Geopolitical, economic transitions are nothing but painful

By: Martin Love

TEHRAN, Aug. 25 (MNA) – Who knows what the real numbers are, but it’s been estimated that since the end of World War II the US has been responsible, one way or another, for the demise of some 25 million souls across the planet – many of them innocent, who were victimized by the overweening insistence that the US grab or maintain military or economic hegemony by damaging potential rivals.

There is nothing at all novel about this, for if one looks at history over the past centuries, there have been numerous governments and powers that sought to dominate their era and even, on occasion, managed to do some good. There are some peoples, polities and governments that quite literally have deserved reduction because on balance they have proven to be more destructive than constructive for humanity as a whole. Nazi Germany may be the prime example during the past century of a country that deserved the world’s enmity.

The US has long tried to fit the Islamic Republic into this category of polities that allegedly don’t deserve to survive for the SOLE REASON, in fact, that Iran refuses to ally itself with US and Zionist and Saudi attempts to control the Middle East and reap the benefits of its vast wealth. And even if the Islamic Republic, like any other country, sports aspects that can legitimately be criticized, Iran stacks up as a far more benign country today than severely undemocratic Saudi Arabia and Israel, the US’s chief “allies” in the region, despite all the Western and Zionist propaganda to the contrary.

I have, in any event, been depressed witnessing the US and Western failures of judgement, particularly with regard to Iran, and I have read that the suffering and confusion is immense within Iran, but at the same time I have tried to point out along the way that more than half the world’s population is moving within a painful transition, with leadership from Russia and China, to a new and much more promising paradigm than what the US has been trying to bully impose on the Mideast and Asia and even Europe. The US, in effect, may have been setting a trap for itself in recent decades that will eventually limit its impositions on other countries and force more cooperation.

Consider, for example, that a new bloc may be forming. It includes Russia, China, Iran and Turkey for starters, and may include India and Pakistan, too. Pakistan’s new leader, Imran Khan, has lately expressed disgust with his country’s allowing the US to have its way. The BRICS may be turning into the BRICS plus. This is good reason for Iranians to look ahead and try to understand that they, too, face a brighter future than they have known for decades.

Turkey has been offered membership in the “BRICS plus” and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization for starters, and Erdogan has allegedly shown interest in both. Thus, Turkey may leave NATO and cast its fate not with the West, but with Asian partners. Trade deals are on the table, too, and trade will increasingly be settled in local currencies, not the US dollar.

It’s all about the integration of Eurasia. Iran is already reportedly preparing to engage, by the start of 2020, into a comprehensive free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union, and neighbor Turkey could well follow. 

Turkey, like Iran, is in the US doghouse because it plans to deploy Russian missile defense systems, has claimed it will continue to buy Iranian oil despite the sanctions, has apparently given up Western obsession with the deposition of Assad in Syria and will likely complete a gas pipeline across Turkey from Russia. (Why would Europe bother with far costlier LNG exports from the US?) And meanwhile, even one of the Persian Gulf states, Qatar, has offered a $15 billion loan to Turkey and restored better relations with Iran that includes energy collaboration in the shared South Pars gas field in the gulf, the largest on the planet.

All this can only benefit Iran eventually provided the US and Saudis and Zionists realize that further military aggressions in the Mideast will only deepen their worldwide isolation. In the US there is, for example, growing horror about the Saudi and UAE war on Yemen and the humanitarian crisis there with calls for the US by some in the US Congress to halt whatever support related to the war that the US military has been rendering to the Saudis.

I know for a fact that many “average” Americans are beginning to get a honest picture of just how relatively backward and corrupted and undemocratic the Saudis are. The possible beheading this month of a lovely Shia woman and human rights activist who lived in the Qatif oasis, a Shia enclave within largely Sunni Arabia, who simply expressed some opposition to the Saudi regime, has had an impact on transforming perceptions and I can say with certainty that in reading comments by many Americans attached to news articles about the Middle East that there is a strong revulsion against the Saudis, the Zionists, the Neocons in Washington and, in general, US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Iranians ought not to think most Americans with any knowledge of the Mideast do not rail against the Trump Administration. Some new war in the region sparked by the US or the Zionists will mark the end of the Trump presidency and the credibility of those who have supported its foreign policies, not to mention that the US would sink further into unsustainable financial debt.