This is basically a resource grab. Soleimani was in the same position as Chile’s Allende, Libya’s Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam. The motto is that of Stalin: “No person, no problem.”
 

Saddam and Islamic Revolutionary Iran got into a war in the 1980's. in 2019 Soleimani the Persian was preventing America from grabbing Iran's oil assets from the indigenous Arabs of Iraq by ... limpet mine attacks on ships carrying Arab oil. Following the blatant international aggression by the country Bolton has always warned about ... Trump sacked Bolton. And then two Saudi oil facilities get blown up by Iranian drones. As no one is blowing up Iranian tankers and oil terminals or occupying Iranian territory, they can sell anyone willing to buy. It is true Iran is under US and United Nations sanctions because they evidence suggests Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons, but the way they play with the drones and limpet mines hardly suggests they could be trusted with nuclear weapons capability.

Not even the Safavid dynasty ruled Iraq. Iran has been fighting Iraq since 1936, the Shah had a little war (1000 dead) with Saddam over the Shatt-al Arab. Yes oil goes through the Shatt-al Arab, but they were fighting over it in the days of sail.

President Trump is just the taxicab driver, taking the passengers he has accepted – Pompeo, Bolton and the Iran-derangement syndrome neocons – wherever they tell him they want to be driven.
 

Pompeo is just a yes man. Bolton is the Iran hater, and days after Trump sacked Bolton him Solie Maniac attacked crucial world energy supply centres. The nocons must have been exultant.

Obviously Israel wants to secure the Golan Heights; hence its opposition to Syria, and also its fight with Lebanon; hence, its opposition to Iran as the backer of Assad and Hezbollah. This dovetails with US policy.
 

All Israel had to do was mount a military build up on the Golan border and the treat of an invasion would have meant Assad would having to divert his army from fighting the rebellion.

Their plan is to hold onto the main source of their international revenue: Saudi Arabia and the surrounding Near Eastern oil-export surpluses and money.
 

Courtesy of American military force Iraq was shattered, the Sunnis made to accept they are a minority, and Saddam hanged, so Iran no longer has to worry about Iraq as an enemy . One might think that made things even, but no Iran is not happy with just Iraq being taken down it wants to topple the Saudi monarchy too. No Arab country can be allowed to do anything in its own land that Iran does not approve of.

But when it comes to the global and U.S. domestic response, it’s the United States that is the determining active force. And its concern rests above all with protecting its cash cow of Saudi Arabia, as well as working with the Saudi jihadis to destabilize governments whose foreign policy is independent of U.S. direction – from Syria to Russia (Wahabis in Chechnya) to China (Wahabis in the western Uighur region)
 

Saudis cannot even defend their own country with masses of heavy weapons and Hudson thinks there are enough Syrian and Saudi arabia are of comparable size) Saudi cyborgs to fight in the maen against machines war that was Syria revolt. All the US had to do is give the Syria rebels heavy weapons and ant aircraft and they would have won. The US didn't and it didn't let the Saudi's either. The rebels had literally no artillery except lash ups ( 'hellcannons').

A major omission by Hudson is not discussion US capital intensive fracking running on qualitative easing, and the effect that had on oil prices especially when the Saudis tried to put the US frackers out of business.

No single country can counter the U.S. unipolar world order.
 

China can and China will.

It takes a critical mass of countries.
 

The UK tried that kind of economic cooperation and though it was great for Poles ect, it just didn't work in the interests of the majority of Britons, hence Brexit. Nothing wrong with being an internationalist but don't pretend all will benefit.

This already is taking place among the countries that you list above. They are simply acting in their own common interest, using their own mutual currencies for trade and investment. The effect is an alternative multilateral currency and trading area.
 

Only Trump dared make himself president by saying China was raping America under what the liberal economists were calling mutually advantageous terms of trade. There can be little doubt how Trump would asses Hudson's prescription

I have no doubt that Professor Hudson could explain a lot of things about economics very well, what a pity he is going off of his area of expertise into matter on which his opinions are of dubious value like the manpower issues of modern war and conscription now, rather than in the early seventies. His understanding of economic matters casts a great deal of useful light on geopolitics, but does not dissolve the necessity of looking at the world as not just a hunting preserve for venal bankers, but the home of peoples struggling for security in an eternally uncertain environment of rival states.

Well when the Spartans were at Thermopylae, the pass which they held against the invading Persian hordes, someone came to them and told them in order to frighten them hat when the Persians let go their arrows it darkened the sky and you could not see the sun. Well, said the Spartans, in that case we shall have to fight in the dark. [...]

For the imposition of one’s system upon another. For all the things which nations sought to preserve their freedom or to impose their will upon others.

(TOWARDS 2000, Enoch Powell, Radio Clyde, 1977
 

Replies: @AllowMeAQuestion, @JADE, @Luther Bliss

"Welsh on loans" ?? How can such blatant anti-Welsh racism be tolerated?

Replies: @Luther Bliss, @SolontoCroesus