Gandalv
This week, the Pentagon's number three published a seven-part essay insisting that nobody is leaving America. Access to American weapons, he explained, is "a privilege, not a right." Marvellous. For seventy years, Europe and Canada bought American weapons the way you keep Netflix on auto-renew, year after year, without a thought. Then the service started insulting the subscribers, threatening to seize one member's island, and tripling the price. Auto-renew is now off across 31 accounts, and the man in charge is explaining, at length, that cancelling was never an option. Here is a rule about official essays: nobody writes seven numbered paragraphs about a threat they consider imaginary. We have been reading what Washington reads, and it is not the press conferences. It is the paperwork. Swedish radars beating Boeing in Canada. Procurement rules that ban any weapon with an American off-switch. And the deliveries America still makes? Deals made before Trump. Hard to cancel, easy to shrink. Europe is rearming for trillions, and America gets the scraps. At the summit, Trump says the allies love him. In the ledgers, they have already left him. Ankara was where the two stories finally met. What happened next is the story inside👇 https://open.substack.com/pub/gandalv/p/a-privilege-not-a-right?r=3v7cjb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
