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Conrad Black: Middle East is on the brink of peace, thanks to Trump

The Russo-China-Iran alliance is being destroyed

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Even after President Trump’s televised address on Wednesday night, the obtuseness and antagonism of the Napoleonic military geniuses in much of the world’s media think that the Iran War could be a quagmire and stalemate without a formal Iranian surrender. Trump repeated that his objectives are the permanent end of Iran’s nuclear military ambitions and of its support of terrorism in much of the world. In furtherance of that he will strike them “very hard” for another month or so. This can only mean that he will, if necessary use amphibious or airborne forces to take over the distribution of Iran’s oil, while destroying its power grid and closing its ports as tightly as its airspace. This is a logical conclusion of the war, in which the United States has incurred eight fatalities in combat and five others accidentally. Neither this small number nor the material cost of about $50 billion is onerous to the United States.

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The president implied that without the necessary formal concessions of Iran, the U.S. and Israel will continue to isolate Iran, as it no longer has any power of resistance. The U.S. and Israel will be perfectly capable of maintaining Iran in a condition of complete stagnation, vulnerability and bankruptcy at minimal human and material cost to themselves indefinitely. This is not a quagmire; it is a complete victory in the most one-sided war between serious states in modern history. A reduced number of tankers is still moving through the Strait of Hormuz, and there are clearly back-channel communications between the Americans, and at least a faction of the shattered Iranian government, despite the Baghdad Bob propaganda being spewed by Iran from the bomb shelters of Tehran.

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What is occurring is a simultaneous series of decisive changes to the international correlation of forces. The West is about to win the war on terror that it has been waging. The Middle Eastern forces that refuse to recognize the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state are about to be crushed completely and the durable reconstruction of the most contested areas is about to begin. Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, are all being detached from their Russo-Chinese sponsors. The United States is about to take over as much as half of Chinese sources for oil and will be substantially replaced by Russia while Western Europe becomes predominantly dependent upon America and its clients for oil and gas and ceases to finance the Russian aggression in Ukraine with oil and gas purchases from Russia while beseeching America to do the heavy lifting in preventing the Russian takeover of Ukraine.

This will complete a benign cycle in the Middle East. For 20 years it had been in a tense balance between three separate geopolitical formations, following the Iraq War, which was a strategic disaster and delivered that artificial country largely over to Iranian influence. Then there was the hopeful but unsuccessful Arab spring, and the rise of ISIS. Iran set up what became known in the region as the Axis of Resistance with terrorist vassals in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen controlling distinct territory and resources Iran expanded its influence without provoking a full-scale war with a serious opponent, until the Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates used their vast petroleum wealth to subsidize resistance to the Iranian backed forces without getting into a direct confrontation with Iran. The rivalry between these two groups was essentially promoted by the third pole of influence which consisted mainly of Turkey and Qatar supporting Islam as political movements that were not puppets of Iran. Turkey was reduced to this after the European Union slammed the door in its face when it sought a closer association with it.

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Israel stood aside from all of this, though it was regularly harassed by the Iranian-backed terrorist apparatus of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza and the bedraggled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Israel steadily became a more formidable military foe that was capable of deterring the sort of wars unleashed upon it by the Arab powers in 1948, 1967, and 1973. It was officially at peace with Egypt and Jordan. Guerrilla wars are only resorted to by entities that don’t have the resources for a real war. The United States, in between the terrible blunders of helping force out the Shah of Iran, (President Carter), and promoting (President George W. Bush) elections that elevated Hezbollah and Hamas, attempted to manage, but not resolve this permanent state of acute abrasion.

Donald Trump, who has demonstrated great intuitive, but not scholarly talents as a geopolitician, recognized that this permanently uneasy and violent condition possessed no potential for evolving positively, and that Iran and its proxies had to be neutralized He withdrew from Obama’s catastrophic nuclear deal with Iran which authorized Iran to become a nuclear power in ten years, and imposed heavy sanctions on that country. By the last year of Trump‘s first term, Iran could not afford to finance the terrorist activities of its vassals. Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, and then killed its commander Quassem Soleimani. The Abraham accords in 2020 moved the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan away from the previous Arab position that normalized relations with Israel would depend on a resolution of Palestinian problem. It was an important step in integrating Israel into its region rather than it being quarantined as a leper state by most of its neighbours.

The barbaric escalation of October 7, 2023 that unleashed the Hamas invasion of Israel, which was expected to send a flying column to the walls of Jerusalem and to provoke an uprising in the West Bank, filled Israel with a determination to fight the terrorist war in Gaza to a victorious conclusion. The Biden administration waffled with a weak statement that Israel had a right to defend itself but disputed its right to counterattack seriously into Gaza. With the return of President Trump, the U.S. led discussions that produced a delicate ceasefire and the release of Israeli hostages, and Israel eliminated approximately 80 per cent of the Hamas trigger pullers. It remains to disarm Hamas and to reconstruct Gaza.

Events were overtaken by the approach of an Iranian development and deployment of a nuclear warhead for missiles that could reach as far as London and Paris and Israel and the United States destroyed that capability from the air. Iran was swiftly resupplied, though not with nuclear warheads and the U.S and Israel refused to accept Iran’s stall of negotiations, leading to the present conflict.

Europe’s performance has been contemptible as most of their governments are leftist and are overly influenced by extreme Muslim voting minorities. There will be a reckoning in NATO for all the slackers, including Canada. It will be a great and a delicious irony that Donald Trump is producing the greatest advance of world peace since the end of the Cold War. In one long lifetime, the remarkable American presidents Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump will have transformed the war-ravaged world of Hitler and Stalin into comparative peace and prosperity.

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