Why is America So Deeply Involved in the Middle East? Energy? Geography?
What is the importance of the Middle East for the West? Is it energy resources to fuel the industrialized West? Or the key trade and shipping routes passing through the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal used by ships to sail from Asia to Europe and North America?
Why is oil, the most traded commodity, priced and traded in US Dollars? Does oil trade help maintain the US Dollar as the international trade and reserve currency and solidify US control of the global financial system, giving the US a very powerful tool to control the world?
What is the history of West's involvement in the Middle East? Can it be traced back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in early 20th century?
When did the United States take over where Britain and France left off? Cold War? Iranian leader Mosaddegh's overthrow by CIA? Suez Crisis?
Energy revolution is in full swing in Silicon Valley with widespread use of solar panels, electric vehicles and storage batteries. Like other technologies emerging from Silicon Valley, this energy revolution will spread to the rest of the United States and the world in the next decades. How will it change US policy and posture in the Middle East?
Does the US involvement in the Middle East pose a threat to Pakistan? Is Pakistan next after Iran? Will Pakistan's nuclear weapons help keep Pakistan secure? What economic and other powerful tools does the United States have to put pressure on Pakistan or any other country?
ALKS host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with Misbah Azam and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com).
https://youtu.be/DQIUue1tb4A
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
South Asia Investor Review
Muslims in Silicon Valley
US Dollar as International Trade/Reserve Currency
Soleimani Was the Hardest of the Hardliner
Sykes-Picot Agreement in Middle East
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Putin Challenges American Exceptionalism
Remittances to Pakistan Up 21X Since Year 2000
Modi's Kashmir Blunder
Godfather Metaphor for Uncle Sam
Clean Energy Revolution
Destructive Power of Drone Swarm on Saudi Oil Installation
US Dominates List of World's Top Universities
Indian RAW Agent Kulbhushan Jhadav Used Chabahar
Iran-Saudi Conflict
Pakistan's Nuclear Program
Iran Nuclear Deal
1971 India-Pakistan War
Chabahar vs Gwadar Ports
Did America Contribute to the Rise of ISIS?
Riaz Haq's YouTube Channel
PakAlumni Social Network
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| Map of Greater Middle East (Morocco to Pakistan) |
Why is oil, the most traded commodity, priced and traded in US Dollars? Does oil trade help maintain the US Dollar as the international trade and reserve currency and solidify US control of the global financial system, giving the US a very powerful tool to control the world?
What is the history of West's involvement in the Middle East? Can it be traced back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in early 20th century?
When did the United States take over where Britain and France left off? Cold War? Iranian leader Mosaddegh's overthrow by CIA? Suez Crisis?
Energy revolution is in full swing in Silicon Valley with widespread use of solar panels, electric vehicles and storage batteries. Like other technologies emerging from Silicon Valley, this energy revolution will spread to the rest of the United States and the world in the next decades. How will it change US policy and posture in the Middle East?
Does the US involvement in the Middle East pose a threat to Pakistan? Is Pakistan next after Iran? Will Pakistan's nuclear weapons help keep Pakistan secure? What economic and other powerful tools does the United States have to put pressure on Pakistan or any other country?
ALKS host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with Misbah Azam and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com).
https://youtu.be/DQIUue1tb4A
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
South Asia Investor Review
Muslims in Silicon Valley
US Dollar as International Trade/Reserve Currency
Soleimani Was the Hardest of the Hardliner
Sykes-Picot Agreement in Middle East
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Putin Challenges American Exceptionalism
Remittances to Pakistan Up 21X Since Year 2000
Modi's Kashmir Blunder
Godfather Metaphor for Uncle Sam
Clean Energy Revolution
Destructive Power of Drone Swarm on Saudi Oil Installation
US Dominates List of World's Top Universities
Indian RAW Agent Kulbhushan Jhadav Used Chabahar
Iran-Saudi Conflict
Pakistan's Nuclear Program
Iran Nuclear Deal
1971 India-Pakistan War
Chabahar vs Gwadar Ports
Did America Contribute to the Rise of ISIS?
Riaz Haq's YouTube Channel
PakAlumni Social Network
Comments
The blueprint set out by the treaty had a lasting legacy, in part prefiguring the borders and political futures of countries like Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. But it’s not remembered in the West as much as, say, the infamous clandestine Sykes-Picot pact, because of what followed in Turkey. Nationalists in the Ottoman ranks, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, rejected SĆØvres and waged a series of wars that cast out the French, Greeks and Italians from Anatolia and compelled the Europeans to settle on new terms with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which defined Turkey’s modern borders. Nevertheless, the memory of colonial Western schemes to deprive Turkey of sovereignty — and the armed struggle needed to foil them — still stalks the Turkish political imagination.
“SĆØvres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some scholars have called the ‘SĆØvres syndrome,’ ” wrote Nicholas Danforth, a historian of 20th-century Turkey, in a 2015 piece marking the 95th anniversary of the treaty’s signing. “SĆØvres certainly plays a role in Turkey’s sensitivity over Kurdish separatism, as well as the belief that the Armenian genocide — widely used by European diplomats to justify their plans for Anatolia in 1920 — was always an anti-Turkish conspiracy rather than a matter of historical truth.”
The treaty looms even larger now. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has a penchant for posturing over historic symbols, began meeting toward the end of last year with the leader of the U.N.-backed government in Libya in a former palace of Ottoman sultans in Istanbul. In the aftermath of one of these sessions, Erdogan explicitly linked his government’s newly emboldened foreign policy to a moment of historical reckoning. “Thanks to this military and energy cooperation, we overturned the Treaty of SĆØvres,” he said, hailing his country’s willingness to once more project power across the Mediterranean.
In the months since, Turkish drones and military support have helped the Tripoli-based government turn the tide of battle in Libya’s messy civil war. Erdogan, thanks to Libyan backing, has secured maritime exploration and potential oil drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean that put Turkey into a new tussle with other countries in the region, including Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and France. The new Turkish claims clash with those of Greece and Cyprus and flared long-running tensions among these troubled neighbors.
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As Cold War bonds fade, older realities are coming to the fore. When Macron toured Beirut after the explosion last week, promising to help deliver a new political status quo for an infuriated Lebanese public, it was a reminder of the potency still of the French legacy in its former protectorate — and a welcome exercise of soft power for a president more tormented at home.
American intelligence agencies are scrutinizing efforts by Saudi Arabia to build up its ability to produce nuclear fuel that could put the kingdom on a path to developing nuclear weapons.
Spy agencies in recent weeks circulated a classified analysis about the efforts underway inside Saudi Arabia, working with China, to build industrial capacity to produce nuclear fuel. The analysis has raised alarms that there might be secret Saudi-Chinese efforts to process raw uranium into a form that could later be enriched into weapons fuel, according to American officials.
As part of the study, they have identified a newly completed structure near a solar-panel production area near Riyadh, the Saudi capital, that some government analysts and outside experts suspect could be one of a number of undeclared nuclear sites.
American officials said that the Saudi efforts were still in an early stage, and that intelligence analysts had yet to draw firm conclusions about some of the sites under scrutiny. Even if the kingdom has decided to pursue a military nuclear program, they said, it would be years before it could have the ability to produce a single nuclear warhead.
Saudi officials have made no secret of their determination to keep pace with Iran, which has accelerated since President Trump abandoned the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged in 2018 that his kingdom would try to develop or acquire nuclear weapons if Iran continued its work toward a bomb.
Last week, the House Intelligence Committee, led by Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, included a provision in the intelligence budget authorization bill requiring the administration to submit a report about Saudi efforts since 2015 to develop a nuclear program, a clear indication that the committee suspects that some undeclared nuclear activity is going on.
The report, the provision stated, should include an assessment of “the state of nuclear cooperation between Saudi Arabia and any other country other than the United States, such as the People’s Republic of China or the Russian Federation.”
An article in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday said that Western officials were concerned about a different facility in Saudi Arabia, in the country’s northwest desert. The Journal said it was part of a program with the Chinese to extract uranium yellowcake from uranium ore. That is a necessary first step in the process of obtaining uranium for later enrichment, either for use in a civilian nuclear reactor or, enriched to much higher levels, a nuclear weapon.
1,
This thread is From a WikiLeaks cable dated January 24, 2007,
documenting a meeting between Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and now President of the UAE, and R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs at
Show more
Warfare Analysis
@warfareanalysis
·
Oct 31
2, MBZ views on free elections: “Middle East is not California”
"MBZ: if we want to make peace." In "The Middle East," he insisted, "is not
California." In the post 9/11 world "in any Muslim country you will
see the same result." While members of the U.S. Congress and
Show more
Warfare Analysis
@warfareanalysis
·
Oct 31
3, MBZ views on Quran schools: MBZ calls Quran schools “some Taliban schools”
“Correcting the situation required education, according to MbZ, a process that will take 25 to 50 years of focused effort to turn around deeply-rooted cultural phenomena.
In the western part of
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Warfare Analysis
4, MBZ: Muslims should never have free elections, We should worry about 3 Islamic counties: Egypt šŖš¬, Saudi Arabia šøš¦ , and Pakistan šµš°.
“MbZ countered that, "free elections in the Middle East" could eventually mean that the U.S. would "have to find
somewhere else to get 17 million barrels (of oil) a day."
In Iraq, MbZ said, elections had produced "a disaster."
As for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and pressure from jihadists inspired by Iran,
he said he was not worried about the UAE, which could hold out for a
long time: "The Iranians will have a hard time coming here, but we
will lose Arab countries like Lebanon and Palestine.
Thank God for Hosni Mubarak (described as a family friend of the Al Nahyan).
If Egypt has free elections, they will elect the Muslim Brothers."
There were three large Islamic countries to worry about, according to
MbZ: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.”
https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1984515658084704702
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Warfare Analysis
@warfareanalysis
6, MBZ calls Muslim scholars “some holy man in Mecca”
“Referring to the UAE situation, MbZ opined that of the 60,000
soldier UAE armed forces and its loyalties, some 50 to 80% would
respond to a call of "some holy man in Mekkah."
He repeatedly alluded to being "stoned" by his own citizens if he pushed some
subjects too openly.
Acknowledging the prodding by the U.S. to hold elections, MbZ said the process would take at least 20 years and that focus should be on the next generation.
"When I travel to Saudi
Arabia, I meet with 80-85 year old Saudi leaders who never learned of
the internet until they were 70. There is a big gap in Saudi
Arabia." MbZ said the UAE is addressing the educational aspect of
the problem by privatizing government schools with the aim of
privatizing 25% in 5 years so that there will eventually be 0%
"talebani Quran schools."”
https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1984515669862293546