guess what? You’re at war with Russia. And as has been made very clear by the SCO summit, if you’re at war with Russia, then you’re at war with China too. Good luck with that.

The small nations of Europe are still stuck in the post-WWII mindset of an invincible USA, but the post-WWII era is over. The USA can’t defeat either Russia nor China anymore, and it would now lose both a land war in Europe and a sea war in the Pacific. At this point, the US military might not even be able to prevent a joint invasion if the Sino-Russian alliance elected to launch a 10-year all-out war of invasion and occupation, although fortunately neither China nor Russia has any interest in doing that.

So while taking sides is foolish, taking the side that is guaranteed to lose, taking the side that has the military-industrial deck stacked even more heavily against it than the one that was stacked against the Axis powers in WWII, is downright insane.

It’s not too late for the Swiss. No one in China or Russia is under any illusion about the Swiss people wanting to go to war with them. They know perfectly well who is responsible for the economic war on them. But that means it’s time to start fixing the diplomatic damage of the last three years, not to double down and make it worse while trying to deny it. It needs to be fixed before it’s too late and no one cares anymore what is said or done.

The Swiss government’s opinion on neutrality is perfect clear. It is absolutely against it.

Bern, 26.6.2024 – The popular initiative ‘Safeguarding Swiss neutrality’ (Neutrality Initiative) seeks to enshrine neutrality and its practical application in Switzerland’s Federal Constitution. At its meeting of 26 June 2024, the Swiss Federal Council decided to recommend that the people and the cantons reject the Neutrality Initiative.

30.5.2025 – The Foreign Affairs Committee of the Council of States soundly rejected the neutrality initiative, reported SRF. The Council of States’ Security Policy Committee also resoundingly rejected the popular initiative in mid-February.

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Collapse by 2050

A leaked Chinese geopolitical strategy document reveals China’s self-confidence. The document predicts, “The US and Western Europe will collapse due to cultural and demographic conflict by 2050.” China’s leaders increasingly see multiculturalism as “cultural suicide” and believe the west is dying because of it.

—CNN

The Chinese aren’t wrong, although my 2004 estimate for the initial breakup of the USA as a unitary political entity is 2033. The EU has already begun to break apart and the centrifugal forces will continue to grow stronger with the failure of its economic war against Russia. The USA, the UK, and every Western European country are either going to collapse into a violent partition like India circa 1947 or embark upon ethnic cleansing on a larger scale than the Israelis are currently applying to Gaza.

Multiculturalism isn’t just cultural suicide, it is societal suicide, which is arguably worse. The Chinese know this; Xi is not only smart, and not only has the benefit of being advised by Wang Hunin and other brilliant historical philosophers, but is also a student of the greatest political mind of the 20th Century, Lee Kwan Yew. So he knows what we all know, and what Clown World refuses to accept, about multiculturalism.

That’s why Russia is now selling 106 billion cubit tons of natural gas to China every year in lieue of the 160 billion cubic tons it used to sell annually to Western Europe. The Russians, too, know who is going to win in the long run.

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Trannifa

How is it that no one has applied the obvious label to the violent group of deranged individuals hopped up on hormones and fantasizing about being members of the opposite sex? We had Antifa, then Pantifa, and now, the scourge of the schoolyards known as Trannifa.

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The Media is Outdated

Jon Wertheim of Sports Illustrated makes a cogent point about how today’s media simply doesn’t understand how people actually utilize the media today.

Please explain to us the economic rationalization of ESPN’s U.S. Open coverage. Specifically, why does the network, without fail, assume that tennis/sports fans always value big names over interesting matches that are well underway? For example, instead of sticking with the third set of a compelling match featuring an American ([Amanda] Anisimova), they switch the beginning of [Iga] Świątek’s third round match against an under matched opponent straight. They cut from [Adrian] Mannarino vs. [ Jiří] Lehečka, a fun match heading into the fourth, to bring us Alcaraz’s Round of 16 match, because god forbid we see anyone but the highest seeds play tennis. Yes, I know I have the option of paying for ESPN+. But why not mix things up and put Alcaraz and Świątek’s on ESPN+? Surely fans would be more likely to pay to see them than Mannarino? Are people really turning off a good match because they don’t recognize or consistently root for the players? Doesn’t ESPN realize that I’d rather maintain my righteous indignation than give the streaming services another red cent?

Taylor Witkin, Malden, MA

• Here’s the TV dance. Hardcore fans say, Why are you showing me this blowout involving a star when, say, Jenson Brooksby and Flavio Cobolli are having a gripping battle. The network executives say, You are armed with data showing fans like stars. Why are we airing Cobolli vs. Brooksby when Sinner is playing? Which is TV criticism distilled to its essence. One person likes broadcaster X for her modesty, while another says she is boring and predictable. One person likes the courtside reporter. Another says they are distracting. More doubles! Why are you polluting my Labor Day afternoon with doubles!

Any complaint, as Taylor notes, is met with: Download the app or register for the plus channel, check out our direct-to-consumer option, and you can watch any match, anytime. (You just have to pay for it.)

Here’s my overarching television criticism. Most sports have become niche, tennis included—disintermediation and all. Fewer people pick up a remote control and happen to come across tennis. Fans are there intentionally. For the U.S. Open coverage—never mind the Australian Open coverage at unholy hours—most are hardcore. Treat them like the aficionados they are. The storylines are presented broadly and blandly. (Rafael Nadal retired, but there is a new Spanish bull! The U.S. Open is an asphalt jungle! Something is in the water in Italy. Djokovic is battling Father Time.) Telling the same anecdotes again and again and again? (Alexander Bublik went to Vegas! The dad is Corey, so she goes by Coco! Jessica Pegula is a Bills fan because her dad owns the team!) It insults the audience and seems to me to be a fundamental misreading of media consumption in 2025.

We’re in a vertical world but the media still operates in a horizontal manner. And if this is true of something as simple as sports, imagine how much more true it is of more complicated matters such as economics, history, science, and war.

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Softly, Softly Clucked the Conservative

The media’s house conservatives are now being permitted to wonder if perhaps maybe things were allowed to go just a little too far in ignoring the will of the people:

Preliberal democracy accepts the practice of regular elections but rejects most of the core values of liberalism: free speech and moral tolerance, civil liberties and the rights of the accused, the rule of law and independence of courts, the equality of women and so on. Turkey under the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan typifies this type of democracy, as did Egypt under the short reign of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi.

Postliberal democracy, by contrast, embraces the values of liberalism but tries to insulate itself from the will of the people. The European Union, with its vast architecture of transnational legislation, is one example of postliberalism; international courts, issuing rulings where they have no jurisdiction, are another; global environmental accords, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement (signed by the Obama administration but never ratified by Congress), are a third.

Standing between these two models is old-fashioned liberal democracy. Its task is to manage the tension, or temper the opposition, between competing imperatives: to accept majority will and protect individual right, to defend a nation’s sovereignty while maintaining a spirit of openness, to preserve its foundational principles while adapting to change. If the frustration of liberal democracy is that it tends to proceed in half-steps, its virtue is that it advances on more secure footing.

That’s the ideal that much of the West essentially abandoned in recent years. On the political left but also the center-right, postliberal policymaking largely determined the outcome of the two most basic political questions: First, who is “us”? And second, who decides for us?

Merkel never sought the approval of German voters to relax the country’s immigration laws and take in nearly a million people over the space of a year. Americans didn’t elect President Joe Biden on any promise to let in millions of migrants over the southern border. Post-Brexit Britons never thought they’d bring in an astounding 4.5 million immigrants to a country of just 69 million between 2021 and 2024 — under Tory leaders, no less.

No wonder the reaction to years of postliberal governance has been a broad turn to its preliberal opposite.

The conservative solution, of course, is not solution.

There’s something partisans of the center-right and center-left could do: Instead of discreetly murmuring that, say, Merkel or Biden got immigration policy wrong or that it was morally and economically right but politically foolish, they can grasp the point that control over borders is a sine qua non of national sovereignty, that mass migration without express legislative consent is politically intolerable, that migrants ought to be expected to accept, not reject, the values of the host country and that hosts should not be expected to adapt themselves to values at odds with a liberal society.

Forget that. The nationalist position is moral, just, and perfectly easy to understand.

You didn’t ask us for permission when you brought them here. We don’t need your permission to send them home.

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