July 29, 2015

Changing Middle East Alliances




[From article]
Bibi Netanyahu must know how Chiang Kai-shek felt as he watched his old friend Nixon toasting Mao in Peking.
The Iran nuclear deal is not on the same geostrategic level. Yet both moves, seen as betrayals by old U.S. allies, were born of a cold assessment in Washington of a need to shift policy to reflect new threats and new opportunities.
[. . .]
But as U.S. and Iranian interests converged, those of the U.S. and its old allies — Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey — were diverging.
[. . .]
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown in the Middle East today.
The Israelis, too, see Iran as their great enemy and indispensable pillar of Hezbollah. For Bibi, any U.S.-Iran rapprochement is a diplomatic disaster.
[. . .]
Clearly the United States and Iran have overlapping interests.
Neither wants all-out war with the other.
[. . .]
For Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel all want the Assad regime brought down to break up Iran’s Shiite Crescent and inflict a strategic defeat on Tehran. But the United States believes the fall of Assad means the rise of ISIS and al-Qaida, a massacre of Christians, and the coming to power of a Sunni terrorist state implacably hostile to us.
Look for the Saudis and Israelis, their agents and lobbies, their think tanks and op-ed writers, to begin beating the drums for the United States to bring down Assad,
[. . .]
Any U.S.-Iran rapprochement would be dead, and we will have been sucked into a war to achieve the strategic goals of allies that are in conflict with the national interests of the United States. And our interests come first.

http://buchanan.org/blog/a-mideast-game-of-thrones-16275

A Mideast Game of Thrones
Tuesday - July 21, 2015 at 12:09 am
By Patrick J. Buchanan

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