So people are up in arms that Trump said things because, instead of taking them at face value (the US is overspending for other nations' security), they're reading into it too much.
Meanwhile Hillary and Obama (and the rest of the neo-cons opposing Trump) have been marching us strait towards WWIII with their antagonization of Russia.
As I understand it: to keep Iran from the European gas market, to bolster gulf state allies, to maintain the petrodollar and to weaken Russia.
"...strategic concerns, motivated by fear of expanding Iranian influence, impacted Syria primarily in relation to pipeline geopolitics. In 2009... Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter's North field, contiguous with Iran's South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets - albeit crucially bypassing Russia...
Instead, the following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar...
The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline plan was a "direct slap in the face" to Qatar's plans. No wonder Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in a failed attempt to bribe Russia to switch sides, told President Vladmir Putin that "whatever regime comes after" Assad, it will be "completely" in Saudi Arabia's hands and will "not sign any agreement allowing any Gulf country to transport its gas across Syria to Europe and compete with Russian gas exports", according to diplomatic sources. When Putin refused, the Prince vowed military action."
"Don’t let anyone fool you: As we have detailed since 2013, sectarian strife in Syria has been engineered to provide cover for a war for access to oil and gas, and the power and money that come along with it."
"An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar. Iranian gas from South Pars would be traded in an alternative basket of currencies."
"Many have questioned why Russia became involved in the Syrian war but often overlook the fight over natural gas. As Harvard Professor Mitchell A Orenstein and George Romer wrote last month inForeign Affairs, Russia currently supplies Europe with a quarter of the gas it uses for heating, cooking, fuel and other activities.
In fact 80 per cent of the gas that Russian state-controlled company Gazprom produces is sold to Europe, so maintaining this crucial market is very important. But Europe doesn’t like being so reliant on Russia for fuel and has been trying to reduce its dependence. It’s a move that is supported by the United States as it would weaken Russian influence over Europe."
"In 1989, Qatar and Iran began to develop the South Pars/North Dome field, which is buried 3,000 meters below the floor of the Persian Gulf. With 51 trillion cubic meters of gas and 50 billion cubic meters of liquid condensates, it is the largest natural gas field in the world. Approximately one-third of its riches lie in Iranian waters and two-thirds in Qatari ones.
Sin...
That's a lot of info; thanks! This clarifies how certain evil bastards with lots of media and political pull have an interest, and emphasizes that USA as a whole can only lose by involvement in this mess.
And to protect ISIS! ISIS! Europe is going to be nuked while protecting ISIS. I Wonder how will we read about this in a few decades. Maybe the term "european" will be synomym of idiots.
I saw this article on HN this morning at zero comments, and I really expected to drive in to work and get there with 50+ comments going "Yeah! That's right!" I had this comment all planned out about how impressive it was to get HN to suddenly line up behind the neocon foreign policy establishment by just saying "Boo Trump!" in the right way.
But it seems I've underestimated HN a bit; my compliments and apologies.
I'll salvage the part where I point out this is basically an appeal to authority appealing to authority, and I don't necessarily trust either of the authorities. I do believe that there are some serious negotiations that take place and that there are things hidden from the public that are more serious than they may initially seem (both in the sense of being important and being treated more seriously than anything that makes the news), but when I look out into the world I still see an awful lot of official foreign policy maneuvers that do not seem to be the result of sober adult calculations for the best of humanity but still very much seem to be games of brinkmanship where the players stand to gain and the public and the world... and not to put to fine a point on it, but me and the ones I love, and you and the ones you love... are the ones that will pay if they lose.
I haven't got much rational reason to trust the current foreign policy community and I've got no rational reason to accept Elizier as an authority on the matter. That is not to say either of those things is false... it is to say that I have no reason to accept them as true, and in the case of the foreign policy community, some rational reasons to distrust them. If I am wrong, because it turns out those are both reliable authorities, then the only rational conclusion is that both of these authorities should have tried much harder a long time ago to give me rational reasons to trust them more. Such things happen.
I believe the point was that while it's fine for Trump to say he isn't happy with the current NATO commitments, it's unacceptable for him to say he's not sure what he wants, is open to offers from both sides, and will make a decision last, from a position of power, when the stakes are suitably high.
That is to say the problem is his use of the word "maybe", and following it up with a call for bribes instead of a call for consultation. It's not the breaking of old treaties that offends, it's the part where he refuses to offer his terms.
I wish to retract the bit about calling for offers, as that is not in the transcript. The transcript does underline unpredictability as a core value, however.
I agree that being ambiguous is very, very dangerous, but I think that Putin is smart enough to know that there is a limit that he can push and crossing the NATO line is not a good idea. What we really have to worry about is Putin's replacement. Is he going to be as smart.
What's interesting is that in the UK, Corbyn was just elected (again) the president of the second major party (not currently in power) on a platform of stopping UK's nuclearly-armed submarines (essentially the UK's only nuclear deterrent). Which is similar, yet a bit different (the US can protect itself even without NATO, the UK can't without nuclear submarines), to what Trump's saying, yet (many) people still wanted it!
Most geopolitical analysts agree that the US can't protect itself long term without NATO. The short version is who controls Western Europe controls Europe. Who controls Europe controls Eurasia. Who controls Eurasia controls all of the world besides the Americas. The endgame of an united Eurasia is a failure from the USA national security POV.
'The people in the national security bureaucracy--hell, even me, even though I'm not a national security bureaucrat and have only read a handful of military history books--heard that and thought:
"HOLY SHIT."'
I'm not sure how he's supposed to have his finger on the pulse of the national security bureaucracy when he admits that he's a rank amateur.
Categorizing Trump's remarks from the interview as 'maybe we shouldn't defend NATO' is bollocks. The question from the NYT was this: "If Russia came over the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?"
If one considers the previous ~200 years of Russian Baltic/Eastern European hegemony to have experienced merely a 25 year interruption, perhaps Russia is feeling revanchist, that dangerous superset of expansionist which fuels the latter with patriotic imperative.
It is feeling threatened both by the US's clandestine involvement in the former Soviet states and its attempt to hamstring it's natural gas industry via the proxy war in Syria.
[not a mod] I guess it's just a certain amount of user flags. This submission was flagged/unflagged a few times already (big karma users can vouch for an unflagging of a submission).
27 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 83.2 ms ] threadMeanwhile Hillary and Obama (and the rest of the neo-cons opposing Trump) have been marching us strait towards WWIII with their antagonization of Russia.
"...strategic concerns, motivated by fear of expanding Iranian influence, impacted Syria primarily in relation to pipeline geopolitics. In 2009... Assad refused to sign a proposed agreement with Qatar that would run a pipeline from the latter's North field, contiguous with Iran's South Pars field, through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, with a view to supply European markets - albeit crucially bypassing Russia... Instead, the following year, Assad pursued negotiations for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with Iran, across Iraq to Syria, that would also potentially allow Iran to supply gas to Europe from its South Pars field shared with Qatar... The Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline plan was a "direct slap in the face" to Qatar's plans. No wonder Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, in a failed attempt to bribe Russia to switch sides, told President Vladmir Putin that "whatever regime comes after" Assad, it will be "completely" in Saudi Arabia's hands and will "not sign any agreement allowing any Gulf country to transport its gas across Syria to Europe and compete with Russian gas exports", according to diplomatic sources. When Putin refused, the Prince vowed military action."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/a...
"Don’t let anyone fool you: As we have detailed since 2013, sectarian strife in Syria has been engineered to provide cover for a war for access to oil and gas, and the power and money that come along with it."
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-09-10/competing-gas-pipel...
"An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar. Iranian gas from South Pars would be traded in an alternative basket of currencies."
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/12/08/syria-ultimate-pipeli...
"Many have questioned why Russia became involved in the Syrian war but often overlook the fight over natural gas. As Harvard Professor Mitchell A Orenstein and George Romer wrote last month inForeign Affairs, Russia currently supplies Europe with a quarter of the gas it uses for heating, cooking, fuel and other activities. In fact 80 per cent of the gas that Russian state-controlled company Gazprom produces is sold to Europe, so maintaining this crucial market is very important. But Europe doesn’t like being so reliant on Russia for fuel and has been trying to reduce its dependence. It’s a move that is supported by the United States as it would weaken Russian influence over Europe."
http://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/is-the-fight-over-a...
"In 1989, Qatar and Iran began to develop the South Pars/North Dome field, which is buried 3,000 meters below the floor of the Persian Gulf. With 51 trillion cubic meters of gas and 50 billion cubic meters of liquid condensates, it is the largest natural gas field in the world. Approximately one-third of its riches lie in Iranian waters and two-thirds in Qatari ones. Sin...
But it seems I've underestimated HN a bit; my compliments and apologies.
I'll salvage the part where I point out this is basically an appeal to authority appealing to authority, and I don't necessarily trust either of the authorities. I do believe that there are some serious negotiations that take place and that there are things hidden from the public that are more serious than they may initially seem (both in the sense of being important and being treated more seriously than anything that makes the news), but when I look out into the world I still see an awful lot of official foreign policy maneuvers that do not seem to be the result of sober adult calculations for the best of humanity but still very much seem to be games of brinkmanship where the players stand to gain and the public and the world... and not to put to fine a point on it, but me and the ones I love, and you and the ones you love... are the ones that will pay if they lose.
I haven't got much rational reason to trust the current foreign policy community and I've got no rational reason to accept Elizier as an authority on the matter. That is not to say either of those things is false... it is to say that I have no reason to accept them as true, and in the case of the foreign policy community, some rational reasons to distrust them. If I am wrong, because it turns out those are both reliable authorities, then the only rational conclusion is that both of these authorities should have tried much harder a long time ago to give me rational reasons to trust them more. Such things happen.
That is to say the problem is his use of the word "maybe", and following it up with a call for bribes instead of a call for consultation. It's not the breaking of old treaties that offends, it's the part where he refuses to offer his terms.
No thanks!
I'm not sure how he's supposed to have his finger on the pulse of the national security bureaucracy when he admits that he's a rank amateur.
Categorizing Trump's remarks from the interview as 'maybe we shouldn't defend NATO' is bollocks. The question from the NYT was this: "If Russia came over the border into Estonia or Latvia, Lithuania, places that Americans don’t think about all that often, would you come to their immediate military aid?"
The answer is here: http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/trump-nato/4...
Underlying this rambling nonsense is the assumption that Russia is some sort of world aggressor.
Are you saying that this assumption would be wrong? Is Russia in no way feeling expansionist at present?
It has reason to speak and behave belligerantly.