Khaybar Oasis in Saudi Arabia, where a Jewish tribe lived two thousand years ago and roughly where ministers in the current government of Israel draw the border of Greater Israel.

Saudi Arabia has made its move. As we come to the present, Mohamed bin Salman and his foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan have condemned Israel’s vicious campaign waged against the Gazans at every turn since October last year. The Arab street feels, however, that as the leading Arab nation, whose king is the guardian of the “Two Holy Mosques,” hence supposedly the defender of Muslim and Arab rights, Saudi Arabia could have done much more. Before we get to the recent Saudi move and its impact on the current situation in the Middle East, giving a hitorical account serves to put things in perspective.

Such an account starts with King Faisal, assassinated on March 25, 1975 under mysterious circumstances, after backing Egypt in the 1973 war against Israel with the oil embargo that led to a quadrupling of oil prices at the time, immediately after making the final in a long series of typically fiery speeches about the liberation of Palestine and Al-Aqsa. Faisal’s brothers, who have succeeded him to the throne one after the other, have dramatically toned down Faisal’s rhetoric, but still kept to a formal line that a Palestinian state should be established in peace.

A golden opportunity came to consolidate this idea with Jimmy Carter’s plan for a Middle East Peace Conference. This idea was floated, however, on the heels of an unexpected right-wing political revolution in Israel which brought Likud and its leader Menachem Begin to power in 1977. Begin made life as difficult as possible for Carter, whose idea of having everybody in the region at the same negotiating table was rejected by the Israeli leader. The negotiations turned into an unhappy set of bilateral negotiations between Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. Sadat’s vain, haughty, and fantasising personality led him to fall prey to the manufactured adulation of the American press, and to every trap laid for him by Begin in the grinding negotiations.

The Camp David Accords reached in those negotiations represented a betrayal of Palestinian rights and led to a major unrest amongst Egypt’s élites at all levels and in all corners of society. Sadat arrested them all. Then he was assassinated. The Accords are in fact recognised in authoritative accounts as the origin of the subsequent failure to broker any peace between Palestinians and Israelis. Saudi Arabia cut its ties with Egypt, and King Abdullah launched the much maligned 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, on the heels of the Second Intifada. The initiative demanded the establishment of a Palestinian state on the basis of a two state solution .

When it comes to Saudi Arabia, modernity could be said to have been dumped on an ill-prepared tribal society. Although the term “leading Arab nation” was used above to describe Saudi Arabia, the country is only now beginning to try to define what it means for it to be a nation in its Vision 2030 development plan, as it faces twin threats of declining revenues from fossil fuels, and the savage repercusssions of prospective climate change. It is in fact doing this more with the help of China than the United States, from whose empire it has effectively decoupled in the development sense, albeit not in the financial sense.

In the 1980s Saudi Arabia became the pillar of the financialized Neoliberal Order, providing the cheap funds for the dollar empire which the financial sector in the City of London and Wall Street would use as leverage for worldwide investments and, more frequently, for short-term pump and dump schemes that have destabilised the Global South. Hefty margins earned in this process have helped offset vast Anglo-Saxon trade deficits. As the United States then began the muscular phase of the Neoliberal order, tracking and sanctioning all trade using dollars, Saudi Arabia, like all countries with a financial surplus, increasingly became its prisoner. The American confiscation of $300bn of Russia’s foreign reserves on the tail of manoeuvring Putin into a war in Ukraine, sent shivers down the Saudi spine.

If Saudi Arabia has been found wanting in the current crisis, this must come down to the fact that since Sadat’s rule, Egypt, Palestine’s direct neighbour, has been AWOL from the national cause of the Arabs defined by Nasser. Egypt is the only country in the Middle East to have gone through the kind of social change related to industrialization known in Europe, which as a result allowed it to create its sense of “nation.” The main engine of Arab nationalism thus isn’t running. It’s completely turned off. The country’s seething population is held in check at the barrel of a gun. Egypt, a country of 110m people, has the largest army in the region. Thanks to the discombobulating nature of the régime, the Egyptian army has allowed itself to just sit and watch the Gaza atrocities, literally over a fence. As utterly disconcerting as this is, the current Saudi move should be understood in this overall context.

THE SAUDI MOVE: Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MbS) held a phone conversation with the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian yesterday in which he discussed the desert Kingdom’s initiative for a joint Arab-Islamic “extraordinary” summit that will be discussing Gaza today. The messaging to Iran on the part of MbS was unusual. It involved an expression of ‘hope to raise bilateral relations to the highest levels in all fields.’ In fact, the key to the choices that face world leaders over the next three months lies not in the Arab-Islamic summit gathering in Riyadh to seek to class Israel as a threat to world peace under Chapter 7 of the UN, but in the Saudi-Iranian relations articulated by MbS in his phone call.

The phone call came as the Saudi army chief began a highly unusual visit to Tehran. It is not inconsistent with the “New Diplomacy” that Saudi Arabia has been conducting with Tehran ever since the Chinese-brokered peace deal of March 2023, which MbS had been angling for since 2021. It is, however, a stronger message than usual.

The timing of this latest Saudi messaging is significant from the point of view of the fact that Trump had just appointed Iran hawk Brian Hook as the foreign policy transition team manager, and that Netanyahu having run down a blind alley in Gaza and now also in Lebanon, is seeking to escape domestic pressures by dragging the United States into a war with Iran.

Given that Trump has blocked attempts by Hook to foist aggressive anti-Iran evangelical Mike Pompeo on him, there is room to believe that the new American president has gained some wisdom from his last stint in power. By that I mean, he has learned to see the contradiction between stopping the “forever wars,” which has consistently been his stated foreign policy, and appointing neocons in cabinet posts. I believe the person most likely to have cleared up this contradiction for him is Tucker Carlson, who has long battled to rid the Republican Party of neoconservatives, and who has the president’s ear.

So far, Trump has confirmed Susan Wiles as Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller as Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of immigration and a wide range of domestic issues, and pro-Israel Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador. All of these figures are were selected for their “fierce” personal loyalty to Trump. Mike Waltz, who is a China hawk, will be National Security Advisor and Marco Rubio, a neoconservative, potentially, secretary of state. We still have to wait to understand exactly what this administration will look like as a whole.

The Saudi statement reaffirming the Iran relationship thus comes at a crucial decision-making time for Trump in which sycophantic phone calls from Netanyahu have multiplied, pushing the ‘Iranian threat.’

Netanyahu and his régime is a creation of the Adelsons, and the dead Casino magnate’s widow has now given Trump over $100m, just as her husband did last time round. Netanyahu has, however, completely voided Israel to keep himself in power. The Israeli armed forces were blindsided and their reputation destroyed on 7^th October 2023, but Netanyahu then set about actually causing their physical destruction by starting the now year-long ground invasion of Gaza, followed by the more recent attempt at a ground invasion of Lebanon.

The losses in men and equipment have been astonishing, on which Israeli reports have been nowhere near correct. Nowhere near. Western media reports carry the lies of the Israeli media without question. It is only to be hoped that Bill Burns (still) at the CIA is giving Trump the real numbers.

Eventually, when the dust settles, people will be shocked by the facts. Defence minister Yoav Gallant was going ahead with the plan to force ultra-orthodox Jews to serve in the military, as demanded in a recent Israeli Supreme Court judgement. He said that 7,000 recruits for the army were urgently needed. When as a result of this decision, Netanyahu’s coalition looked like it was going to fall apart and his government fall, he fired Gallant. If the army still needs these recruits, although it is not getting them, it is also rapidly losing even more men as Hezbollah bombs Israeli supply lines, restocking facilities and barracks on a daily basis, even as the resistance movement repels all Israel’s attempts at incursion into Lebanon.

But there is worse. If Israel has build a country around an army on a policy of maintaining ‘escalation dominance’ over the region, i.e. scaring the neighbourhood to death, so that no-one dares take any military action against Israel, this strategy has been blown apart during this conflict.

For instance, just yesterday and today, Israeli special forces attacks against Beit Lahia and Jabalia in North Gaza have met with unparalleled resistance by the Qassam and Sarayah al-Quds Brigades, even as food, water and medicines have been prohibited from entering for weeks now, as part of the genocidal “General’s Plan.” The Israeli army is defeated yet again by insurgents after fourteen months of trying.

But that is the least of it. There is Lebanon’s drone dominance, which gave us the high profile shoot-up of Netanyahu’s bedroom three weeks ago, and its missile capacity, which today saw the firing of 200 guided missiles onto Israeli military targets ranging from Haifa to Safad across the entire of Galilee. There is also Iran’s missile capacity which was demonstrated in the very destructive “True Promise Two” attack.

All these factors have continued to add to the shredding of Israel’s regional military deterrent: an unprecedent situation for Israel and the region.

There was also a development which shocked the Israeli military establishment. The lack of success of Israel’s attempt at responding to the second Iranian attack involved the activation of what appeared to be Iran’s enigmatic anti-stealth air defence. This event led Netanyahu’s strategic affairs minister, Ron Dermer, to Putin’s door to see if he could get any answers on what might have happened. [Note that Netanyahu started all the tit-for-tat missile attacks when, unprovoked, he bombed Iran’s Embassy in Damascus and assassinated Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, while attending the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Masoud Pezeshkian].

Even though the last Israeli “response” was unsuccessful, such as it was, involving just a few drones and quadcopters attacking an old Iranian military installation, it was still recognised by Iran as an attack on its sovereignty. It reserves its right to a third, potentially even more devastating, retaliation.  

As expected this has turned the long-term security outlook for Israel on its head and seriously affected the economy. Israeli businesses are streaming out of the country and they don’t look like they are coming back. Many countries have now set up special tax-friendly schemes specifically to welcome and profit from this new cash-rich migrant population. With the loss of deterrent, unless Israel suddenly and consistently makes peace its overarching programme, which would necessarily have include a Palestinian state, no business will feel safe in Israel, and no settlers will feel safe reoccupying abandoned settlements on the borders with Lebanon and Gaza. Judging by the comments of Bezalel Smotrich on Netanyahu’s extreme right cabinet, the plan is for Israel (read: the United States) to invade the whole Middle East so that there is no-one left to threaten Israel.

The problem for Israel is in fact redoubled by this overt and brazen dismissal of human rights, which has led to an acceleration in the foreign divestment from the country.

But the choice that Netanyahu is putting to Trump is binary: either his genocidal régime falls or there is a war with Iran to keep Netanyahu in power. Trump has been paid by Miriam Adelson, Netanhayu’s sponsor. So now it’s over to Trump.

MbS seems to have staked his ground in this matter, however. If Trump wants to be able once again to show charts to the American people from the White House about how much money he is making out of Saudi Arabia for the American nation, he had better keep the peace in the Gulf. Miriam Adelson doesn’t have that kind of money. Still, even without that, a war with Iran is geopolitically absurd for the United States to contemplate. There is no need to rehearse the devastating economic damage it would do to the region, to the world and to the US economy.

This is such a desperate ploy on Netanyahu’s part that in of itself, the ploy speaks volumes about the motives. It is all dressed up in apocalyptic and maniacal religious talk of Netanyahu as the successor of Moses, but the purpose is simply to keep him in power, keep inquiries into misconduct at bay and indefinitely delay criminal law suits against him.

All the dead, the mutilated, the abused, the sick, the injured amongst Palestinians and now the dead, injured and displaced in Lebanon, are about keeping a thoroughly corrupt system of government in place. Israel’s desire to be a democratic state for Jews alone, has necessarily condemned it to the status of an apartheid state.

What has become all too clear, apart from the ease with which the border between maintaining a apartheid régime and committing genocide can be crossed, is the inevitable way apartheid and injustice spreads corruption directly into and throughout the ruling order. Netanyahu is a butcher on a mass scale, who started out as a criminal and a thief trying to save his skin. Along with that, the fact that Israeli politics could not come up with an alternative to Netanyahu, incapacitated as the polity is by its viciousness and without any credible opposition to bring Netanyahu to account, is an indictment of the whole project of the Zionist concept of a state.

It was always going to be a Mickey Mouse arrangement from the inception of the Israeli state that was railroaded into existence by Harry Truman in 1948. It is now collapsing around the last thug standing. Let’s see what decision Trump, or the Trump administration now comes to, now that hardliner Waltz joins the team and that, potentially at this moment, neoconservative Rubio will do as well. Anything is possible it seems these days as the empire feels the pressure of decay and decline.

However, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian is still holding out an olive branch to the United States. He was elected as a “reformist” by the the Iranian public, and is offering to negotiate over the country’s nuclear power programme within the parameters established Obama in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Trump, as we know, actually on Mike Pompeo’s advice, subsequently pulled out of the JCPOA the last time round.

The last time Pezeshkian held out an olive branch to the United States during the 22-25 September General Assembly of the United Nations (pictured above), the Biden régime ordered the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah during the proceedings. Nasrallah was waging a limited war to encourage Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza, but had at the time agreed a cease fire. Mightily upset at this turn of events, Pezeshkian returned home and approved the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC)’s True Promise Two missile attack, which he had originally been unwilling to authorise. Now Lebanon, itself devastated by Israeli air raids, is now in turn devastating Israel, slowly and incrementally.

GENOCIDE JOE: We also have another Micky Mouse régime in the sequential Democratic administrations that have made a mockery of the whole notion of justice for the people of America since the “New Democrats” came to power under Bill Clinton. Punctuated by Republican administrations, they defined the post-1990 era. The American empire expanded on their watch, doing little of the people of the world, with corporate profits rising to record levels, doing little for the American people. It has all ended in war and violent convulsion, and in a revolting coda in the puking up of Joe Biden’s genocide. 

The democrats were rightly crushed in this election, as the Muslim vote in Michigan spoke. Where last time Biden scored 88% in Michigan, this time Harris scored 22%. As previously reported, Biden was already haemorrhaging the black vote nationally because of Gaza and, although Harris replaced him, her messaging was too obviously cynical, vacillating between insisting on Israel’s “right to defend itself” and condemning the Gaza genocide on the other, depending on where you lived (assuming with usual Democrat condescension that voters had no access to national news). The Hispanic vote also turned against Harris. People forget that Spanish speakers listen to what Gustavo Petro of Colombia, Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela and other Latin American leaders have to say about American imperialism and Israel’s nefarious participation in the anticommunist death squads that had so much to do with the devastation of their original societies.

But the most spectacular piece of Democratic arrogance was Bill Clinton’s defence of the Gaza genocide in an astonishing speech given in Michigan. It was he who brought the “New Democrats” of the third way, in the 1990s, along with the first expansion of NATO. He also slashed welfare, exported jobs (NAFTA, WTO), and legislated for the wholesale financialization (bank mergers) that was supposed to compensate the public for gutting the economy. Economist Raghuram Rajan famously parodied this policy by quoting the royal ordinance: ‘let them eat credit.’ The whole thing collapsed under Bush Jr. in 2008, as we all know. Then the banking cartel that Clinton had created with his friend Robert Rubin at Treasury, brought Barak Obama to power as the marketing tool that would quell discontent with coolness and save them from going to prison. The bail outs and “quantitative easing” that followed generated the wall of money which destroyed the way capitalism normally works and created the digital and e-commerce giants that now suck most of the profit out of the world economy. Endless credit serendipitously turned them into the kind of stratospheric monopolies that can do this on a monstrous scale, burying the economy in the process.

Hillary Clinton was supposed to be crowned Queen in 2017 on a wave of donations from the new billionaire class unleashed on politics by the Citizen’s United 2010 Supreme Court Ruling. But Trump won with the money from high-frequency trader, Robert Mercer and his ultraright-wing daughter Rebekah, and with help from the media. The populist Tea Party movement emerged from the financial crash. It was angry at Obama for being useless but also for being black. Breitbart guru Steve Bannon helped Trump turn it into the MAGA movement. The Democrats would have stood a good chance against Trump, however, if Hillary Clinton hadn’t taken control and rigged the primaries in her favour against the party’s best candidate, Bernie Sanders. Clinton then fabricated evidence blaming Russia for her defeat that was recycled through former British secret service MI6 officer Christopher Steele to produce the “Trump-Russia dossier” feeding a media frenzy of historic proportions, eventually to be shamed in a four part article in the authoritative Columbia Journalism Review.

TRUMP’S RETURN: Trump is now back after having been vilified by the Democrats, indeed because he was vilified and mistreated by the Department of Justice in a clearly politicized attack over supposedly classified documents, in a case that came to nought.

This is not really the beginning of a new era, but the tail end of an old one. It is a reckoning. Trump is a critic of American decline. This time the “Other” is China, exploding into prominence after Clinton and Rubin had forced through its membership of the WTO in 2001 against massive protests. Last time it was Japan as top nation that Trump railed against in his Art of the Deal. But Japan had been conquered territory all along and ultimately had to do what it was told. An enforced Yen revaluation drove Japan into deep recession for well over a decade.

China is not conquered territory, nor was Japan’s 1970s and 80s dominance in any way comparable. China’s share of world gross production is three times the US share, six times Japan’s, and nine times Germany’s, but because China is its own best customer, its share of world exports is 20%. The US is massively exposed to Chinese inputs. All major manufacturers in the world source at least 2% of their industrial inputs from China, making the “decoupling” from China that Biden launched in his legislative programme, well-nigh impossible. Given Waltz’s appointment China is clearly in Trump’s crosshairs.

So Trump won in this election because the Democrats betrayed their progressive and multi-ethnic base in favour the corporations and lobbyists that became their paymasters. As one Kenyan-American commented: ‘I don’t want to have to climb over a pile of bodies to vote for Harris.’ For many, the genocide, even in its early days, when only one tenth of the current casualties had been racked-up, edged out domestic concerns such as the economy, inflation and crime.

But the Democrats also did have to pay the political price of the rise in the cost of living caused by the corporate gouging that Biden’s legislative programme brought with it, bringing Trump in with three and half million more votes than Harris. After all, whatever the American system legislates for, ultimately always benefits corporations, never the public at large.

Trump promises tax cuts, rises in tariffs to bring jobs home, and ending forever wars, as his back-of-envelope plan. But to “make America great again,” is presumably about prioritising the public interest over the special interests of corporations that dominate the America domestic space through its empire. The political system doesn’t exist in the United States that will enable the kind of restructuring necessary to bring back a pre-neoliberal environment. This can only be forced on it through international competition, which is why China’s emergence as a challenger has to be welcomed, whatever the Trump administration thinks.

As things stand, the Biden administration could not reshore and increase manufacturing at home by attracting US corporations. They remain wedded to China. What happened instead was that Germany, which after all is conquered territory like Japan, was cannibalised. Its cheap gas supplies from Russia were cut off by blowing them up, forcing German industry to migrate to the United States, and leaving whoever remained behind to use US LNG at triple the price of Russian gas. This is why we have a war in Ukraine, which Trump wants to end, but which is ending of its own accord anyway. Trump won’t have much to do there, unlike in the Middle East.

Trump will likely find it difficult to make the changes he really wants, even if he begins to shed the illusions about tax cuts that have dogged Americans ever since Reagan’s “economics of joy” and the Laffer Curve confidence trick (Stein 1984: 345-6). Certainly his last tax cuts suffered from this illusion in spadefuls, and he now actually wants to do the same thing again.

US administrations always end up waging war, raping the planet and abusing its peoples. The internal house can never be brought to order. It is too easy just to kick the can down the road by using imperial money, and so forcibly borrowing from the rest of the world. In order to do that the value of imperial money has to be maintained. US corporations must thus be allowed to dominate the planet, rake in vast tax-free profits and surreptitiously recycle them into US Treasuries through various tax havens like Holland, Luxemburg, Ireland, and so on, as well as the usual tropical islands, where corporate executives go to retire. But this also involves war and destabilisation to ensure the repatriation of imperial dollars to the metropole from the Global South, at the cost of local development, and also so that defence contractors can make outsize profits, repatriated into US debt, whether in the form of private or corporate money.

But what Netanyahu is demanding from Trump is a regional war in the Middle East, and on that path lies the destruction of imperial money.

MbS, by contrast, is cooperating with an Iranian régime which has elected a “reformist” as president, who is going out of his way to try to open dialogue with the United States. They are jointly offering Trump a different path: a peaceful and profitable one. Which path will Trump chose?

As this site has repeatedly said, we have come to the point at which the revolution in warfare does narrow US options. The trouble with Netanyahu’s offer is that what was supposed to be the American road to supreme naked power – the F-35 Stealth fighter – has suddenly and enigmatically tripped on Iranian soil. Also Iran’s new hypersonics mean that American interests and bases all over the Middle East are within minutes of flying time from destruction. Pentagon capitalism doesn’t have a missile defence answer to hypersonics (see the postscript on this subject at the end of this article). [The problem is that if Trump appoints a neocon cabinet, ideology will not allow these military facts to play the role that they should in political decision-making.]

But what is unavoidable is the revolution in international relations that has taken place. The “New Diplomacy” pursued by MbS with Masoud Pezeshkian (as he did previously with Ibrahim Raisi) has dissipated the Sunni-Shi’a divide, which until recently been the cornerstone of US/Israeli military aggression in the Middle East. Now that alliances have changed, organizing a US war against Iran is clearly politically more fraught.

Trump it seems is sending his daughter Tiffany’s Lebanese father-in-law, Masaad Boulos, as an emissary to Lebanon and Iran. Does this bode well? This certainly is a change from Jared Kushner. But if Trump does go down the path opened up by MbS and Pezeshkian, that will mean… the end of Netanyahu. The question is… can he? For that is the binary choice which this very man has organised to trap the next president of the United States. Everything else, the end of the genocide and the Lebanon war, follows from this choice.

[Ref: Prt 15 Post-Script 28; info@globalshiffft.com; © 2024]