The Post-Partisan Emporium

  How a BRICS Trio Is Staring Down Israel Pepe Escobar   The Global Majority is fully aware that the genocidals in Tel Aviv are trying as hard as they can to provoke an apocalyptic war – with full US military support, of course. Contrast that combative mindset with 2,500 years of Persian diplomacy. Iran’s acting Foreign Minister, Ali Bagheri Kani, has recently remarked how Tehran is trying hard to prevent “the Israeli regime’s ‘dream’ of triggering an all-out regional war.” But one should never interrupt the enemy when he is in total panic. Sun Tzu would have approved this maxim. Iran certainly won’t interfere as the US and G7 members pull out all stops to come up with some semblance of a Gaza ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel to prevent a serious military retaliation by Iran and the Axis of Resistance. Earlier this week, that warning bore fruit: Hamas representative in Lebanon, Ahmed Abdel Hadi,  reported  yesterday that Hamas will not show up at the tentative negotiation round

  TEOTWAWKI And I feel fine RADIO FAR SIDE On the 6th of June 1974, the Watergate scandal was in full bloom, the global economy was in the crapper, and I was anxiously awaiting my 13th birthday to become a full-fledged teenager. President Nixon had instituted a national 55mph speed limit, which essentially pissed off everyone who lived west of the Mississippi River. Japan was the China of the day and the Vietnam war was nearing the end of its decade-long stranglehold on Merkin culture. At that moment, Prince Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were  sitting down to change the world  and create an empire. The Petrodollar Pact, among other things, forced the world to buy oil and gas in US dollars, and created Saudi Aramco, the single most powerful energy company ever. At the same time, Nixon had ended  the Bretton Woods agreement  and closed the gold window at the Federal Reserve Bank, thus severing US currency from its Constitutional link to precious metals. Th

The Summer of Living Dangerously PEPE ESCOBAR The plutocracy believes that afterwards they can buy the whole thing for a pittance while flies are still laying eggs in European carcasses. So Le Petit Roi in Paris was predictably crushed in the European polls. He has called parliamentary snap elections, dissolving the Assemblée Nationale in an act of blind, puerile revenge on French citizens, de facto attacking French institutional democracy. That doesn’t mean much anyway, because the lineaments of “liberty, equality, fraternity” have long been usurped by a crass oligarchy. The second round of these fresh French elections will be on July 7 – nearly coinciding with the British snap elections on July 11, and only a few days before the slow-burning urban catastrophe which will be the Olympics in Paris. Paris salons are ablaze with intrigue on why the little Rothschild stooge with a Napoleon complex is throwing all his toys out of the pram now because he’s not getting what he wants. After al

  Russia, SCO, BRICS: The Normalization of Afghanistan PEPE ESCOBAR   The whole Russia-Taliban affair involves a humongous package – encompassing oil, gas, minerals and loads of rail connectivity. This past Sunday in Doha, I had a meeting with three high-level representatives of the Taliban Political Office in Qatar, including a founding member of the body (in 2012) and a key official of the previous Taliban government of 1996-2001. By mutual consent, their names should not be made public. The cordial meeting was brokered by Professor Sultan Barakat, who teaches at the College of Public Policy at Hamad bin Khalifa University – set in an outstanding, immaculate campus outside of Doha which attracts students from across the Global South. Prof. Barakat is one of those very few – discreet – players who knows everything that matters in West Asia, and in his case, also in the intersection of Central and South Asia. With my three Taliban interlocutors, we talked extensively about the challeng