What’s Behind Trump’s Response to the Iran Crisis?

The Strait of Hormuz ultimately places Trump in a dilemma of choosing between only two ways to lose: to forgo it and bury his career, or to go through with it and bury the hegemony he claims to be preserving.

Even as alliances and summits multiply outside the Western orbit, Washington is losing, at an ever-increasing pace, the centrality of planetary affairs that it had taken upon itself.

In Bishkek, under the auspices of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, not just a simple summit took place – but an almost dramatic scene where history, visibly tired of its old Western directors, decided to change the scenery. In the same room, at the same time, power structures that the West still stubbornly, with a now automatic condescension, dismisses as “peripheral” converged: the PMSC (Mecca Pact for Collective Security), the CRIC (China-Russia-Iran-North Korea), BRICS , the SCO itself, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA), the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), ASEAN (Laos and Vietnam), the African Union (Togo and Egypt), and so on. These are acronyms that some columnists still recite as if they were exotic curiosities, even as they methodically reshape the power dynamics of the international system. While the Euro-Atlantic capitals cling to their tired certainties, here another grammar of the world is being written. More sober. Colder. Above all, more lucid: that of of an order where the West is no longer the center of gravity, but one actor among others, sometimes a spectator of its own illusions. The real spectacle is not this convergence. It is the feigned astonishment of those who, after decades of........

© New Eastern Outlook