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It seems to me that for Iran to use the Straits to squeeze the rest of the world into acquiescing into its brutality is a ploy that brings diminishing returns. Given that oil can be piped as well as shipped via a tanker, construction of more pipelines to take the stuff – and gas – over land rather than via sea seems screamingly obvious. Sure, pipelines can be attacked and that creates issues around security. Even so, the key is to have options. I have heard it said that one reason behind the Hamas Oct 7 attacks was that Iran wanted to stymie a pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia that would, as part of it, include a cross-region pipeline or set of pipelines (maybe with the oil reaching the Mediterranean coast in Israel).
As conflict between U.S.-Israeli forces and Iran effectively shutters the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia has activated a 45-year-old contingency plan to bypass the blockaded waterway and keep global crude markets afloat. The centerpiece of this strategy is the East-West pipeline, a 1,200-kilometer artery that transports crude from the kingdom’s eastern fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu. Long considered a redundant relic of the 1980s Iran-Iraq War, the line is now the primary exit point for Saudi exports.
State-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco has rapidly reoriented its logistical center of gravity toward the west due to the lingering threat of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Even if the Straits retain some value, that is going to erode and fast in the next few years, is my guess.
And this whole saga also highlights the truth of a quote attributed to an American fracker business executive, who is supposed to have said that these folk are not just extracting more oil and gas, but are helping to save Western civilisation. Whoever that was, he or she wasn’t exaggerating.
As of the time of going to press, President Trump has announced a two-week ceasefire. I worry that this gives Iran breathing space – I don’t think the region will be sorted out until or unless the regime in Tehran is overthrown, although this needs, ultimately, to come from Iranians themselves.
That said, it is worth taking stock of what has happened in terms of the loss of military power in Iran, including its ability to make nukes. That’s not a trivial achievement. And the world – including China – has had a good look at the impressiveness of the US and Israeli air forces and special forces. It has, to be fair, also had a good look at the parlous state of the UK’s military, particularly its pitiful navy.
Chris Bayliss weighs up UK energy minister Ed Milliband and this politician’s determination to press on with his decarbonisation, Net Zero agenda, facts of reality be damned:
Others may argue that making reasonable concessions to public opinion at critical moments might benefit the green agenda in the long run, by limiting the chances of a backlash. But climate politics lives or dies by its sense of inevitability. There are only so many true believers like Miliband or Al Gore who get near positions of power. The movement is only effective so long as it retains its power over the cynical or weak-willed — the likes of Angela Merkel, David Cameron or Boris Johnson. And that power comes from the green movement’s monopoly on a vision of the future, at least in terms of energy.
With nuclear power largely removed from the discussion, opposition to the green agenda can only talk about fuels associated with the past — gas, oil, sometimes coal. If jaded politicians want to look modern and relevant, they are forced to talk about renewables. They can tell the weary public that they just have to get used to it, and that it’s the future whether they like it or not. It might not make them popular, but it makes them look potent. This is why “backsliding” is considered the most deadly sin by climate campaigners. In order to maintain that impression of inevitability, policy must only ever be seen to move in one direction. “True believers” are under an even greater obligation to hold the line, or face the wrath of the movement.
The green ratchet is bearing a huge load of bad ideas in British energy policy that don’t hold logical water even if you share their assumptions about the severity of climate change. Most obviously these relate to the electricity system and the atrophying of firm generation capacity in a system that relies on gas back-up when intermittent sources do not produce. There is a growing public awareness that critical detail has been excluded by renewables proponents, and this is responsible for the growing cost of electricity, rather than wholesale gas prices.
Reading all this, it is hard not to think of how Milliband, and others who share his views, hold the intellectual equivalent of the sunk cost fallacy.
Meanwhile, at the Daily Sceptic:
The climate science world (‘settled’ division) is in shock following the discovery in ancient ice cores that levels of carbon dioxide remained stable as the world plunged into an ice age around 2.7 million years ago. Levels of CO2 at around 250 parts per million (ppm) were said to be lower than often assumed with just a 20 ppm movement recorded for the following near three million-year period. In addition, no changes in methane levels were seen in the entire period. Massive decreases in temperature with occasional interglacial rises appear to have occurred without troubling ‘greenhouse’ gas levels, and this revelation has caused near panic in activist circles.
I remember the late Brian Micklethwait, of this parish, telling me a while back that sooner or later, the lies and exaggerations of the climate change alarmists would be exposed, and the anger of electorates over what has been allowed to pass would have major consequences. Remember, gentle reader, that much of the deindustrialisation of the West, and all that this implies, has been driven by those who championed the end of fossil fuel production.
“Sovereignty is not merely the technical possibility of making a one‑off decision. It is the continuing ability to govern yourself: to set and revise your own rules in the light of your own needs. When you adopt the regulatory framework of a foreign power, when commercial realities make reversal prohibitively costly and when you have no seat at the table where the rules are made, you may have exercised a choice at the outset but you have chosen powerless subordination thereafter.”
– Steve Baker, former Conservative MP and campaigner for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. He’s unhappy at the machinations of the current Labour government, and I share his annoyance.
Zack Polanski may be terrible at economics, but he is a great entrepreneur — a political entrepreneur, that is. The lesson from Corbynmania, the Greta Thunberg movement, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, the gender movement and the Palestine movement is that there is a lot of vaguely youthful, vaguely left-wing, vaguely anti-capitalist political energy around. That energy was looking for a political outlet, a gap in the market which Polanski spotted and filled. I wish he had used his talents to become an actual entrepreneur in the private sector instead, creating wealth rather than promoting ideas that destroy it.
– Kristian Niemietz
For those blissfully unaware of Zack Polanski (original name is David Paulden), here is some information about his approach to foreign affairs. Assuming he is sincere, he is mad, or it may be that he is simply intellectually depraved.
Youth unemployment has surged to 16.1%, meaning that one in six young people want a job but can’t find one. It’s no surprise when some estimate that half of the over 200,000 jobs lost since Labour took office have been among the youngest.
– Andrew Griffith.
For those who don’t recall, the expression “Labour Isn’t Working” was the banner of a Conservative Party election campaign of 1979, and while unemployment rose sharply in the early term of office of the Thatcher period – that was also a period of the monetarist squeeze against inflation – the devastating impact on the Labour Party of being associated with unemployment – and union mayhem and inflation cannot be overstated. Even today, the shame of a party that used to bang on about the “dignity of labour”, when many working-aged adults aren’t in employment or seeking it, should be far higher than it is. But as we seem to be reminded almost daily with this clanking and sanctimonious government, a sense of shame appears to be absent. Being a socialist, it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry, and never having to understand that incentives matter.
Well, I suppose one of several silver linings of the current arguments about whether the UK should transfer ownership of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius (the legal case is weak, the strategic case is absurd) and the USA should buy Greenland from Denmark, is that those of us who are a bit off the pace with our geography have had a chance to remind ourselves where these places are, and why they matter.
The Chagos Islands have been what are rather grandly called a British Indian Ocean Territory. The UK government, claiming that it is required to do so under international law (debatable), is to hand the islands to Mauritius – which is hundreds of miles away to the west of Chagos – and will pay Mauritius (a tax haven, by the way) for the ability to have control of said islands for a leasehold period of several decades. That means the UK can no longer decide if other countries – such as China – should be excluded, for example, from putting listening posts in the vicinity. The US military uses the Diego Garcia military base to operate long-haul flights, such as of the B2 stealth bomber and B52 bomber varieties, often to vital strategic effect.
In 2025, when the Starmer government was pushing this arrangement to pass over the islands to Mauritius – and pay Mauritius billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money for the purpose (which is itself a disgrace) – the newly elected Trump administration appeared to be content with the deal, although some in the defence establishment appeared to be worried about the geo-strategic implications of opening a potential door to China in that part of the Indian Ocean. The Chagos transfer remains caught up in UK parliamentary wrangling, but I fear that it will go through – but maybe not if Trump’s comments in the past 24 hours have an impact.
Mr Trump, who is angry at the UK for things such as allowing the Chinese to build a massive new embassy in London (with enhanced spying capabilities, no doubt), and about the UK’s criticism of his Greenland purchase demand (the UK is on firmer ground, if not entirely) has hit at the UK for the Chagos situation. Arguably, Trump’s move gives Starmer, if he is wise enough (is he, ed?) an “off-ramp” excuse to axe the Chagos transfer and put it down as a bad idea. (That would be the smart course, in my view.) Maybe even a smarter course would be for Starmer to let the US buy a stake in the Chagos Islands with a promise to let the UK still use the base on a joint basis. That would deal with America’s concerns about long-haul base access in the Indian Ocean and countering Chinese mischief-making, and perhaps take a bit of sting out of the Greenland issue.
I haven’t space to go into the Greenland case, but suffice to say that I think a US invasion of land that is under Danish rule (Denmark is in NATO) is unlikely to happen and would be outrageous if it did. I think Trump will pull back and over time, some sort of arrangement will be reached once tempers cool. Greenland, given some icecap melting etc, is going to be easier for surface ships and submarines to navigate around, and that makes it an important place for the US/Canada/others to want to protect, given where it is on the map.
But where the Greenland case is relevant in the Chagos case is that the US has a lease of a military base there (signed in 1951 – there were several attempts by the US to buy the place). And Trump has said that leaseholds aren’t enough – the US must own it. The logic he uses is similar to the logic that critics of the Chagos transfer have used – leaseholds aren’t enough because you must have the ability to exclude. Exclusion is the key issue here.
Maybe, therefore, a way forward for Trump and other NATO powers is to insist that US/Western leases in Greenland must involve no such leases for China, Russia and others potentially hostile to NATO members, and that such leases should be reviewed, such as once every 10 years to account for changing geopolitics.
The ability to show a measure of maturity on all sides – including ours in the UK – is critical. I worry that the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing pact between the UK, US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia is likely to end unless matters change. Starmer, who has been a clanking disaster of a Prime Minister, should stop goading the US by foolishly, and in my view fecklessly, giving every impression that the UK is becoming a useful idiot for Beijing. Whatever criticisms one might make of Trump’s recent foreign policy moves, on this occasion, he is more on the side of the angels than some might admit.
Recently, I flicked through James C Bennett’s The Anglosphere Challenge, written more than 20 years ago, a few days ago. Reading it in light of recent events show what’s changed in the world, and what hasn’t. Recommended.
Britain is also eerily emulating a pattern of democratic backsliding; from India to Mexico, authoritarian governments “test-drive” what they can get away with at local level first. By conveniently delaying elections at a time when council tax is set to rise, Labour risks setting a wicked precedent for “taxation without representation”.
– Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph (£).
Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimist Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers):
“Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride.
He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects.
Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise.
One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high.
Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely.
Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
“So, where are the chants of ‘From The Gulf to the Caspian Sea, Iran will be free'”?
– Allister Heath, asking a question that sort of gets a natural, logical answer: because Iran’s regime is against Israel and Jews, and against the West more generally. And in the minds of those who used to protest about Israel’s attacks on Hamas/Hezbollah and others, that is what counts. A few thousand people dead in Iran is all about the smashing eggs/omelette equation according to this anti-West calculus. In a way, this plays to the whole “two-tier” issue of the thinking about much of today’s Left (and the barmier forms of it on the Right): If you are on the “right” side of a particular argument (say that you are against Israel’s existence, or at least ambivalent about it), then it creates moral “space” to be indulgent towards regimes that are against Israel, etc. We see this over and over.
(Daily Telegraph link behind paywall.)
Minnesota is not a happy place at the moment, what with the multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud story and now this:
After an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and President Donald Trump portrayed that use of lethal force as clearly justified. Noem averred that the dead woman, Renee Nicole Good, was engaged in an “act of domestic terrorism” because she was trying to “run a law enforcement officer over.” Trump went even further, saying Good “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” (Reason magazine.)
Bystander video of the incident immediately cast doubt on those accounts. Footage from various angles “appears to show the agent,” later identified as Jonathan Ross, “was not in the path of [Good’s] SUV when he fired three shots at close range,” The New York Times reported on Thursday. “The SUV did move toward the ICE agent as he stood in front of it,” The Washington Post noted. “But the agent was able to move out of the way and fire at least two of three shots from the side of the vehicle as it veered past him.”
I am not going to get into the “who did what?” side of this, but I think that to some extent, this is what happens when people who are pressured to “get results” and operate in a system where they are encouraged to do so. For many years, law enforcement in different countries has had this issue, with the US in the lead. We are seeing the increasing militarisation of law enforcement. Radley Balko, who now works at the Washington Post, has done important work in shining a light on where this is going for many years. Things are seemingly getting worse the current administration but this did not come from nowhere.
Several Samizdata commenters are, if I recall correctly, those with law enforcement experience, so I’d be interested to know what the rights and wrongs are here.
Some thoughts about what might happen if the brutes ruling Iran are toppled:
Funding for various Islamist terror networks will decline and that is good for Israel, Lebanon and wider world.
Israel might try and carve out relations with Iran, leading over time to trade and capital flows, development, etc. There are lots of young, smart Iranian people who want something better. Some expat Iranians might return and bring money and investment.
This will hit the Islamists who are allying with the Western hard Left. This is going to badly undermine morale and the sense that their ideology is winning. That is important.
Iran’s relations with Moscow will change, and become more difficult. This might further tilt the scales against Putin, although that is not something I predict with much confidence.
On balance, this is also a negative for China, assuming that Iran moves in a slightly more liberal direction (I use that word with due care and attention).
The Gulf states might benefit in some ways but not in others. Saudi Arabia, UAE etc have benefited in recent years from expanded links with the West, in part because they were seen as the relatively sane folk in the room (particularly, the UAE). If Iran were to turn more friendly, more pro-capitalist, etc, it creates more competition for the Gulf states. Competition is generally a good thing.
Can we call it “Persia” again?
I saw this on Fraser Nelson’s Substack (it seems everyone has a Substack these days). The British journalist has been to Thailand with his wife, and noted this positive healthcare outcome in Thailand:
Thai private hospitals are a phenomenon. I had a foot complaint that had me hobbling around London for months, wearing trainers into the office. My local GP was of no use; I wasted money on private MRI scans and consultants trying to diagnose the problem. Nothing worked. But when I went into Wattanapat hospital in Aonang the problem was diagnosed, surgery carried out and completed all within 90 minutes. I felt like Lazarus for the rest of the holiday. In Bangkok, one of my friends had a trapped nerve in her leg – which was diagnosed and treated in two hours. She walked in without an appointment and was never unattended for more than a few minutes. Blood tests, x-rays, intravenous painkillers, specialist diagnosis, treatment pathway for when she returned home: all for 7,500 bhat (~£175). I was operated on by the same doctor who diagnosed me: they don’t seem to fragment it into specialities. I paid about £400. The UK has a good private health sector, but money cannot buy the integration or speed that Thai hospitals offer.
I found out later that people now travel to Thailand to bypass European hospital logjams. Most Thai private hospitals hold Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation, a gold standard for global healthcare quality with ~350 standards for things like surgical hygiene, anaesthesia protocols, medical personnel qualifications and patient safety. I suspect most NHS trusts would fail to meet this standard, even though they cost far more money. UK private healthcare is more a premium-priced overlay on NHS infrastructure rather than a reimagined delivery model. Thailand shows what proper integration achieves: clinical outcomes Western healthcare once promised but increasingly fails to deliver.
I had the same frustrating experience in dealing with my own ankle/knee pain issues about six years ago, but unlike Nelson, I did not fly thousands of miles to get treated (which clearly has to be factored in for the health tourist equation to work. But then Fraser Nelson was in the country anyway on holiday.) I have private medical cover, but did not use it on this occasion, and got sorted with specially made insoles, and did physio and various exercises – including barbell lifts such as the deadlift – to strengthen my knees, and so forth. I am a lot better and feel fitter than when I was a decade younger.
Whatever the specifics, the example given from Thailand shows that the UK’s free-at-the-point-of-use system has major faults, because there’s less of a price incentive to focus on what people are looking for, and therefore fresh sources of supply aren’t drawn in. Prices are information carriers, and like a clogged artery, a healthcare system run on socialist lines can produce the national equivalent of a stroke. (This in some ways describes the economy of the UK.)
Healthcare needs a sharp dose of capitalism along with green veggies and a daily walk. Think of how under free market healthcare, technologies such as 3-D printing/processing scale up production, in a customised way, of items such as hip replacement parts, knee replacement parts, insoles, and other things. This tech already is being used, but under a more market-based UK system, this will accelerate. The toolkit that is promised by AI could really drive change in a positive way (and I am not as starry eyed about AI as some might be). Healthcare needs its Jobs, Dyson and Rockefeller.
Anyway , thoughts about health and wellbeing often crop up in the cold, post-Christmas days of January, so it is time for me to hit the weights. Wishing everyone here a happy 2026.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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