Greg Snow ❄

GULLIVER WAKES UP Watching the UN emergency meeting yesterday—as well as various world leaders like Starmer stepping up to their podiums and microphones—reminded me of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. America has been cosplaying as the world’s polite giant for decades—politely allowing a swarm of pint-sized parasites to tie us down with dental floss while they lecture us on “responsibility” and “shared values.” We don’t need NATO. We don’t need the UN. And the mask is slipping: the Lilliputians are starting to sweat. In “A Voyage to Lilliput” (1726), shipwrecked Lemuel Gulliver wakes up pinned to the beach by an army of six-inch egomaniacs. They’ve lashed him with thousands of threads, pegs, and stakes thinner than shoelaces. Then they strut: issuing proclamations, demanding tribute, conscripting him into their ridiculous egg-cracking civil war, treating the colossus like a rented mule. Gulliver—big-hearted fool—plays along at first. He doesn’t want to accidentally squash the little tyrants. He even drags their navy across the water like bath toys. But the “bonds” are laughable. One good shrug and they’re confetti. Gulliver’s captivity was never physical; it was consensual masochism. When he finally gets bored of the charade, he stands up, snaps the strings like birthday streamers, and strolls off. The Lilliputians’ empire of the absurd collapses in seconds. Sound familiar? Gulliver = America: the lone superpower that could end any conventional war in weeks, whose economy could buy and sell continents, whose tech sets the global pace. We could walk away tomorrow and the world would still run on dollars, Hollywood, and iPhones. The Lilliputians = Everyone else: NATO freeloaders who spend 1.2% on defense while we hit 3.5% and play global cop; UN diplomats in Turtle Bay who veto our moves, shield tyrants, and spend our money on “climate equity” junkets; European allies who virtue-signal about multilateralism while begging for our bases and our blank checks. They’ve tied us with “consultations” that paralyze action, “2% pledges” treated like polite suggestions, endless guilt trips about “alliance unity,” and bureaucratic quicksand designed to make unilateral moves politically radioactive. We’ve submitted—post-WWII habit, Cold War inertia, out of fear of looking like the bully. So we’ve hauled their fleets, rebuilt their economies, and let them ride shotgun on our wallet. But the giant’s eyes are opening. Why subsidize Europe’s welfare-state militaries? Why fund a UN that hosts anti-American circuses? Why let Brussels dictate our foreign policy? The threads are fraying because we’re noticing they’re made of nothing but hot air and bad faith. The Lilliputians feel the tremor. Panic ripples through NATO summits and Security Council chambers. They’re frantically weaving new strings—climate treaties with penalties, “rules-based order” sermons, more “allied” demands masked as solidarity. But Gulliver’s patience is gone. One yawn, one stretch, and the illusion shatters. Swift wrote satire to expose pretension and power’s absurdities. Today it’s prophecy: America’s voluntary self-shackling is over. Time to stand up, brush off the pygmies, and remind the world who actually carries the weight. Gulliver has had enough.