Strategic Culture

Don’t the Americans understand the implications of creating a desperate, unemployed and radicalised constituency across the entire Middle East?

Trump may not be prepared to go to war for Israel, but others in the US Establishment view America ‘winning again’ in the wider civilisational war, as an existential issue for America.

U.S. pressures will escalate – in line with the binary ‘either/or’ ultimatum, and Iran will then push back through increasing enrichment and acts of deterrence. The present lull in tensions may be short-lived.

David Wurmser is Matryoska’s ‘doll’ within: no military invasion, but just a strategy to blow apart the Iranian Republic.

Iran – wisely – has eschewed direct, state-to-state military conflict, for a more subtle, and pernicious war on the US presence in the Middle East – a war, which if successful, will re-cast the region.

The strategic balance seemed more or less sustainable until its upending with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani and Al-Muhandis, ordered by Trump.

Boris Johnson has done the impossible – but done it by doing the precise opposite of what conventional rationalism would have expected.

The EU premise was of ‘uncle’ America, always being ‘there’, in case of difficulties. This is no longer true – and shocking it is, for EU élites.

The new type of warfare is using economic pressure to trigger popular protest and then to leverage the economic grievances of the ordinary populace.

Democracy – as experienced – too often has become the institutional tool to smother smouldering anger, Alastair Crooke writes.