Saturday, June 11, 2016

Threats? Oh dear.

Often, people who issue threats are betraying the precarity of their own position.

As a major potential F-35 customer, a lack of or continued postponement a Canadian order likely increases the cost of the F-35 for other customers, perhaps prohibitively. This could be terminal to the program as it would also impact US orders.

More to the point, Canadians generally find naked threats terribly impolite. It's ingrained in our national mythology. We are not keen to cooperate with rude people. Trudeau has an out here.

The Canadian military is conditioned by definition to respond to threats with aggression.

Boeing, Dassault, or Saab will see this as an opportunity to sweeten an offer.

I'm not sure Lockmart really did itself a favour.

Events unfold, the centre cannot hold

Sometimes things just happen.

In the UK just a short time ago, prime minister David Cameron created a monster in the form of a suggestion that, despite being publicly pro-EU, he would open a conversation, and later a referendum about Britain's withdrawal from it. Lord knows just what he was thinking (my own view is that he thinks very hard but finds thinking very hard). Fear of UKIP's fear of eastern Europeans and brown people, Bojo or Osborne, I don't know. Whatever it was, he is now faced with not on some easy vote, but a deeply divided country that may well irrevocably dissolve in the near years should the leave side win and Scotland consequently hold another referendum to leave the Union.

Oopsie.

In the US, decades of GOP race-baiting and obstructionism have opened the door to Trump.   Nuff said. 

My point is that it doesn't take much for the game to change overnight. This time next year the UK might not exist and a mostly English parliament might be presiding over restive publics in Wales and some serious weirdness in Northern Ireland as the loyalists see the object of their loyalty fade. The economy may be in shambles, millions of returning citizens will need housing and care in a stressed NHS. Access to its major economic partner could be severely curtailed.

In the US...one cannot begin fathom other to say that the US role in the ordering of the world will look very different even if Trump means only half of what says.

Meanwhile, the white walkers of climate change advance.