These activists have big dreams. They want local governments to rebuild the urban environment—housing, transit, roads and tolls—to achieve social justice, racial justice and net-zero carbon emissions. They rally around slogans such as “ban all cars,” “raze the suburbs” and “single-family housing is white supremacy”—though they’re generally white and affluent themselves, often employed in public or semipublic roles in urban planning, housing development and social advocacy. They treat public housing, mass transit and bike lanes as a holy trinity, and they want to impose their religion on you.

“The residential is political,” wrote new left urbanists David Madden and Peter Marcuse in 2016. “The shape of the housing system is always the outcome of struggles between different groups and classes.” By dictating how cities build new housing, the logic goes, urbanists can dictate how people live and set right society’s socioeconomic, racial and moral deficiencies.

One widely circulated left-urbanist plan from April 2018 comes from the People’s Policy Project, a crowdfunded socialist think tank. The authors, Peter Gowan and Ryan Cooper, envision the construction of 10 million “municipal homes” over the next decade. The proposal imagines local governments building more housing units than the private construction industry and becoming the largest landlord in many cities.

The abysmal record of public housing in the U.S., from crime to decay, makes no difference to these urbanists. They rebrand “housing projects” as “municipal homes” and assert that new units will resemble neighborhoods in Stockholm, Vienna and Helsinki, rather than Detroit, Newark and Oakland.

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Britain needs help because nearly half of its frigates and destroyers are undergoing major repairs or upgrades. The Royal Navy has around 80 ships, down from more than 130 during the 1982 Falklands War. The country is without a deployable aircraft carrier, though it has plans for two. London spent more than 2% of gross domestic product on defense in 2018, fulfilling its NATO requirement. But former Defence Minister Tobias Ellwood admitted after the tanker seizure that “our Royal Navy is too small to manage our interests across the globe.”

Germany refused to help, perhaps because it doesn’t want to offend Iran and might lose a naval engagement. While the Deutsche Marine has helped fight piracy in East Africa, it struggles to meet basic NATO commitments. At one point in 2018 its entire U-Boat fleet—six submarines—was stuck in dry dock. The surface fleet has held up better, though it’s aging fast.

Berlin spent only 1.2% of GDP on defense in 2018. Chancellor Angela Merkel ’s heir apparent, Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, called for Germany to meet its 2% commitment during her recent swearing-in ceremony. Her fellow lawmakers responded with boos.

The French would have had a limited benefit to a patrol mission, perhaps because La Royale has only a single aircraft carrier after cancelling plans for a second years ago.

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