President Xi Jinping plans to visit Saudi Arabia soon. In the video above, Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris of The Duran speculate that Prince Mohammad bin Salman may be planning to join the BRICS alliance.
If so, this could be a big threat to U.S. power—a much bigger threat than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The BRICS alliance consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Its ultimate purpose is to create a new reserve currency that would be a substitute for the U.S. dollar.
The fact that most world trade is conducted in dollars, which the U.S. government has the power to print, gives the United States enormous leverage over the world economy, including the power to impose economic sanctions.
If this changed, the United States would lose its financial power as well as much of its ability to finance the world’s largest military budget.
Saudi Arabia back in 1973 agreed, in return for U.S. military protection, to price its oil in dollars, to deposit its dollars in U.S. and allied countries’ banks, and to buy U.S. military equipment. As the leading oil exporter, Saudi Arabia has a lot of power in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose purpose is to control the price and production of the world’s oil
The Biden Administration earlier this year supported the Group of Seven’s plan to cap the price of Russian oil imports. This must have miffed the Saudis and other OPEC members, because, if successful, the plan would have infringed on the Saudis’ and OPEC’s power to set would oil prices.
Later President Biden asked Prince Mohammad bin Salman to increase oil production to help keep the price down and offset the loss of Russian oil due to economic sanctions. Bin Salman turned Biden down.
Christoforou and Mercouris think Bin Salman is taking a big risk. They expect the U.S. to try to destabilize and overthrow the Saudi regime. The U.S. is already trying to stir up trouble between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Even a direct attack or invasion are not impossible, and Mercouris said Bin Salman needs to be sure of his personal security.
Algeria also has applied to join BRICS. Other countries are expressing interest.
In 2023, Saudi Arabia may push Ukraine off the front pages.
Or maybe not. I don’t have the power to read minds or predict the future.
But I don’t think President Xi would be planning to visit Saudi Arabia unless he had something in mind. And I notice that Saudi Arabia is not the only country who leaders are losing both respect for. and fear of, the United States.
Pepe Escobar, reporting last week on the Russia-hosted Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, says the world’s center of economic gravity is shifting to Asia, with China as leader and Russia and India as its main partners.
I have my doubts that the Chinese-led new order will be as utopian as Escobar predicts, but the Chinese magnetic pole is a more powerful attractor than the U.S. pole.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, led by China, now includes China, Russia, the Central Asian republics, India, Pakistan and Iran, while 11 more nations, including Turkey, seeking to join.
The reason is not hard to see. China promises benefits to its economic partners; the NATO alliance demands sacrifices. As the old saying goes, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz advocates an expanded, militarized European Union with Germany as the dominant force.
It would include all of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, plus Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. It would have a common foreign policy, consisting of a permanent Cold War against Russia, and make decisions by majority vote, not by consensus as now.
Germany dominates the smaller Eastern European countries economically. The further east the European Union goes, the greater the influence of Germany, the less the influence of France and the stronger the possibility of a war policy being adopted over French objections.
Kevin Drum, writing for Mother Jones, defended President Obama against charges of being too supportive of the Saudi Arabian royal family.
Obama, like all US presidents, was heavily constrained by our foreign policy establishment, but in the end he did provide Saudi Arabia with less support than any previous president—and the Saudis made no secret of their intense dislike of Obama over this.
I think [Glenn] Greenwald underrates just how hard this is in real life, and how much credit Obama deserves for taking even baby steps against the virtually unanimous opposition of the entire US government.
Notice what Drum is saying here. The elected President of the United States is one thing. The unelected actual government of the United States is another. The first can influence, but not control, the second.
I think this is all too true, like Senator Schumer’s warning to Donald Trump to not mess with the intelligence agencies. What does this say about American democracy?
The name of the center is ironic, because Saudi Arabia is the center for extremist ideology in the Arab world.
Saudi Arabia pays for missionaries to spread Wahabism (or Salafism), a highly intolerant version of Islam. Wahabists believe that Shiites and other Sunnis are not true Muslims.
Hassan Rouhani
King Salman and his son, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, are waging a bombing campaign against Shiite villagers in Yemen, is stepping up aid to rebels in Syria and is trying to organize a Sunni Arab military alliance against Iran.
Voters in Iran, meanwhile, have re-elected President Hassan Rouhani, the moderate reformer who negotiated the nuclear deal with the USA.
Rouhani is more democratic and peaceable than the hereditary Saudi rulers. He has won honest and contested elections. The range of choices in Iranian elections is limited because the ayatollahs vet candidates. But you could say the same about U.S. elections, except that our candidates are vetted by big-money donors.
The Saudis seek regime change in Syria and Yemen; Rouhani seeks increased trade and investment. In Middle East geopolitics, the Saudi monarchy is the aggressor, the Iranian clerical regime is the one on the defensive.
The young new ruler of Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is trying to organize an alliance of Sunni Muslim nations against Shiite Iran.
And President Donald Trump is expected to endorse an anti-Iranian “Arab NATO” during his forthcoming visit to Saudi Arabia.
This is a terrible idea. It doesn’t benefit Americans and it risks a war that would be disastrous for both Americans and people in the Middle East.
Saudi Arabia is an enormously wealthy nation, but it is thinly populated and militarily weak. It depends on the United States for its defense. In return, the Saudis buy billions of dollars in armaments from American companies and pump oil in sufficient quantities to keep world oil prices low.
So the United States since the 1970s has sided with Saudi Arabia and also Israel against their geopolitical rivals in the region. Once Saudi Arabia’s chief rival and threat was Iraq. Now it is Iran.
This has nothing to do with making Americans safe from terrorism, and everything to do with promoting the strategic and economic interests of Saudi Arabia.
The United States, back to the times of Henry Kissinger and maybe Franklin Roosevelt, has based its Middle East policy on support for the Saudi Arabian monarchy.
Washington has treated the Saudi monarchy’s enemies (except for Israel, and maybe Israel is not that much of an enemy) as its own enemies—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the ayatollahs in Iran, the Assad regime in Syria and even the Shiite community in Yemen.
In return, the Saudi monarchs have kept oil prices under control, charged for oil in dollars and deposited those dollars in U.S. banks, and bought billions of dollars with of weapons from American aerospace and defense contractors.
But Sarah Chayes and Alex de Waal, writing in The Atlantic, warn that the Saudi Arabian monarchy, like the rule of the Shah in Iran, cannot go on forever. And like the Shah, the Saudi royal family is ripe to be overthrown by militant, anti-American religious zealots.
The Saudi government has appeased these zealots by encouraging them to go wage jihads in foreign lands. The best result, from the Saudi perspective, is that they die fighting and never come home. The next best result is that their identities are known and they can be tracked.
The fundamental fallacy which is committed by almost everyone is this: “A and B hate each other, therefore one is good and the other is bad.”==Bertrand Russell, in 1956
Execution in Saudi Arabia
One thing to remember about the escalating Saudi-Iran conflict is that the two sides are more alike than they are different. Both are countries in which you can be executed for expressing forbidden political or religious opinions.
The Iranian government has denounced Saudi Arabia for its execution of the dissident Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, along with 46 other opponents of the regime. But the Iranian government in fact executes more people in any given year than the Saudi government.
Execution in Iran
The world death penalty leader is China, followed by Iran as No. 2 and Saudi Arabia as No. 3.
The Saudi government executes people by be-headings, which is gruesome but, if done by a skilled headsman, is relatively quick, even compared to U.S. electrocutions and chemical injections.
The main Iranian method of execution is by slow strangulation, which can take as long as 20 minutes.
Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, wrote the following for Al Jazeera America.
The escalating tension between Saudi Arabia and Iran is the story of a declining state desperately seeking to reverse the balance of power shifting in favor of its rising rival.
History teaches us that it is not rising states that tend to be reckless, but declining powers. Rising states have time on their side. They can afford to be patient: They know that they will be stronger tomorrow and, as a result, will be better off postponing any potential confrontation with rivals.
Declining states suffer from the opposite condition: Growing weaker over time, they know that time is not on their side; their power and influence is slipping out of their hands.
So they have a double interest in an early crisis: First, their prospects of success in any confrontation will diminish the longer they wait, and second, because of the illusion that a crisis may be their last chance to change the trajectory of their regional influence and their prospects vis-à-vis rivals.
When their rivals — who have the opposite relationship with time — seek to deescalate and avoid any confrontation, declining states feel they are left with no choice but to instigate a crisis.
Saudi Arabia is exhibiting the psychology of a state that risks losing its dominant position and whose losing hand is growing weaker and weaker. … …
The observations I quoted would be just as true if Parsi had substituted “the USA” for Saudi Arabia and “China” for Iran. Since the Vietnam era, American political leaders have entered into conflicts just to prove that we Americans were strong and willing to fight, while the Chinese leaders have quietly made their country stronger.
I don’t know what the future holds for Iran or China, but I have no doubt that we Americans need to change direction or we will lose what power we have.
Saudi Arabia is heating up the Sunni-Shiite conflict in the Middle East. I think the U.S. government should think long and hard about letting the Saudis draw Americans further into it.
The Saudi Arabian government recently executed 47 opponents of the regime, including radical Sunni jihadists and the Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr.
I think this means that the Saudi government feels threatened by the radical Sunni jihadist movements, and wants to redirect their rage outward by stepping up the conflict with Iran and with Shiites generally.
Either Sunni jihadists are killed fighting in Syria and other places, or Saudi Arabia’s enemies—Iran and its ally Syria—are weakened.
Dark green indicates Shia predominance
The Sunni-Shiite conflict in the Middle East involved families who’ve lived side-by-side in peace for decades. Why are they at each others’ throats now?
I thinks that it is because the Sunnis and Shiites are used as proxies in a struggle for political power among Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Iran, Turkey and Israel.
And this is overlaid by an economic struggle for control of oil and gas resources and pipeline routes. It so happens that Shiites, although a minority in the Muslim world as a whole, are a majority in the oil and gas regions.
And all this has been made worse by the murderous and ineffective intervention of my own country, the United States.
But the tragic conflict also is kept going by the need of the Saudi royal family to appease Wahhabi jihadist clerics.
The Syrian situation reminds me of a remark by Adam Smith in (I think) The Wealth of Nations — about how masterminds who think of themselves as master chess players, using other people like pieces on a chessboard, will find the people they think they are manipulating are actually playing their own game.
The aims of the U.S. government in the Middle East are, in no particular order, to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, to counter the growing power of Iran and to destroy the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Da’esh).
The bitter experience of the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions means that the American people will not tolerate a large-scale intervention with ground troops, so American leaders, including the principal Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, look for pawns to carry out U.S. purposes.
Here is a rundown on these pawns and the games they are playing.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirate governments, all predominantly Sunni Arab nations, fear the rise of Shiite Iran and Shiite power in Iraq much more than they do Sunni Arab ISIS or al Qaeda. To the extent they fear ISIS and al Qaeda, it is more as an internal threat, and they are happy to see their local rebels go off to fight and maybe die for ISIS. The Saudi government doesn’t crack down on individuals who contribute to ISIS because they reflect the beliefs of Wahabism (aks Salafism), the harsh version of Sunni Islam that rules Saudi Arabia.
The Kurds in northern Syria and Iraq are fighting ISIS effectively, but they are fighting to defend themselves and their goal of an independent Kurdistan, to be carved out of the existing territory of Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, not as part of any overall “war on terror”. They aren’t going to give up that goal just because it is inconvenient to the USA.
The Turkish government desires the overthrow of the Assad government in Syria and the suppression of Kurdish nationalism more than suppression of ISIS. Oil from ISIS-controlled territory enters Turkey, and money and arms go from Turkey to ISIS. Turkish politicians talk of the glories of the Ottoman Empire and of the unity of ethnic Turks across Asia.
The Iraqi government desires to prevent breakaway movements, whether ISIS, other Sunni Arab fighters or Kurds.
The Sunni Arab militias and tribal leaders in Iraq blame the United States for overthrowing Saddam Hussein and setting up an Iraqi government dominated by Shiite Arabs, so they’re not willing to be U.S. proxies in a campaign against ISIS.
The Shiite Arab militias in Iraq hate ISIS, but their leaders distrust the United States and won’t work with Americans.
The “moderate Arab” rebels in Syria primarily desire to get rid of Bashar al-Assad and talk about fighting ISIS primarily to obtain U.S. weapons – many of which wind up in the hands of ISIS, al-Nusra and like groups.
The Iranian government desires to support Shiite Muslims against all enemies, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey or ISIS, and to defend Syria and also Hezbollah, which represents the Shiite Muslims in Lebanon.
The Syrian government is an enemy of ISIS because ISIS is an existential threat to its existence. But the Assad regime regards the other Syrian rebels and the Kurdish separatists as equally threatening
This leaves Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Putin justifiably fears the influence of ISIS and other jihadist terrorists on the large Muslim population in the Caucasus and other regions of the Russian Federation. He also wants to defend Russia’s Syrian ally and keep Russia’s naval station in Syria. But for him, the war against ISIS is a war of self-defense, not merely a means of extending Russian influence.
If fighting ISIS is the top U.S. priority, then the U.S. government should find a way to cooperate with Russia against ISIS. If the U.S. government is unwilling to cooperate with Russia against ISIS, then fighting ISIS is not the top U.S. priority.
The Sunni-Shiite war is a tragedy, but it would burn itself out if Saudi Arabia and Iran were not using the two Islamic factions are proxies in their struggle for power in the Middle East.
The lineup is Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and the Shiite militias on one side, and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, Turkey and the Sunni militias on the other.
The U.S. government has inflamed the conflict further by taking the side of Saudi Arabia. This has undermined our “war on terror,” because Al Qaeda and ISIS are among the Saudi-backed Sunni militias warring against Syria.
Now Russia is befriending Iran and giving military assistance to Syria, and the Shiite-dominated government of Iraq is thinking of calling in Russian help. All this is in the name of fighting ISIS, which is a good thing, not a bad thing. But if Russia is lining up permanently with Iran’s proxies against the U.S.-backed Saudi proxies, this is quite another thing.
A U.S.-Russian proxy conflict would increase human suffering in the Middle East, and be of no benefit to the American or Russian peoples It would be dangerous for the world.. Washington should open negotiations with Moscow to keep the conflict from escalating further.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy which punishes criminals by means of public be-headings, crucifixions, amputations and whippings.
Crimes include being a victim of rape, criticism of the Saudi ruling family and criticism of the Wahabi / Salafi sect of Islam, an extremist and radical form of Islam which is associated with terrorism and which the Saudi government is spreading throughout the world.
Saudi diplomats are in line to head the United Nations human rights commission.
All the American Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Barack Obama have pledged themselves to the defense of the Saudi royal family.
The reason: Access to Saudi oil is considered vital to American national security.
The need for Saudi oil was shown during the 1973 oil embargo, when Saudi Arabia and six other Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States in protest of U.S. support of Israel during the Six Day War.
President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger soon persuaded the Saudi royal family that Communism was a greater threat than Israel. Today Saudi and Israeli policy are aligned against Iran and Syria.
There is a resistance movement against the Saudi monarchy. What will Washington do when and if it succeeds?
The documentary by Abby Martin of teleSUR is an excellent summary of the Saudi situation and the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
These are links from my expatriate e-mail pen pal Jack and his friend Marty.
∞∞∞
The Palaces of Memory by Stuart Freedman, review of a coffee table book of photographs of worker-owned coffee houses in India, by Peter Nitsch for The Cutting Edge of Creativity.
But why are oil prices falling? It is because Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is committed to pumping oil in large volume instead of shutting back in order to prop up the price.
What gives the Saudis so much leverage is that their production costs are low, and they can make a profit at a lower price than can Russians, Venezuelans or others.
That’s why the U.S. supports Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, and why President Obama recently reassured King Salman that the U.S. will continue its cold war against Iran despite the agreement with Iran over sanctions and nuclear facilities inspections.
My question is whether it is in the U.S. interest to wage cold war against either Iran or Russia. There is no moral issue here. The Iranian and Russian regimes are bad enough, but everything bad you can truthfully say about them goes double or triple or maybe 10 times for Saudi Arabia.
Bernie Sanders is, from my point of view, very good on economic issues, pretty good on civil rights and civil liberties issues and not good on war and foreign policy issues.
He is a better champion of the interests of the American voting public than any other Democratic candidate, or any Republican. He is not much of a champion of harmless people overseas who get in the way of U.S. military operations.
He recently said that he’d continue President Obama’s drone killing policy, but in a kinder, gentler manner in which fewer people were killed. He also has called for a more active military role for Saudi Arabia.
What I take this to mean is that he would continue the Bush-Obama policy of global military intervention, but in a way that minimizes American casualties.
The issue with drone killings is not the technology. Drones can be highly useful in conducting military operations, and are preferable to dropping napalm bombs.
Drone killings, and Special Operations assassinations, are a Constitutional issue. It is whether a President of the United States has the authority to sign a death warrant for anybody anywhere in the world, based on his sole authority without any accountability.
The secondary issue is that, as applied to poor, primitive, brown-skinned people in remote areas, the policy is to kill people who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is death by racial profiling.
Israel and Saudi Arabia are not friends and do not even have diplomatic relations, but they work in parallel when it is in their national interest to do so.
Why should not the governments of the United States and Iran work together against our common enemies, the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) and Al Qaeda?
This would make more sense than trying to fight ISIS and Al Qaeda while making common cause with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates against the main enemies of ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Tom Jansson cartoon for The Cagle Post
Maybe this is what President Obama had in mind. Maybe this is already U.S. policy. If so, good!
Americans criticize the Iranian government for giving weapons and other help to armed factions in other countries, but that is no different from what the Saudis, the Gulf emirates, Israel and the United States itself does. Iran’s current intervention in Iraq and Syria is at the invitation of the governments of those countries.
I think the violent conflicts in the Middle East, including the Sunni-Shiite conflict, would die down if Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, the USA and other countries agreed among themselves to stop giving weapons, supplies and money to the various battling groups.
Unfortunately that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. But I have to say the such an agreement is more likely than other nations agreeing to be neutral while the US government continues conducting bombing campaigns and arming its own proxies.
Iran and the United States are neither friends nor enemies. They are countries with their own interests, which sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict.
LINKS
Rethinking Iran by Kevin Schwartz and Arjun Singh Sethi for Counterpunch.
Adam Curtis is a documentary filmmaker for the BBC who makes connections that other people don’t see.
In his new documentary, Bitter Lake, he shows how Afghanistan has been a focal point of a three-way struggle among Anglo-American capitalism, Soviet Communism and Saudi Arabia’s radical extremist Wahhabist Islam.
While Soviet Communism has collapsed and Anglo-American capitalism is in crisis, Wahhabism is spreading and growing stronger.
Curtis doesn’t offer a policy for dealing with Wahhabism, but his documentary shows that mere firepower is not the answer, nor is providing money and weapons to prop up corrupt warlords and governments. The First Rule of Holes applies: When you’re in one, stop digging.
The embedded YouTube video above is a history teacher’s abridgment of Bitter Lake which covers all the main points. Click on Bitter Lakeif you want to see the full version or if the embedded video doesn’t work.
The U.S. government should beware of being drawn into the conflict in Yemen.
The fight among Shiite Houthi militia, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the government of Yemen are part of a wider Middle East conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Source: Zero Hedge. Click to enlage.
That religious conflict is overlaid with a conflict between two alliances of Middle East powers—Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Shiite militias on the one hand, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, the Sunni militias in Iraq and Syria and Turkey, with Israel as a silent partner, on the other.
Washington sides with Saudi Arabia and Israel. I have come to realize that sanctions against Iran were never about the imaginary danger of nuclear weapons, but to keep Iran weak. Now Iran has found an ally in Putin’s Russia.
This is a highly dangerous situation. National governments are keeping the religious wars going by sending arms and money to the different religious factions. But religious wars are not controllable. Being drawn in to these wars serves no national interest of the United States, does not benefit the people of the region and puts the American people at risk of being drawn into a wider war.
The USA has had a strange relationship with Iran during the past 35 years. While waging economic war against Iran, the U.S. government strengthened Iran’s position by defeating its main enemies, the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. A defeat of ISIS would further strengthen Iran.
By agreeing to end sanctions, the Obama administration appeared to accept Iran as a major power in the Middle East. Now Obama is sending warships to checkmate Iranian power.
I’m by no means an expert on the religious and cultural geography of the Middle East, but I don’t see this ending well.
A liberal blogger, Raif Badawi, has been sentenced by a Saudi Arabian court to 1,000 lashes, plus 10 years in prison, for “insulting Islam”. He’ll receive 50 lashes a week for 20 weeks. He got his first installment last Friday.
His crime was to critique interpretations of Islam by the intolerant Wahabi (aka Salafi) sect, which is the established religion in the Saudi
The Saudi ruling family lives in fear of terrorist Muslim extremists such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. Yet the thinking of these movements is rooted in Wahabism, and the Saudi government spends hundreds of millions of dollars to spread its ideas through the Muslim world.
A few more thoughts about the Charlie Hebdo massacre. If French don’t want their citizens of Arab origin to embrace radical Islam, they shouldn’t use Muslim as a synonym for Arab, any more than they would use Catholic as a synonym for native-born Frenchman or Frenchwoman.
Also, the Charlie Hebdo massacre has conveniently superseded the Senate torture report in the public mind. The roots of extremist Islamic terrorism are also in Abu Ghraib and the graves of the more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians who died in the U.S. invasion.
This is not an excuse for terrorism or a plea for tolerance of terrorism. It is a recognition of cause and effect.
Patrick Smith explained why the real winner in the new U.S.-Russian cold war is China.
Saudi Arabia is driving down the world price of oil, now about $80 a barrel, by putting oil on the market. The main point, Smith wrote, is that the Saudis can make a profit so long as oil is priced at more than $30 a barrel, but the Russians, whose oil is harder to get, need a price of $104 a barrel.
The Saudis oppose Russia for supporting Syria and Iran, which are obstacles to Saudi influence in the Middle East. Other oil-producing nations suffer collateral damage. Venezuela is currently going through a political and economic crisis due to the fall in the price of oil.
Russia had helped the United States in its negotiations with Iran, by agreeing to reprocess uranium for the Iranians, which would remove the possibility that the reprocessing might be used to make Iranian nuclear weapons. U.S.-Iranian negotiations also are collateral damage.
All this benefits China, which gets to buy Russian oil and gas at a bargain price. China is expanding its influence in Asia offering attractive trade deals to nations that don’t want to be drawn into U.S. conflicts.
Rick Perlstein, author of the newly-published The Invisible Bridge: the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, said the roots of present-day politics go back to the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon governed based on short-term political gain, and candidate Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to believe in the myths we tell ourselves.
Democrats meanwhile turned away from working people and New Deal liberalism and embraced an illusory non-partisanship. This created a politics in which big-business conservatives can pose as populists and the true representatives of working people.
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