One thing that Trump better think about very deeply before he would even consider an attack on Iran is that Iran's closest allies are Russia and China. These three countries have formed a very powerful alliance which, if it acts in unison, would be virtually unstoppable. China and Russia have both expressed great concern over th is developing situation in the Middle East.
"We call on all parties to remain rational and restrained, not to take any actions to provoke the escalation of tension in the region, and not to open a Pandora's box," Foreign Minister Wang Yi of China told reporters in Beijing. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov told reporters Moscow had repeatedly warned the US and its regional allies about what he called the "unthinking and reckless pumping up of tensions in an explosive region".
"Now what we see are unending and sustained US attempts to crank up political, psychological, economic and, yes, military pressure on Iran in quite a provocative way. They [the actions] cannot be assessed as anything but a conscious course to provoke war," Ryabkov was quoted as saying. He added that " Iran possesses the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East, with thousands of short and medium range ballistic and cruise missiles capable of striking as far as Israel and southeast Europe."
If a war erupts between Iran and the US the latter nation will almost immediately target Iran's oil refineries. Does Iran have an effective air defense system to stop most of such attacks? That's hard to determine but it apparently has a large defense system comprised of various types of surface to air missiles including the very accurate Russian S-300 systems.
Before we end this discussion let's attempt to determine how we have arrived at this volatile situation. There may be many reasons but one of the biggest lies with the Trump cancellation of the Iran Nuclear Agreement and the massive sanctions that the U.S. has, over quite a few years, placed on Iran; on their financial system and their ability to export oil, both extremely important factors in the state of their economy.
These sanctions are strangling its economy, which is said to be in free fall and is greatly hurting the people of Iran. These continuing sanctions are clearly causing Iran to get to a point where it can no longer take much more and there are those in that country that are strongly calling for retaliation.
And Trump, after aborting the retaliatory strike on Iran, has now decided to increase sanctions on that country, which will increase tensions even more and could ignite a massive confrontation at some point. Does this foreign policy ignoramus of a president have any clue as to what he is doing? Great thinking Mr. Trump; nothing like throwing gasoline on an already raging fire!
The absence of serious, ongoing negotiations to try to prevent such confrontations is simply astounding, incomprehensible. If there are no serious negotiations in a dire situation how can there ever be a solution to the problem at hand?
What to do in this situation? Both sides need to stop the saber rattling and right now. Both sides need to think twice before they make the monumental mistake of attacking the other.. Maybe a good way of defusing this confrontation would be the restoration of the Iran Nuclear Agreement.
The U.S. government should think deeply about the need to bring an end to the war mentality that has followed the doctrine of doing the same things over again and expecting a different result. That doesn't work and never will. That's pure insanity.
Michael Payne
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
