At the home in which I grew up, our plot was separated from the narrow country road that ran along a boundary by a 2m wide strip that belonged to Suffolk County Council. It was annoyance at the Council's lack of maintenance that drove my mother to add its grooming to my boyhood task-list of mowing and trimming. So for a length of 70 or 80m as the road ran alongside our land, an unkempt, blowsy country roadside assumed a neatly trimmed tidiness. It took three or four years for the Council to twig that we were maintaining their roadside - whereupon, they started regularly to send out a maintenance gang to pre-empt my efforts.
My mother took it as a sign that local bureaucracy was amenable to her own particular form of 'nudge', and was happy that she had a neat boundary. I was happy at losing the task of maintaining it. Now, of course, I realise that the Council had been prompted not by a sense of obligation to a ratepayer but from fear that if we maintained it for 12 years and they didn't, we could claim ownership of the 2m strip from them through adverse possession. I'm glad my mother had no knowledge of this quirk in British law - it would have prompted her to surreptitiously expand on all borders.
And so with Russia. Russia will expand in any direction that is not clearly and signally defended and 'owned'. That includes land, sea and air. It doesn't make Russia any more of an enemy than cutting a verge made me an enemy of Suffolk County Council; Russia acts in a very proper Adam Smith type of economic self-interest. And peace is best served by NATO and the UK maintaining forces, fleets and air patrol and response capacities that signal clearly and without doubt where the boundaries are. A minimum of 2% of GDP but ideally for the United Kingdom, a spend that gives us a standing army of 100,000 men and a fleet of 50 warships.
That Russia also must be an ally in the coming conflict with African mass migration, Islamist aggression and Malthusian challenges doesn't mean we shouldn't also keep clear boundaries and military parity in sight. The EU of course is blind to the realpolitik and risks conflict through its insane territorial ambitions - a dangerous stupidity that needs the UK's level head to counter. If Theresa May makes Presidents Putin and Trump her key diplomatic priorities, she is doing absolutely the right thing.
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Steve
I recently read a report on defence expenditure which was sourced from Janes ( generally considered reliable) that Russia's defence
expenditure was approximately 55 billion dollars and the USA's over 600 billion, to which could be added the expenditures of the NATO countries. As the Americans sa " Go figure".
NATO was an admirable and very effective, limited defensive alliance until Blair and Clinton perverted it into an aggressor organisation with the unprovoked attack on Yugoslavia to in 1999. Tony Blair was always envious of the electoral benefits of the " Falklands effect" enjoyed by Mrs. Thatcher and Yugoslavia was the nearest he came to it - but only with much "post truth" propagandising, controlled by Alastair Campbell. Very quietly last year the International Tribunal on Yugoslavia exonerated the late Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic ( billed as " The butcher of the Balkans") from complicity in the atrocities in Bosnia.
Every subsequent "humanitarian intervention" by "New NATO" - Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the proxy wars in Ukraine and Syria, has been uniformly disastrous. The chief effect has been to promote the demographic invasion of Western Europe by massive influxes of refugees, most of whom are Muslim. The Orthodox Christian refugees from Ukraine mostly went to Russia, of course.
It was quite unrealistic to expect Russia tamely to assent to the loss or neutralisation of its naval base at Sebastopol by the EU/NATO sponsored coup in Ukraine - a classic example of arrogant Western overreach. As we have seen in the US election, Mr Putin is regarded as a useful bogeyman by the "liberal elite" but, since Mr Blair's dodgy dossier with its bogus assertions of " Weapons of Mass Destruction" in Iraq, the public in Western countries is no longer prepared to trust the " intelligence community" and it's manipulations.
One has to wonder Radders where the 100,000 will come from to make up this ideal force?
Judging from the increasing numbers of native "snowflakes" our universities and schools are churning out I cannot see a credible force being recruited from their numbers. It would be a nightmare just trying to work out the number of latrine pits to be dug to accommodate the various demands!
However, with-in our midst we have the ever growing number of native born Muslims. Already forecast to overtake "us" in only a couple decades. Something that will also be seen in the recruitment numbers to our Armed Forces.
One wonders how long it will be before we have a home born Muslim standing army in this country?
As for the threat of who will cause the next major conflict in the world? I would be more worried by the policies coming out of Bruxelles than Moscow.
Radders, I thought you were going to tell us that Suffolk CC objected so much to your mother's (or your) action that it took her to court to prevent her doing the job that they should have done.
Good fences make for good neighbours!
(i) The council could have saved itself the trouble by granting your mother a licence to maintain the strip, which would have precluded her making a claim for adverse possession of the land.
(ii) Muslims could be recruited into Muslim regiments on the lines of those in the Indian army, where they made doughty fighters under British officers.
DP111...
Its going to depend on Team Trump. Have a look at this team. Its made up of very powerful people in their own right. Real movers and shakers, unlike the Obama team, who were just Obama’s friends, or patrons. This is a team picked to win a cultural, and real war, or both.
Reading Steve Banon’s, Trump’s strategy advisor. He is convinced that the West has forgotten why it is the West. In so doing, it had made the West vulnerable to Islamo-fascism, which he sees as the greatest threat the West has ever faced. Do too os the thinking of President elect Trump.
The Trump agenda is thus to change the philosophical direction that the West has been on, since the last 20 years, particularly the Obama years.
Given this, “Drain the swamp” is simply code for a “Reformation” of the West, and not just cleaning corruption in the DC Beltway. The latter will happen automatically as part of the “Reformation”.
If my analysis is correct, I would expect the entire political establishment of the West, including the CIA, NSA, FBI, to try and stop any attempt to neuter them.
And so it has turned out.
President-elect Trump and his advisors knew this. They expected the Establishment to fight back. But instead of coming to some accommodation with the MSM, and even Intelligence agencies, who have, astonishingly, briefed against the incoming president, they saw it as an opportunity to up the ante on them. This is a real smart move. Indicates that Donald Trump is operating with his team behind him.
The Intelligence agencies must now realize that they have been had. In five days, the Intelligence chiefs will be on the carpet at the Oval Office, facing President Trump, flanked by the smartest and toughest people I have ever seen. Or they will resign before that happens. But that won’t end their nightmare. This is a war.
As Team Trump begins Combined Operations, (Call it Operation Overlord)*, we will see the rest of the West fall in line. Eastern Europe is already behind Donald Trump. Teresa May has already signalled she in on board.
We certainly need a restored Navy. Britain is a trading nation and as the old saying put it "the flag follows the trade". In the past when Britain has pursued a Continental rather than a Maritime strategy, it has always led to ruin. Russia is naturally wary having been invaded several times and insecure unless it controls a series of "buffer states" (completely). However, looking at the map from a Russian perspective, they see themselves surrounded by potentially hostile nations(whether justified or not). It remains to be seen if Russia were to interfere in the Baltic states, but like Finland, they see these states as being really part of Russia.
To be honest, when it comes to keeping the Muslim hordes in the middle east and north Africa under control and out of Europe, I have rather more faith in Putin than Merkel.
One sunny day in January, 2017, an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue where he’d been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, “I would like to go in and meet with President Obama. ”The Marine looked at the man and said, “Sir, Mr. Obama is no longer President and no longer resides here. ”The old man said, “Okay,” and walked away.
The following day the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, “I would like to go in and meet with President Obama. ”The Marine again told the man, “Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Obama is no longer President and no longer resides here. ”The man thanked him and again just walked away. The third day the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying, “I would like to go in and meet with President Obama.” The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, “Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Obama. I’ve told you already that Mr. Obama is no longer the President and no longer resides here. Don’t you understand?
”The old man looked at the Marine and said, “Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it.” The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, “See you tomorrow, Sir!”
A very sensible post.
Unfortunately, we would be very fortunate to have an RN of 30 ships, never mind 50.
The politicians say "We can't afford it", but a war would be a lot more expensive ...
Just like post-1933...
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