Strategic Culture

The question is: can Trump’s instinctive, creative ambiguity hold the line of US credibility (which exists more in the eye of the domestic beholder?)

What has the ‘international style of architecture’ – now going out of fashion – got to do with today’s geo-politics?

The US is ‘blowing smoke’ about launch sites mainly to divert from the very obvious (but embarrassing) fact that the raining down of missiles on Abqaiq, primordially owes to the Saudi war on Yemen (supported unreservedly by Trump).

In all the hullabaloo of Brexit and its associated parliamentary infighting, little noticed has been how Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson are attempting to change the very nature of the UK political landscape.

There is consensus amongst the Washington foreign policy élite that all factions in Iran understand that – ultimately – a deal with Washington on the nuclear issue must ensue. It somehow is inevitable.

Is the prospect of looming global recession merely an economic matter or is there a wider pattern of geo-political markers that may be deduced ahead of its arrival?

It is now no longer conceivable that MbS can deliver what Trump and Netanyahu desired. Does this then mean that the US confrontation with Iran, and Jared Kushner’s Deal of the Century, are over? No.

Conflict is popping up everywhere in the world nowadays and all of them have their separate background contexts. But why so many at the same time? Well, it’s all about change – about the recognition that we are at the cusp of major changes. The world is beginning to pre-position.

The treaties are untouchable, precisely because Germany believes that to loosen its hold over the monetary system will be to open Pandora’s Box to the ghosts of inflation and social instability rising, to haunt us anew, Alastair Crooke writes.

The more the rival US élite factions cloister themselves in their enclaves, certain in their separate views about how America can retain its global supremacy, the less likely it is that they will understand the very real impact of their collective belligerence on the outside world.