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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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This seemed so implausible to me that I went and hunted for accurate sources ... and found references for both claims. So... wow.

I'm also not usually a fan of the "child with a gun", but even stopped clocks get to be right twice a day. "I just really do question whether or not they'll come to [our rescue]" seems to be a reasonable concern, if not about intentions (Germany did stick it out in Afghanistan for decades), then at least about recent capabilities vs peer adversaries. They're in an at least an order of magnitude better shape now, and still improving, but is that because they've fixed the root problems or just because they got tired of being repeatedly embarrassed by leaks to the press?

It's not great, but in a lesser country, you don't even hear about such things.

Yeah, the only NATO allies that would contribute any significant amount of forces and materirl are Canada, the UK, and France, but even then they wouldn't contribute much compared to thr US. There are some NATO militaries like the Finns that I expect would punch above their weight, but they're too small to contribute too much. The US would be doing the bulk 9f the fighting for NATO in WW3, unlike WW2 when the Brits carried their own weight.