The headline in the December 28 Financial Times was modest, even if it did appear on the front page: "US rivals launch Mideast war games." As the newspaper put it, "Russia, China, and Iran launched their first joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman yesterday, throwing down a direct challenge to U.S. influence in the Middle East.".
We might pause over those words, "a direct challenge to U.S. influence." The article quoted Iranian admiral Gholamreza Tahani as saying, "The most important achievement of these drills ... is the message that the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be isolated." Tahani added, "These exercises show that relations between Iran, Russia, and China have a reached a new high level while this trend will continue in the coming years."
The U.S. response to this development was muted; the FT quoted an unnamed State Department official saying that Iran should "Think twice" about conducting joint naval exercises, warning that such actions "Should concern all nations with an interest in safeguarding freedom of navigation in the region." These words won't exactly strike fear into the Iranians; especially since, as the article recalls, the Iranians shot down a U.S. drone in June and seized a British-flagged oil tanker allegedly in their territorial waters in July-and the U.S. didn't do anything in response.
So maybe that's why there's new pressure on U.S. forces currently in Iraq, which, of course, borders Iran.
It's long been understood that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had the inadvertent effect of opening the door to Iranian influence in that country, and it could well have been the hand of Iran that fired the rocket that killed a U.S. contractor on December 27.
So we can see another worldwide struggle in the making; call it, as of now, Cold War II. So what can the U.S. do? Beyond the obvious-no more gratuitous foreign wars that fritter away resources and rally the locals against us-we might take a page from our success in Cold War I. In that first cold war, we found that two Eurasian giants, Russia and China were allied against us.
Can Donald Trump and his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, figure out a way to split the new axis of Russia, China, and Iran? Most experts are skeptical about Trump's ability to do anything but tweet, but then, most of those same experts have been consistently wrong.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-new-cold-war-with-eurasia/
We might pause over those words, "a direct challenge to U.S. influence." The article quoted Iranian admiral Gholamreza Tahani as saying, "The most important achievement of these drills ... is the message that the Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be isolated." Tahani added, "These exercises show that relations between Iran, Russia, and China have a reached a new high level while this trend will continue in the coming years."
The U.S. response to this development was muted; the FT quoted an unnamed State Department official saying that Iran should "Think twice" about conducting joint naval exercises, warning that such actions "Should concern all nations with an interest in safeguarding freedom of navigation in the region." These words won't exactly strike fear into the Iranians; especially since, as the article recalls, the Iranians shot down a U.S. drone in June and seized a British-flagged oil tanker allegedly in their territorial waters in July-and the U.S. didn't do anything in response.
So maybe that's why there's new pressure on U.S. forces currently in Iraq, which, of course, borders Iran.
It's long been understood that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had the inadvertent effect of opening the door to Iranian influence in that country, and it could well have been the hand of Iran that fired the rocket that killed a U.S. contractor on December 27.
So we can see another worldwide struggle in the making; call it, as of now, Cold War II. So what can the U.S. do? Beyond the obvious-no more gratuitous foreign wars that fritter away resources and rally the locals against us-we might take a page from our success in Cold War I. In that first cold war, we found that two Eurasian giants, Russia and China were allied against us.
Can Donald Trump and his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, figure out a way to split the new axis of Russia, China, and Iran? Most experts are skeptical about Trump's ability to do anything but tweet, but then, most of those same experts have been consistently wrong.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/a-new-cold-war-with-eurasia/
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