SAGE ADVICE FOR OUR TIME.

In Brussels Signal, Conrad Black offers a verdict that it might behoove the process-worshippers in the faculty common rooms to read and understand.

China is a challenge but not a rival and America’s ostensible allies are much less formidable than they were in the World Wars or even most of the Cold War. If Europe wishes to be taken seriously by the Americans, it has to act seriously and bring something to the party besides unction, loquacity, patronisation, and the compulsive will to appease America’s enemies.

For that consummation to be achieved, dear reader, it is essential that the coils of the anaconda continue to tighten.

What appears to be the last shot in the locker for the beleaguered and fragmented Iranian regime is the false claim that they control the Strait of Hormuz. The United States Navy could certainly convoy oil tankers through in approximately three 30-tanker convoys per day. They have the ships and aircraft necessary to assure reasonable safety and could put Marines on all ships to repel boarders and respond instantly to shore attacks and to the small craft of the Iranians that have so terrorised unescorted tankers. President Trump has already declined the belated offer of the Europeans, who need this oil, to assist in clearing the Strait. The United States doesn’t really need oil from this source and its lack of alacrity in reducing the price of oil for allies who would not allow the United States use of their own airspace and American bases in their country for the purposes of conducting this war, is understandable.

In his view, the mullahs might posture and puff in the way of men of Asia Minor, but it's likely for show for the benefit of their own subjects, but they won't do anything foolish.

The correlation of military forces now between the United States and Israel on one side and Iran on the other is approximately a thousand to one, and any recourse to aggression against the United States by Iran would be so horrifying a mistake that even the blooded and divided fighting bull government of the Islamic Republic has eschewed it. The departure of the United Arab Emirates from OPEC also indicates that that country will assist in moderating the world oil price while Iran flounders to the end of this operetta of a war in which the principal terrorism-sponsoring country in the world and a relentlessly belligerent source of threats and outrages has been reduced to impotent mendicancy, all at a cost to the United States of eight battlefield fatalities and a non-combat accident in which five other servicemen died.

What has been most remarkable in the response of the West has been this sour grapes recognition that the United States does not need anything from NATO to achieve its international strategic goals.

All of which might be true, and yet now is not the time to go wobbly.

Turn over the fissile material and destroy the machinery of uranium enhancement.  Stop funding proxies throughout Asia Minor.  Compensate the Gulf Arab states for damages to their tourist infrastructure.  Recognize that the Strait of Hormuz is international waters.