Matthew Palmer
🇬🇧 Former soldier. Accidental journalist. Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.
Thoughts & feelings on defence and other things. Not always serious. Views my own.
Longer thoughts & feelings on substack:
crackingdefence.substack.com
- Reposted by Matthew PalmerThey closed the CIA World Factbook and deleted it entirely.
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- 'The timescale for the defence investment plan remains uncertain, with dates for publication ranging from mid-March to May....' *Screams internally*
- Noice.
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- Reposted by Matthew Palmer9-9-6 was a Chinese term invented mostly to show how depressing and lifeless work culture was; watching softbrained AI guys adopt it as an ideal is ... well, entirely predictable
- www.ft.com/content/d0b7... No thank you.
- Not just Canadians, mind. There is a sizeable contigent of British personnel scattered across the US, both as exchange officers and embeds.
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- Much easier to blame the naughty civil servants than grow a pair, take some risk and do the hard work to change the situation.
- Why in God's name would we not adopt our own bloody missiles?
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- To add, Europe as it currently stands could probably fight the Russians to a stalemate already. But the point of rearmament is to ensure that we can hit them so hard that there is no chance of parts of the Baltics, Poland, Norway, etc being left under Russian occupation in a frozen conflict.
- Indeed. I'm getting very bored of the 'Europe couldn't possibly' argument and associated internalised helplessness. There is no reason why Europe could not handily deter and defend ourselves against Russia if we put our minds to it.
- End of an era!
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- Reposted by Matthew PalmerPlease. This is absurd. Europe can certainly deter Russia and defend itself if its focused and determined. Perpetuating a sense of European helplessness may help Rutte bureaucratically but its 1. wrong 2. prevents action. 3. willfully blind: the US ain't coming to defend Europe.
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- Just overhead two undergrads remarking that they 'honestly couldn't understand how anyone did university degrees before ChatGPT was invented'.... 🫠
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- 'Perhaps most dispiriting for many Europeans was realising the French had been right all along.'
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- Career firing, career firing, career stops.
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- Crisis over, time to stick heads back in the sand.
- Unfortunately, many in the government seem to think that it does.
- I'd like to think that this crisis would kick the UK governmemt into taking the strategic implications of a breach with the US seriously. But because Trump, ever a figure known for his reliability, has now said 'no force', I cynically imagine they will put their heads back into the sand.
- Reposted by Matthew PalmerI cannot tell you how absolutely infuriatingly this stuff comes across to Europeans. When we say America is no longer a reliable ally, it goes considerably deeper than Donald Trump himself. This kind of complacent, condescending shit is a *huge* part of it.
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- Strong speech from Carney here. Well worth a read. Wish a British politician could do the same.
- Fuck me not good.
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- This is fucking excellent.
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- This article remains ever-green. *Sigh*
- Reposted by Matthew Palmer2024: can Europe defend itself ALONGSIDE America? 2025: can Europe defend itself WITHOUT America? 2026: can Europe defend itself AGAINST America?
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- Bastards. Still managing to cling on to power, after all this time. However: 'In the past, street protests have taken on an ebb and flow of euphoria and exhaustion. The 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah took more than a year to crest'
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- The inability of a large number of politicians and journos to take an interest in anything outside the micro-world of SW1 never ceases to amaze. Reminds me of a few years ago when the coverage of a Rus missile landing in Poland was all about Sunak's leadership rather than the event itself.
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