Strategic Culture

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.

The ‘max pressure’, Make America Great Again formula is not going to work, for the simple reason that it is consuming America’s ‘capital stock’ at a torrential rate. It will neither restore America’s manufacturing base, nor will it recover to America it’s political hegemony.

The crisis between Iran and Washington is only nominally about nuclear issues. It is rather, a political crisis between Iran and America, which reaches back to the humiliation of US President Carter in the context of the US embassy siege in Tehran.

Ultimately, Trump will find himself in a corner in which he never wished to find himself: It may already be too late. He is there.

The Kushner – Trump ‘Deal’, in respect to the integration of Israel into the regional energy economy seems destined to draw the same skepticism and distrust, as does the ‘Deal’s’ other parts.

The consensus on ‘no conflict’ unfortunately, may turn out to have been overly sanguine. This is not because Trump consciously desires war, but because the hawks surrounding him, particularly Bolton, are painting him into a corner.

The pendulum of power in the Middle East has shifted northwards, as a result of Syria’s defeat of the ‘Wahhabist’ campaign against it. Syria, Iran, Iraq and Lebanon now are both mobilised and energised. By contrast, Syria’s Gulf adversaries are enervated, weakened, and mired in their own internal crises.