Joe Quinn spoke with PressTV today about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Washington, DC. Distinctly low-key compared with French president Emmanuel Macron’s 3-day love-fest with US president Donald Trump, the US-German summit merely underscored the isolationist approach Trump has taken with respect to its ‘closest partners’.

The US government imposed import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum in March, but it provided a temporary exemption until May 1 for the EU. Judging by both Merkel and Trump’s statements to the media following their meeting, Trump is probably not going to make the exemption permanent. In short, ‘Europe must pay!

Coupled with the EU leaders’ failure to turn Trump back from reneging on the JCPOA Iran deal, this week’s meeting with the leaders of Europe’s two biggest countries serves to underscore a ‘parting of ways’ within the Atlantic alliance.

Behind all the cuddles and bisoux for the cameras, what was French boy-president Macron’s grande visite to the US of A all about? What the US and France can do to retain Western dominance of the Middle East, of course!

Trump is warning Iran not to “restart its nuclear program” while (again) yammering on about the 2015 JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) multinational agreement on Iranian nuclear development being “an insane, terrible deal that should have never been made.”

Europe’s very own ‘stable genius’ meanwhile spoke out of both sides of his mouth in an attempt to tame Trump’s tantrum while not aggravating the Iranians, telling US officials the Iran deal can be “revisited” but should not be torn up. Iranian president Rouhani is meanwhile warning both of them about “grave consequences” if the 2015 deal is torpedoed.

What does all this bluff-and-bluster mean? And what is Trump’s beef with the JCPOA anyway? Needless to say, it has almost nothing to do with the ‘proliferation of nuclear weapons’…

Joe Quinn yesterday spoke with PressTV, explaining that European countries have a lot more business ventures in the pipeline – no pun intended – with Iran than the US does, something that the corporate owners of the US apparently didn’t bank on when they signed off on the deal in July 2015.

In addition, back then, they all assumed that Syrian president Assad was a dead man walking, and it did indeed, at that point, look that way. With the ‘Shia Crescent’ from Lebanon to Iran broken in two by knocking out Iran’s key ally in Damascus, the Americans, Israelis and Saudis were confident that they could control Iran’s economic development – up to and including dictating the terms of gas/oil and infrastructure deals. They may even have been in the planning stages of next knocking out the Iranian government by spreading proxy war from ‘Islamic State’ across the Iranian border.

But then, three months after the conclusion of the JCPOA, the Russian military – at Assad’s invitation – intervened in Syria, beat ISIS senseless, rescued Assad, strengthened inter-regional cooperation between Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus and Hezbollah, and thereby turned the Iran deal – from the perspective of America and its regional allies – into “the worst deal, ever” because now Iran could strengthen ties with Europe through economic partnership while thumbing its nose at the US because Russia had its back.

This was the worst possible development for the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia, which is why they desperately want to ‘fix’ it, while they still can.

But can they? Again we see just how royally Russia screwed them all by intervening in Syria on September 30th, 2015…

I spoke with PressTV in the immediate aftermath of the F.UK.US. airstrikes against Syria late last week.

I describe Israel as the “quiet elephant in the room” and noted that despite US influence over events in Syria being largely trumped by Russia in recent years, the tripartite alliance of France, the UK and US are continuing military operations at the behest of Israel, which is hysterical about encroaching Iranian influence across the Middle East, and what that entails for Israeli regional hegemony.

But it’s a losing game. All four countries – along with their regional allies – are losing their historical positions in the Middle East, and are desperately trying to do something to stop that new reality from manifesting. At the same time, they are apparently not so desperate that they will risk a ‘hot war’ with Russia.

In the process of ‘projecting their strength’, they have exposed how weak they have become militarily, and their avalanche of lies in the media about how ‘successful’ the event was for them indicates that they are facing an existential war, not with Russia and China, but with reality itself. Who do you think is going to win in the end?

Throughout the 20th century, the US ability to project power and dominate global geopolitics was, to a large extent, based on the general perception that the US was the most powerful military force in the world. In most cases, the mere threat of this military prowess was enough to ‘get things done’ the American, or Western, way. The maintenance of the widespread belief in US military preeminence is therefore extremely important to the US establishment, and any event that might expose a different reality is to be avoided at all costs. When US/Western military might is physically demonstrated, a careful propaganda campaign and media management of the outcome is necessary, up to and including outright lies about the performance of the military tech used. No surprise there. Read More →

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By now anyone with an opinion on the Skripal poisoning has already decided if they believe the official narrative or not. Still, the event and the ongoing media coverage around it presents an opportunity to understand more than we might think. Read More →

The anglo-American establishment hates Putin because he took the broken pieces of a Soviet Union that was supposed to be one more Western vassal state and fashioned them into a modern, sovereign Russian Federation capable of pushing back against the Western vision of a unipolar world, a Pax Americana at gunpoint. Read More →

As you may have noticed from the title, I’m cutting to the chase on this one. Context is everything these days when attempting to understand major geopolitical events. Read More →

One more school shooting in the USA, one more round of inane squabbling, finger pointing and calls to ‘ban guns’ from one side and ‘deal with the mental health problem’ from the other. As is true for most polemic issues hotly debated by ignorant human beings, the truth probably lies somewhere in between, or somewhere else. Read More →

For those who don’t like reading (see article below), I say pretty much the same thing in my interview today with Press TV on the downing of an Israeli F-16 by (ahem…) ‘Syrian’ air defenses.