A New Dawn for Diplomacy

The Rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran

Letters from Vienna #135

A New Dawn for Diplomacy

The Rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran

There is a direct link between what is happening in the Ukraine, the financial markets, global trade and the recent rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran[1]. This might seem surprising at first, especially given the fact that Saudi Arabia and Iran conducted a proxy-war in Iraq not so long ago. Iran won, something the Americans couldn’t forgive the chief architect: Qasem Soleimani, which is why they lured him into a trap, asked him to help negotiate peace, guaranteed his safety and then murdered him in treacherous fashion. But to begin this story one has to start at the beginning, which was over a century ago.

When discussing the Balfour Declaration Engdahl writes: “But more relevant than the evident hypocrisy in the Balfour – Rothschild exchange was the British Great Game, which lay behind the Balfour note. It is not insignificant that the geographical location for the new British-sponsored Jewish homeland lay in one of the most strategic areas along the main artery of the enlarged post-1914 British Empire, in a sensitive position along the route to India as well as in relation to the newly won Arab petroleum lands of Ottoman Turkey. The settlement of a Jewish minority under British protectorate in Palestine, argued Balfour and others in London, would give London strategic possibilities of enormous importance. It was, to say the least, a cynical ploy on the part of Balfour and his circle.”[2]

He continues: “The idea of a Jewish-dominated Palestine, beholden to England for its tenuous survival, surrounded by a balkanized group of squabbling Arab states, formed part of this group’s (Grey, Toynbee, Wells & Milner) concept of a new British Empire. Mackinder, commenting at the time of the Versailles peace conference, described his influential group’s vision of the role a British protectorate over Palestine would play in the Great Game of British advance toward a post-1918 global empire, to be shaped around a British-defined and dominated League of Nations.”

“Mackinder described how the more far-thinking of the British establishment viewed their Palestine project in 1919:”

“If the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, be central to the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt.”

“He noted that the Suez Canal carries the rich traffic between the Indies and Europe to within striking distance of an army based on Palestine, and already the trunk railway is being built through the coastal plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern with the Northern Heartland.”

“Commenting on the special significance of the thinking behind his friend Balfour’s 1917 proposal to Lord Rothschild, Mackinder noted:”

“The Jewish national seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of the war.”[3]

Interestingly enough one of the most important outcomes of the Iraq War in 2003 was the reestablishment of the strategically vital Mosul-Haifa pipeline. Was this the reason for the war in the first place? Possibly…

Gary Vogler, a former senior oil consultant for US Forces-Iraq, wrote in May 2018: “The oil agenda I discovered and experienced was to supply Iraq oil to Israel. The players were the neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, their favorite Iraqi – Dr. Ahmed Chalabi and the Israeli government. One of the motives was because Israel was paying a huge premium for its oil imports and this premium had just started in the late1990s. The agenda called for the reopening of the old Kirkuk to Haifa pipeline and its significant expansion.”[4]

It’s safe to say that Israel was created on account of both the Kirkuk – Haifa pipeline as well as its strategic importance while the success of the “Israel project” was predicated from the very start on the weakness of its neighbors. In fact, this weakness has been a leitmotiv, an ever-recurring theme of the last century. Thus, Oded Yinon wrote in 1982:

“The Arab Moslem world…is not the major strategic problem which we (Israelis) shall face in the Eighties, despite the fact that it carries the main threat against Israel, due to its growing military might. This world, with its ethnic minorities, its factions and internal crises, which is astonishingly self-destructive, as we can see in Lebanon, in non-Arab Iran and now also in Syria, is unable to deal successfully with its fundamental problems and does not therefore constitute a real threat against the State of Israel in the long run, but only in the short run where its immediate military power has great import.”

“In the long run, this world will be unable to exist within its present framework in the areas around us without having to go through genuine revolutionary changes. The Moslem Arab World is built like a temporary house of cards put together by foreigners (France and Britain in the Nineteen Twenties), without the wishes and desires of the inhabitants having been taken into account. It was arbitrarily divided into 19 states, all made of combinations of minorities and ethnic groups which are hostile to one another, so that every Arab Moslem state nowadays faces ethnic social destruction from within, and in some a civil war is already raging.”[5]

The weakness of the “Middle Eastern states” has not only been the subject of much discussion[6] [7] [8] but has also been acted upon. Thus, General Clark let the cat out of the bag when he mentioned the “seven countries in five years”[9] strategy. The final country on the list, and in many respects the most important prize, precisely because it isn’t a “composite state” but rather an ancient, rich and unified one: is Iran. And the reason for the strategy is not too difficult to find: the growing economic and strategic rivalry between the Anglo-American Empire and China, which has found its expression in the “New Silk Road” (about which Pepe Escobar has written exhaustively) on the one hand and the “tilt to Asia” on the other. As John Pilger noted not long ago: a war with China has long been on the cards.[10]

The current diplomatic revolution is a consequence of the weakening of the Petro-dollar (whose very existence has now been called into question), a weakening which cost the lives of both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, both of whom tried to undermine it, and the reality of Chinese industrial strength; China, Iran and Saudi-Arabia need one another like never before. Most importantly Saudi-Arabia has shifted away from ever closer ties with Israel, partly because Israel is tainted by intimate ties to the Anglo-American Empire.

Israel must be regarded as the creation of the Anglo-American Empire and its (real and imaginary) needs have trumped those of nearly every other state on this planet. These (real and imaginary) needs have caused much injustice and suffering in the world (the ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Palestinians, the creation by the Deep State of “Arab” and “Islamic” terrorism (Gladio B), the wars of the Bush era (the seven countries in five years strategy) and last but not least all these never-ending wars have caused untold suffering in Israel itself, a modern-day Sparta, which has never known peace. War leaves, even for the victor, appalling wounds as traces, which seldom if ever heal, which is why it is an evil that needs to be rooted out.

The fundamental shift in economic realities, the transfer of much of the world’s manufacturing base to China, is the root cause of the new-found love between Saudi-Arabia and Iran. Equally telling is that both have a common foe: the West, and fear of reckless military adventure and possible nuclear war, is clearly growing.  

The fact that Saudi Arabia and Iran have restored relations means that any immediate hopes the “Neo-Cons” in America and the extremists in Israel still had of attacking Iran have been dashed. This is well and truly a diplomatic revolution and gives one hope of peace in the Middle East.

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[1]

[2] p.55 A Century of War F. William Engdahl

[3] pp.56-57 A Century of War F. William Engdahl

[4] If Americans Knew Blog, Gary Vogler, May 7, 2018

[5] A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties, Oded Yinon

[6] https://www.voltairenet.org/article171927.html

[7] https://www.palestinechronicle.com/lebanonisation-of-iraq/

[8] https://www.siasat.pk/threads/the-new-thirty-year-war-in-the-middle-east-american-led-policy-of-chaos.371494/

[9]

[10]