Before explaining why we believe that the U.S. should power balance, not fight, in Mideast’s civil wars, let’s review the present situation “on the ground.”
The Washington Post reports: “President Trump’s assertive new strategy toward Iran is already colliding with the reality of Tehran’s vastly expanded influence in the Middle East as a result of the Islamic State war….But the strategy offers no specifics for how to confront Iran’s pervasive presence on the ground in Iraq, Syria and beyond, raising questions about how easy it will be to push back against Iranian influence without triggering new conflicts.”
Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, agrees: “[T]he United States is still dangerously lacking a comprehensive strategy toward the rest of the Middle East in all of its complexity….If Baghdad cannot guarantee the Kurdish people in Iraq the security, freedom and opportunities they desire, and if the United States is forced to choose between Iranian-backed militias and our longstanding Kurdish partners, I choose the Kurds…. The Middle East is vitally important to the future of international security and the global economy…If we keep sleepwalking…, we could wake up in the near future and find that American influence has been pushed out of one of the most important parts of the world….That is why we need to stick with our true friends, like the Kurds.”
But “By orchestrating the taking of Kirkuk, Iran’s rulers are testing Mr. Trump. They are betting that, despite the tough talk, he won’t have the stomach to do what is necessary to frustrate their neo-imperialist ambitions. In the end, they think he will attempt to appease and accommodate them as did President Obama. Mr. Trump reinforced that conviction when, in response to the fighting in Kirkuk, he said his administration was ‘not taking sides, but we don’t like the fact that they’re clashing,’” Clifford May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, wrote recently.
The U.S. Congress meanwhile has been moving a “flurry of bills” — with bipartisan support — to counter Iran.
Ledeen: Regime change needed, and faster please
But not all U.S. policy experts think that a policy of countering expanding Iranian influence — in Syria, for example — is realistic or aligned with U.S. national interests.
The United States’ leading expert on Iran, Michael Ledeen, endorses the Trump administration’s Iran policy as “a good start. But it’s only that. The best part of the ‘new’ Iran policy launched by the president is the crackdown on the Revolutionary Guards, incorporated in Treasury’s comprehensive sanctions….[But] if you want an enduring solution to the Iran nuclear program, you must work for regime change in Tehran, and while Trump effectively laid out the rationale for such a policy, he did not call for it. Instead, he called for harsh measures against the regime, not its removal.”
Raging civil war zone
The present Mideast map is a product of arbitrary borders drawn up between the English and French in May 1916, the Sykes-Picot Agreement. The purpose of the Agreement was to divvy up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. With the Cold War over and the U.S. retreating from its post Cold War attempts to play global policeman, the artificial Sykes-Picot boundaries are collapsing. The Mideast is now a raging civil war zone.
U.S. strategic role: power balancer
What is the U.S. national interest in all this? Certainly not to become a combat participant in this civil war but only a power balancer. If Iran, in alliance with Russia and with growing influence in socialist Venezuela, succeeds in becoming the hegemonic power in the Mideast, this Iranian-led alliance would have a near monopoly of the world’s proven oil reserves:
Countries With The Largest Proven Oil Reserves
| Rank | Country | Barrels (bbl) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Venezuela | 298,400,000,000 |
| 2 | Saudi Arabia | 268,300,000,000 |
| 3 | Canada | 171,000,000,000 |
| 4 | Iran | 157,800,000,000 |
| 5 | Iraq | 144,200,000,000 |
| 6 | Kuwait | 104,000,000,000 |
| 7 | Russia | 103,200,000,000 |
| 8 | United Arab Emirates | 97,800,000,000 |
| 9 | Libya | 48,360,000,000 |
| 10 | Nigeria | 37,070,000,000 |
| 11 | United States | 36,520,000,000 |
| 12 | Kazakhstan | 30,000,000,000 |
| 13 | Qatar | 25,240,000,000 |
Accordingly, it is in the U.S. national interest to counter the threat of Iranian-Russian domination of the Mideast by strengthening its natural opponents — Israel, the Kurds, and the Saudis and their Gulf State allies — by arms sales, diplomacy, and overt and covert support for Iranian regime change.
Balfour Declaration Centennial and the birth of Israel
November 2nd marks the 100th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration — which gave the worldwide Zionist movement the hope of creating a national state in Palestine. That hope eventuated in the post-WWII state of Israel.
The Declaration is named for the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, the 1st Earl of Balfour, who was desperate in late 1917 to obtain Jewish allies in the U.S. and Russia to buoy up Britain’s stalled war effort against Germany. Shortly after the Declaration and in the ensuing decades Britain did all it could to walk back the Declaration — which had deeply antagonized its Arab allies.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be traveling to London for the November 2nd commemoration banquet (paywall) that will be held near Buckingham Palace. The U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May will also attend.
Israel’s leading strategy columnist, Caroline Glick, convincingly explains how the Balfour Declaration’s dodgy support for a “national homeland” was seized upon by Zionists to create, over British opposition, the national state of Israel.
Israel’s ambassador to the U.K., Mark Regev, a Jewish survivor of Nazi Germany, has given a moving tribute to the WWII RAF Bomber Command airmen who saved his life.
Click here to view yesterday’s Founders Broadsheet, which explains why the U.S. doesn’t have the missile shield that could protect it from attacks by North Korea, China, or Russia
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