Patrice de Bergeracpas

There is a joke going around Italy these days, after the latest Iranian developments: Italy doesn’t really need a foreign minister, since the position is already taken by a guy named Mike Pompeo, whose origins are, after all, Italian. Pompeo seemingly spent two days on the phone doing his best to inform European allies of what happened, but didn’t have time for a call to his Italian counterpart. Seriously, why bother?

PHILIP GIRALDI—Trump also called NATO useless, not because of their lack of a raison d’etre, but instead based on what they owed. “They’re in arrears,” he shouted and gesticulated, as if they were late on their rent payments, before directing his ire against the generals. “We are owed money you haven’t been collecting! You would totally go bankrupt if you had to run your own business.”

Tilford cites a litany of sobering statistics showing just how profligate Americans have been in using and abusing natural resources. For example, between 1900 and 1989 U.S. population tripled while its use of raw materials grew by a factor of 17.  “With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper,” he reports. “Our per capita use of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat, and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world.”
He adds that the U.S. ranks highest in most consumer categories by a considerable margin, even among industrial nations.

THE SAKER—Russia has now made the fight against poverty a national strategic priority, something which the Russian people had wanted for years and which the previous “economic block” never considered a priority.
Furthermore, the entire Eurasian Sovereignists block of the government has remained unchanged.  This indicates two things: First, the Russian national security and foreign policy will remain unchanged. Second, the Eurasian Sovereignists have finally weakened the Atlantic Integrationists to such a degree that a Medvedev nicely “boxed in” in the Russian Security Council or a Siluanov “boxed in” in the new Russian government have ceased to represent a serious threat to the future of Russia.

RAMIN MAZAHERI—Americans might be subjected to analyst after analyst rationalizing the brutal, inhuman slaying – and the Orwellian attempt to call an anti-terror hero a “terrorist” — but nobody outside the US believes such nonsense for a moment. And certainly not in the Muslim World, where the US is (allegedly) trying to “win over hearts and minds”, as Washington so often puts it.