Global Intel Watch

🇫🇷 - If the French state won’t help protect catholic churches from being burned, then I think catholics have a right to defend their heritage and to protect their churches. Its a god given right.

🇫🇷 - Edouard Philippe says running for president - Le Monde

🇺🇸🇪🇺 - Someone like Trump or other strictly populist politicians in the West will never stop immigration because stopping or reducing legal immigration is something that has major economic consequences, and to handle such files you need highly competent politicians who are able to face headwinds and to have a clear plan.

More often than not, "No to immigration" is a slogan RW parties use but will never want to actually enforce because that would imply confronting the financial elite.

Thus, doctrinal clarity and consistency is needed. As is highly competent people that would be able to produce clear plans on how would Western economies change after a massive downscale of immigration.

🇺🇸🇪🇺 - What I'm trying to explain is that being in a cold war requires a clear doctrine and a good sense of what causes unnecessary risks for the stability of the broader West.

No, the interests of a few arms manufacturers shouldn't force the West to refrain from doing the necessary scale up in arms manufacturing.

No, the fear of angering the rich shouldn't stop politicians from being cautious on austerity cycles because, you know, in a cold war context you need the population to support the current state of affairs and limit the possibility for growth of radical opposition.

🇪🇬🇪🇹🇺🇸 - I predict the West's policy on this will be balanced by

1) the fact they don't want Egypt to grow too powerful... because there is a neighbor that Egypt have that wouldn't necessarily agree to such a scenario 🇮🇱 so expect a limit on the level of intensity the West will agree too for a potential Egyptian win.

2) Mediatically, their own rhetoric would likely compel them to give at least some condemnation of Ethiopia's behavior.

🇪🇬🇸🇴🇪🇹 - I have a lot of respect for Egypt and on paper they are favorite but they are pretty much untested as far as expeditionary war is concerned. My prediction is that the war will be up to Egyptian logistic officers to win.

🇺🇸🇷🇺 - If we take for granted that the formal abolishment of the right of conquest was is response to the rise mass ethnic cleansing during conquests, then the logical conclusion is that wars aiming to create puppet states constitute, in fact, a restoration of the right of conquest in its original sense, which means as a right to change the rulers, but not the peoples, of conquered territories.

🇺🇸🇷🇺 - Regarding the right of conquest.

During the Cold War, the general rule was that the right of conquest was abolished. As always, there exceptions, notably in former Mandatory Palestine, in East Timor etc, but it was broadly respected.

After the end of the cold war, the exceptions to the general rule of the end of the right of conquest got a lot more frequent: Kosovo, the successive tacit partitions of Syria, Libya and Yemen following the end of their civil wars, Crimea, Iraq, Afghanistan and finally 2022 with Ukraine.

But why was the right of conquest abolished in the first place?

Before the industrial revolutions, war were mainly an elite things. Nobles were doing the fighting, even if as always civilians casualties existed.

This means that the impacts of any result of war and peace was mainly upon nobles and sometimes the clergy. However, when the industrial revolution hit, the masses got involved. There were the napoleonic wars, the US civil war, WW1 and then WW2 which had the draft. All of this meant that govts, if they wanted to survive the war effort, needed to justify the war to their population. Thus, nationalism got stronger and, in the end, it caused a lot more of ethnic cleansing and genocides.

And turns out that, when 1945 arrives, and the allied troops discover the concentration camps, there was an international outcry. First of all, there were only 2 major powers remaining, both of which were nominally anti-imperialist, and then, guess what, people were sick of war. Hence the formal legal abolition of the right of conquest.

Ngl there is a comfy vibe of randomly walking down the street and finding out that the whole neighborhood is dancing to some Italian artist near a bar and then start dancing with them for 3 seconds before walking your way back happy of what you’ve heard and saw.