Watch the news carefully. All news stories will say that Vance alone did not support the Iran War debacle. There is a reason for this. Trump is being humiliated enough to be replaced during the midterms by Vance, to the delight of his Tech supporters, led by Peter Thiel.

The Oval Office gang appears ready to support someone not facing impeachment and criminal investigations. Vance could save them all.

The Natalie Harp stories and departure of Carolyn Levitt are helping ease Trump’s decision to exit now with as much of the family lucre as possible, before it gets stripped away. Keeping it is the price of the Tech take over and the end of democracy as we have known it.

Where will Trump go? I had previously thought of a Persian Gulf state, but now think the reason for the CIA chief’s visit to Moscow is to plan for Trump’s protection there. As long as he brings the Trump Organization’s looted treasures with him, he will no doubt be welcome.

But returning also stimulates much to digest about the past and present.

I knew Sir Ray Geddes during his stays with us in Salzburg. He knew Churchill well, since his father and uncle served in superior positions to him during the First World War. To his uncle was attributed the phrase that Germany must be squeezed “in the fashion of a lemon, until its pips squeek.” I said, Ray, your uncle’s prescription caused the Second World War. But did it?

The effect of the reparations clauses in actuality were nullified because, from 1926 to 1929, the US was lending 5 times as much as was owed with no real chance of repayment. Churchill said England was willing to ease up on reparations demands, but the Americans refused to ease up on England’s war debt to them.

The profitable rate of interest on the loans even led British investors to participate. Germany gained twice as much as she owed. And the 1920 Republican victory in the USA meant Europe had to pay its lawful debts, while tariff barriers were enacted which prevented them to earn enough to do so. The lenders included J.P. Morgan, National City Bank, and the Rockefellers of Chase National Bank, particularly during the later years of the interwar period, which is to say loans to the Nazis.

The same banks lent to the Japanese militarists, particularly Chase. The Depression hit Germany and Japan hard. It’s no wonder they soon started looking back to Japan’s martial past and to Germany’s proud Teutonic paganism. They both discovered they weren’t as weak as the global banking system said they were. To get the means to repay, the path to conquest and theft became inevitable.

Enough on that.

Dublin today is thriving and Ireland is about the most free and independent country on the globe. The Bank of Ireland is a thing apart from the continuing global banking mischief which is seldom seen or understood.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, I was leading a think tank in Europe. The question put to me by German business leaders was what would be the next greatest threat to face Europe? I responded that it would be the invasion of American law firms and the litigious orientations that Europe had managed to escape thus far. They all nodded in agreement. Of course, the other threat avoided until recently was having to trade their social safety nets for weapons production.

Enough on that too.

What follows is important enough that I am quoting Sy Hersh’s Substack today in its entirety:

“Two months ago I wrote here about Presidential Emergency Action Documents (PEADs) that have afforded President Donald Trump, and every president in the last seven decades, extraordinary secret powers to suspend the basic rights of citizens in a domestic crisis with no Congressional or judicial oversight. Those powers essentially give any president the power to upend the Constitution if deemed necessary.

I was helped in my reporting on PEADs by Joel McCleary, a former aide on security issues to President Jimmy Carter who has now focused my attention on another top secret codicil to PEADs known as COGCON, which stands for Continuity of Government Readiness Condition.

“This is the layer the public has never been told to worry about,” McCleary explained to me. He said the warning system was modeled after DEFCON, the early Cold War military warning system that ranged from 1 to 5, with DEFCON 5 indicating ordinary peacetime and DEFCON 1 meaning that a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union had begun or was imminent.

McCleary’s notion is that many of the secret military and intelligence powers initially aimed at warning about a nuclear attack or other extraordinary national security threats are now being turned on political issues: namely the prospect that the Republican Party might lose control of both chambers of Congress, as polls are saying may happen in November’s election. “Note who works the switch,” McCleary said. “Formally, the secretary of homeland security is the president’s lead agent for continuity. In practice, the homeland security apparatus now runs through Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff for policy in the White House who now sits atop an elevated office far above its old standing.

“The working hypothesis,” McCleary added, “is that Miller is the de facto head of the continuity machinery, which means that the on-off switch for the Constitution that COGCON entrusts to the president is, day to day, in the hands of an unconfirmed White House aide.

“The problem is that no legal framework distinguishes between a nuclear attack and a border dispute, between a civilization-ending pandemic and a political protest, between a genuine cyberattack on national infrastructure and a manufactured pretext for invoking extraordinary authority. The president alone defines the emergency. The president alone activates the response. The president alone signs the pre-draft orders. And no institution—not Congress, not the courts, not the military chain of command—has been given the legal tools to determine, in real time, whether the emergency is genuine and whether the response is proportionate.

“This is not a partisan observation,” McCleary said. “It is a structural deficiency that endangers the republic regardless of which party holds the White House.

McCleary noted that last September Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum entitled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” that created no new authorities but repurposed post-9/11 counterterrorism authorities and aimed them instead at domestic political targets. More than three thousand nongovernmental organizations signed an open letter against it, as did some prominent Washington law firms, including Arnold & Porter and DLA Piper. More than thirty members of Congress warned that such dicta could be used to stifle legitimate dissent. “This is the layer,” McCleary told me, that “converts a category of political opponent into a category of terrorism suspect.”

The president has so far ignored many requests from Republican and MAGA election deniers, who continue to believe he actually defeated Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, to, it’s been reported, declare a “national emergency” and give himself “king-like powers” over the midterm elections. Last September, some eight hundred generals and admirals were summoned to the Marine base at Quantico, Virginia, to watch the president give what seemed to be an unscripted address. He claimed at one point that America was facing “the enemy from within”—an apparent reference to domestic political opposition—and warned that “we have to handle it before it gets out of control.” He did not explain what he meant by “handle it.”

It just could be that the president is aware that the Democrats—despite his rhetoric about an enemy from within—are the least of his problems. He remains entrenched in a conflict with Iran that has turned out to be far more complicated and obdurate than he expected. The Iranian leadership is as entrenched as ever, though Iran remains desperately in need of sanctioned billions controlled by the West that could alleviate widespread poverty and economic despair. Trump’s administration is losing the support and respect of many longtime regional allies in the Middle East who have been stung by Iran’s ability to accurately target them with missiles and drones while playing hard-to-get during the on-and-off in peace talks. The Strait of Hormuz may be lost to Washington, at least in the short term, diminishing the prospect of lower gasoline prices and making a Republican victory in the midterms even less likely.

On the other hand, all of these issues may be a sideshow to the worry that many in America—and the world—have about this president. They were best articulated by the droll words of William G. Miller, a brilliant Republican diplomat who was also the staff director of the Senate committee that investigated the CIA’s domestic spying and other abuses in the 1970s: “The president has two existential powers: One, to blow up the planet with the push of a button. And two, to end the Constitution with a stroke of the pen.”

We will have to wait and see while the president, who has the power to end the world, plays hide and seek on his official trips.”

So the immediate questions that face the planet deal with inclusion and exclusion. If we seek maximum inclusion, it comes at the price of job creation and education and providing incentives that can only come at a considerable cost to the West. Is there any option? In my opinion, failure to increase foreign assistance has resulted in the neglected recipients arriving in the center of Europe. The excluded will seek to destroy or make excessively costly technological or medical progress that bypasses them. Thus, exclusion comes at the price now felt in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere, and leads to a rethinking of the social welfare net and cultural liberality that has sustained the modern European ethic following the Second World War.

Does Europe feel a greater cultural threat from Islamic migrants or from a closer relationship with Christian Russia, which shares many of the same concerns? Does focusing spending on military resistance to a non-threatening Russia make more sense than stabilizing North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia? This is another aspect of my book. Looking to the larger historical context, does the division of the Church and the traditional East-West division make sense in a world challenged by a North-South dynamic and Western moral relativism squared off against a violently rigorous interpretation of Islamic fundamentalism?

The world is changing quickly and Europe must adapt. Regrettably, the USA is pulling it to a losing response to both the North-South and East-West challenges. I would like to see it anticipate what is coming and choose suitable partners to help it face what lies ahead. Blindly reacting to the instability that it has itself engendered by intelligence and military adventurism in the developing world would be continuing to react with a flimsy bandage instead of facing up to a costly, but perhaps culturally life-saving, prescription.

A few preliminary thoughts:

JFK wanted to break out of the strangle hold of the pernicious forces that Ike described in his farewell address. Ike really liked and supported JFK, which allowed him to stand up to those forces. In doing so, JFK averted a nuclear exchange over Cuba. Some folks have never forgiven him for that.

LBJ knew Vietnam was a lost cause but continued the war for domestic political reasons, much like the Iran debacle of today. Human politicians are conflicted by many forces, including the strong egos which prevail for those seeking political office, not to mention conflicts of interest from campaign contributions. There are those who still think if we stayed in Vietnam we would have prevailed. Many are the same folks who never forgave JFK, who, by the way, wanted out of the entire mess. Some are even the same folks who still malign FDR for rescuing the nation from the Great Depression.

Colin Powell, the retired Army General and Secretary of State, would have run for the presidency but his family feared his assassination should he do so. They understood more about America than most can come to grips with. He was famous for avoiding conflicts without a clear and achieveable strategy, accompanied with overwhelming force and a clear exit plan. He learned the lessons of Vietnam, where he fought.

The PRC, China, has less to fear from AI because it already operates in accord with the feared centralized decision making and individual subordination to overall public welfare. Still, the Party wants to avoid another decision making option, that general AI might offer.

Turning to the current state of political affairs in the USA today, we have to admit that a hopefully unbiased source of intelligence would not be altogether unwelcome.

The difficulty here is the interface which AI presents for the linkages between machine and human decision making, because the avatars associated with the former make the latter even less prone to thoughtful deliberation. It may be the middle ground that is more dangerous than simply turning to a system which is hopefully less confused and biased, as our current politics suggests.

Good luck to us all!

The Thucydides Trap has expanded into the “Celestial Trap,” as the race for the high ground moves beyond Earth’s orbit. The focal points of this competition are the Lagrange Points (L1–L5)—strategic “parking spots” in space where the gravitational pull of the Earth and Moon (or Sun and Earth) creates points of stability.

The U.S. and China are currently competing for the L1 and L2 Lagrange Points (stable spots in space) to control the “high ground” for satellite surveillance over maritime conflict zones. The competition is continuing all the way to the moon.

The L1 and L2 Lagrange Points these are no longer just scientific outposts; they are being treated as the “maritime chokepoints” of the cosmos.

The Strategic Importance of L1 and L2 are essential for controlling the “Earth-Moon Corridor.” L1 (The Gateway) is located between the Earth and the Moon, the ultimate “high ground.” Whoever stations satellites here can monitor all traffic moving to and from the lunar surface.

L2 (The Far Side Anchor) is currently controlled by China with its Queqiao relay satellites. Since the Earth cannot “see” the far side of the Moon, L2 is the only place to park a satellite that can communicate with lunar bases there. By controlling L2, China effectively controls the communication link for any nation trying to land on the Moon’s far side.

A January 2026 report from the U.S. Space Force warns that the first nation to “permanently station assets” at all five Lagrange points will dictate the rules of customary international law for the next century.

On February 1, 2026: China officially announced the Xihe-2 mission. While ostensibly a solar probe, it will be the first artificial probe deployed to the L5 point.

Beijing is using these scientific missions to establish “keep-out zones” and “Space Defense Identification Zones” (SDIZ) around Lagrange points, claiming they need to protect their sensitive instruments from “foreign interference.”

The US is responding with its DARPA TBD2 Contract (2026), fast-tracking a new class of “lunar situational awareness” satellites. These are designed specifically to park at L1 and detect objects as small as 10cm—essentially a “radar for the Moon.”

Additionally, the Golden Dome Initiative would expand its missile defense concept to include space-based interceptor prototypes. The goal is to ensure that if a conflict breaks out in the South China Sea, China cannot use Lagrange-based satellites to jam U.S. GPS or communications.

The “Celestial Trap” is particularly dangerous because space is a “winner-take-all” environment. The US is racing to catch up with China in placing the “eyes” at L1 and L2 that could decide who wins the fight on Earth.

Now comes new challenges and dangers with China’s quest to be the first to find liquid water on the moon.

In July 2026, the “Celestial Trap” is no longer about satellites in Earth’s orbit—it is a race for physical sovereignty at the Lunar South Pole.

The competition for “water ice” has created two distinct, competing legal and physical frameworks. This is how the U.S. and China are “governing” the Moon.

The Artemis Accords (U.S. Led) have expanded to 61 signatory nations, with Portugal (60th) and Oman (61st) joining recently.

The “Safety Zone” Doctrine: The U.S. legal strategy relies on Section 10 of the Accords, which allows for the creation of “safety zones” around lunar operations. While the Accords claim these are not “sovereign claims,” China views them as de facto land grabs of the best water-rich craters.

The Artemis II Launch was the first crewed deep-space mission since 1972, serving as a massive “psychological win” to demonstrate U.S. dominance in cislunar mobility.

China has counter-balanced the Accords with the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS).

The Coalition: The ILRS has secured over 12 member states, including Russia, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, and Venezuela. Unlike the “principles-based” Accords, the ILRS is structured as a joint-development treaty for a physical base.

Chang’e-7 Mission (August 2026): China is on track to “beat the U.S. to the water.” The Chang’e-7 mission, launching in late 2026, is specifically designed to land on the rim of the Shackleton Crater and deploy a “hopper” to enter the permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) to physically analyze water ice. Chang’e-7 & 8 Infrastructure: China is currently positioning lunar south pole landers. Oracle-M tracks the supply modules and “tugs” that move these components from EML-1 down to the lunar surface.

“Shadow” Objects: A major concern for the U.S. Space Force in 2026 is China’s use of “co-orbital” satellites—small objects that “hide” in the glare of larger Chinese lunar probes. Oracle-M’s high-resolution sensors are designed to “unmask” these hidden assets.

We are in the “Year of the First Stake.” By the end of 2026, the nation that successfully extracts the first liter of lunar water will hold the “logistical keys” to the rest of the solar system.

In 2026, the Thucydides Trap has a new “zero-gravity” trigger. Below is a simulation of how a physical dispute on the Moon could bypass traditional diplomacy and spring the Financial Trap we analyzed earlier.

The Incident: “The Shackleton Stand-off”

Date: November 14, 2026

Location: Southeast Ridge of Shackleton Crater (88.8°S, 123.4°E)

The Trigger: China’s Chang’e-7 lander (launched August 2026) touches down on a prime “Peak of Eternal Light.” This site is within a 5km “Safety Zone” previously declared by the U.S. under the Artemis Accords to protect a nearby lunar rover.

The Physical Confrontation: China’s “mini-hopping probe” enters a shadowed crater currently being analyzed by a U.S. commercial sensor. The U.S. Space Force’s Oracle-M (which we discussed is patrolling this area) captures high-res video of the Chinese probe “interfering” with U.S. equipment.

The U.S. Diplomatic Avatar (Apertuse) immediately broadcasts the Oracle-M footage to all 61 Artemis Accord signatories. It issues an automated “Notice of Harmful Interference.”

China’s Response: Beijing’s AI avatar rejects the claim, stating the U.S. “Safety Zone” is an illegal “colonial land grab” that violates the Outer Space Treaty.

President Trump, facing pressure from the 2026 Midterm elections (held just days prior), decides to “defend American lunar property.”

The Trigger: He invokes the 2026 Dollar Defense Act.

The Action: The U.S. Treasury freezes the assets of CAST (China Academy of Space Technology) and its parent company, CASC. Any international bank facilitating payments for China’s “International Lunar Research Station” (ILRS) is threatened with being cut off from the USD clearing system.

Day 2: The “CRINK” Counter-Move

The Action: China mandates that all future lunar resource contracts (water ice and Helium-3) with ILRS partners (Russia, Venezuela, Egypt) be settled exclusively in the interest-bearing Digital Yuan (e-CNY).

The Ripple: Oil-producing members of the CRINK Axis begin accepting e-CNY for energy shipments as a “gesture of solidarity,” causing a sudden 15% drop in global demand for the “Petrodollar.”

Because Oracle-M was there to film it, the crisis cannot be swept under the rug. In the 2026 Thucydides Trap, total transparency actually accelerates conflict because neither leader can afford to “look weak” when the entire world is watching a 4K live-stream of their landers colliding.

The Result: A Fractured Moon, A Fractured Earth

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One of the folks impressed with my prognostications on my return was my friend and colleague Mike Barber, who headed the Comstock Speakers Forum. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had accepted his invitation to speak. Mike wanted me to spend time with him and get the questioning going. I knew my first question would be asking why naval reserve doctors were unceremoniously plucked from Oak Knoll Naval Hospital and put on ships meandering their way to Kuwait in anticipation of the coming Gulf War. I felt the doctors time was much too valuable to be treated this cavalierly.

The evening for Cheney’s talk was September 13, 1990. Shortly before heading to meet with him, I took a call from State Senator Wadie Deddeh, who represented California’s Chula Vista and San Diego. The war drums were beating and the senator wanted to inform me that one of his closest friends was Tarik Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister and deputy prime minister of Iraq. Both Chaldean Christians who grew up and went to school together, they still spoke at least twice a week. Deddeh said he would be able to pass along any messages I had for Saddam.

So on the eve of war, as I met with Dick Cheney, I had the interesting realization that, without intending it, I could pass along messages to the leaders of both sides in the coming war and possibly say enough to head the whole thing off.

As it turned out, Cheney used the speaking engagement to signal major impending Pentagon cuts, specifically announcing that the U.S. would close well over 100 military facilities overseas, with the bulk of the reductions in Western Europe. (That’s why the docs didn’t come from Europe, which seemed logical.) As for messages to pass along, nothing would stop the American juggernaut then in train. A more carefully calculated threat from Saddam was a possibility, but I didn’t chose to advise the adversary and risk treason.

Less than a year later, I had just returned from Xinjiang in western China, knowing we needed an excuse to get troops into the oil rich areas across the border before China and Russia did, under their recently announced Shanghai Council Accords. Chatter about an attack coming domestically was at fever pitch for anyone caring to listen. Connecting the dots, I told my graduate students that the Twin Towers would likely be attacked again during the semester (there had earlier been a truck bomb detonated in its basement. Court testimony indicated the next time aircraft would be used.) I said we would immediately follow up by sending troops to Afghanistan and northward into the Central Asian republics bordering China. My students responded with groans, but when this occurred before the very next class, I was questioned extensively, then simply referred to on campus as “the oracle.”

Saddam was executed at age 69; Tarik Aziz died imprisoned at age 76. Senator Wadie Deddeh, who was revered and among the most highly praised of State officials, lived to age 98.

I was asked recently why I didn’t write a memoir. Well everyone has stories. Knowing that no one would read it, I decided to merge a lot of my adventures into my novels written as Avery Mann. One is the Mark Jamison Adventures…a trilogy. You can easily discern who Mark Jamison might be. The Gobscheit Series is another set of adventures launched during a recent sojourn in Ireland. I will be speaking at the Dublin Literary Festival at Trinity College in August and also visiting Northern Ireland. More adventures and grist for the keyboard.

Stay tuned and thanks for subscribing!

“….The United States does not want stability in the world, because stability means the status quo. The United States has continually lost what used to be the American empire. It has lost its trade and balance-of-payments surplus. It has lost its industrial dominance. It has lost its dollar financial dominance. It is now a big debtor. It has been losing almost everything. That is why the U.S. National Security Strategy said, in effect: we are no longer going to support the kind of unified world of equality, multipolarity, free trade and free investment that we supported back in 1945, when we had all the power, when we had most of the world’s gold, when we had the manufacturing and industrial power to help Europe survive. We do not have that anymore.

The only asset that the United States now has to cope with a changing world dynamic is the ability to hurt other countries. It can say: we can disrupt your trade. Trump can impose tariffs to stop your access to the American market. That, of course, will upset your exporters and cause chaos. But if you agree to America’s version of the world — if you agree not to trade with Russia, not to trade with Iran, not to permit Chinese investment in your country — if you obey us and become our political and economic satellites, then you can have access to the U.S. market. Otherwise we are going to disturb your situation.

Donald Trump has said again and again that if blocking trade from the Arab OPEC countries and from Iran creates a world depression, that will benefit the United States, because the United States, he says, is self-sufficient in oil. And right now the United States is making a killing from the rise in world oil prices. American oil and gas companies are selling low-priced American oil and gas at world prices, not at low U.S. prices. Their profits are going up, their stocks are going up, and they are able to benefit from all of this.

So for Trump, the United States wins when the rest of the world goes into crisis — just as happened in 1998 during the Asian currency crisis, when Asian currencies, apart from Malaysia which had capital controls, all declined, and American and international investors could swoop in and pick up Korean, Japanese and other Asian companies at much lower prices than before. The United States policy, as announced in its own strategy, is to create crisis abroad. And Trump has carried that to the logical extreme. We are pirates in the OPEC trade once it comes out of the Strait of Hormuz. We have grabbed the ship. We have confiscated the oil. We have taken it. We can do that. That is a situation that serves the United States.

Now, how on earth can there be any agreement with China on this? I think that by talking about Taiwan, China is saying: we are not going to try to talk about problems that obviously cannot be solved. If we make the centre of our discussion U.S. relations with Taiwan, then anything we discuss dovetails into that. That is their version of a diplomatic Strait of Hormuz.

Take the issue of rare earth exports. The Americans want China to begin selling rare earth exports again to the United States. China has said: we do not want to sell rare earth exports that can be made into armaments. It would be crazy for us to sell you yttrium, gallium and other elements for your military to make into F-35 airplanes, arms and missiles, to sell to Taiwan to attack China. This gets back to what Lenin joked: the capitalists are going to sell us the rope to hang them with. You can imagine what China is saying: we are not going to sell the United States the raw materials it needs to build arms and weapons to sell to its protégés such as Taiwan, to attack us militarily. This is our national defence strategy.

So by saying that Taiwan is the centre of any agreement that comes out of these meetings, China is saying that Taiwan shapes any agreement on international trade, international finance and almost anything else the United States would like to make a topic of discussion….

….I sat in on such strategising 50 years ago, in 1974, when I worked with Herman Kahn at the Hudson Institute. We had repeated meetings with the White House, the State Department, the Treasury and many military officials, and they discussed exactly the strategy against Iran. At that time, I remember Herman Kahn saying: we have got to break Iran into five or more separate sections. The way to begin, he thought, was going to be Balochistan, to break it away. Now the United States is trying to work with the Kurds.

For the last hundred years, the United States has had one paramount umbrella strategy to control the world: to control the world’s oil….Every country in the world needs oil and power to run its factories, heat its homes, make chemicals, petrochemicals and plastics, make fertilizer. If we can control the oil trade, then we have the power to hurt any country that does not obey us. We can use that as a lever. We do not have to go to military war with them. We can simply cut off their supply of oil, and that will force them to follow whatever American policy we want.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the Project for the New American Century said, in effect, that the way to control oil was to prevent countries from buying oil from any country we do not control. That is why sanctions were imposed on Iran after the overthrow of the Shah and the rejection of America’s 1953 interference in Iranian politics to take control of the oil industry. That is why the United States destroyed Nord Stream and imposed sanctions to prevent people from buying oil from Russia. That is why the United States destroyed Libya, so that countries could not buy oil from Libya. That is precisely why George W. Bush waged the war against Iraq.

There is always a pretense. The pretense was that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The fact is that what Iraq had was oil, and America wanted that oil. So it bombed and destroyed the Iraqi economy, and essentially brought in al-Qaeda and Wahhabi terrorists to support its strategy. The Americans then spread the fight to Syria to grab its oil supplies.

But all along, when they were outlining the countries they were going to conquer throughout the Near East and the Middle East to control Middle Eastern oil, the sequence ended with Iran. Iran was always the final objective. The United States realised it could conquer Libya, Iraq, Syria and other countries, and it could enforce support from Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and the Arab countries, because all of these countries’ oil proceeds — in their government funds — were invested in the U.S. bond market and U.S. financial markets. So all along the purpose was to control world oil and be able to control the switch: turning off the electricity, the power, the lighting. It all required conquering Iran, recapturing Iran’s oil industry and reinstalling a military dictatorship — this time more vicious and more effective than the old Shah’s. This is a plan that has been 50 years in the making, refinement and elaboration….

You remember that under George H. W. Bush there was the bloody Iraq war against Iran. A million Iranian soldiers died. The Americans provided the Iraqis with chemical warfare and other illegal means. So they already tried in the 1980s to conquer Iran. It did not work.

Then George W. Bush and the rest of the deep state followed the plan and said: we cannot fight against Iran until we conquer Iraq and Syria and control the rest of the Middle East, so that we have our forces there. We have military bases in the Emirates, military bases in Saudi Arabia, military bases all around Iran, so that we can be in a position to conquer it.

Obviously some military strategists are more optimistic than others. Trump has around him all of the most optimistic neocons. These are the same neocons who were around Dick Cheney when he was vice president under George W. Bush. The same people have been there all along, and they are still there — the same pro-Israel Zionists who believe that the United States and Israel can make a condominium, where the United States uses Israel as its primary military base in the Near East, and uses the Israeli army as the enforcement force, now supplemented by Jolani’s jihadist al-Qaeda army in Syria, in partnership with Israel, to act as America’s client oligarchy and enforcers.

….What Iran has achieved is saying: we will not surrender. It has realised that if it does not fight, the United States is going to do just what it said it would do. It is going to have regime change, as it tried to do when it recently killed Iranian leaders. It is going to take over the government. It is going to put in a client oligarchy, just like the Shah. And Iran is saying: we would rather fight than end up becoming a colony, a client dictatorship and a client oligarchy of the United States, which would take over all of our natural resources and oil for itself.

Iran realised that by itself it cannot defeat the United States and its allies in Europe and its allies in other countries such as Japan in the East. It needs the rest of the world to support it. How can it do this? Iran has said: if we cannot export our oil to Asia and to whatever markets we want, then there is not going to be any oil from the Arab OPEC countries or the Middle Eastern OPEC countries exported either. It is the job of other countries — China, Asian countries, Global South countries, even Europe — if you want free trade and access to the oil of this region, you have to include us as part of that oil region. You have to oppose the United States takeover of the Middle East. You have to support our drive to protect our own national security by driving out all American military bases in the Near East, so that we will no longer be threatened. You have to return the money that your banks have stolen from us illegally. You have to drop the sanctions on us.

If you want oil from us or from other countries, you have to permit us to survive. And if you are saying, well, we want oil, and it is okay if America takes Iran over and controls the oil — even if America is going to use this oil as a weapon against us to enforce our agreement with U.S. policy — then Iran says: if you do not care, you had better care, because the cost of not supporting our defence, our independence and our sovereignty is going to be a world depression as bad as the 1930s. Take your choice.

Iran is upping the ante to force the whole world to ask: do you want to permit America simply to grab Iran, to do to Iran what it has just done to Venezuela? To come in and simply grab the oil, and say that all Venezuelan oil exports are to be put into a bank account in Florida under the personal direction of Donald Trump? Trump has said that he wants to appoint the new leader of Iran after regime change. In other words, the Iranian people would have nothing. Iran is saying: if this is your idea of the world — if the rest of the world economy believes that Donald Trump and America should appoint the leaders of every country, and should be able to grab the oil, the mineral resources, the land, the public utilities and anything else they can grab — then quite frankly, to hell with you.

….I have to say what it is that Iran is escaping from.

From 1945 to 1950 the United States was in a strong position. By 1950 it had almost 80 per cent of the world’s gold. But then in 1950 and 1951 the Korean War occurred, and beginning with the Korean War the United States balance of payments moved into deficit. The entire U.S. balance-of-payments deficit was from overseas military spending: the military bases it created all over the world, now almost 1,800; and first the war in Korea, and then especially the Vietnam War. The private sector in the United States was just about in balance. The government was running a balance-of-payments surplus apart from the military. But military spending was forcing America to sell its gold to support the dollar’s exchange rate.

By the time of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the American military was spending money in Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos. These had been French colonies, and the United States was trying to support the French colonial system. The French colonies used French banks. They would take these dollars and send them to the head office in Paris. The banks in Paris would turn the dollars over to the French central bank for French currency, and then the government under General de Gaulle would cash these dollars in for gold. It would buy gold. It did not want dollars; it wanted gold.

Every Friday, when I was Chase Manhattan Bank’s balance-of-payments analyst, we would look at the Federal Reserve statement of how much gold covered the U.S. paper currency — the dollar bills you hold in your pocket. Legally, all U.S. paper currency had to be backed 25 per cent by gold. You could see that U.S. military spending was going to deplete the U.S. gold stock. By 1971 this had reached the limit, and the United States said: we cannot afford to exchange any more dollars for gold. We are closing the gold window.

There was some panic in the U.S. government: what will we do now without gold? What my book Super Imperialism showed was that what seemed to be bad news for America’s empire actually gave America much stronger control of the world financial system than it had before. Because if central banks were no longer able to cash in their dollars for gold, what were they going to spend them on? They were not going to buy U.S. stocks — that was too risky. They were not permitted to buy particular companies in the United States. All they could do was keep their foreign-exchange dollars safe by buying U.S. government bonds.

So all the dollars thrown off by American military spending ended up in the foreign central banks of Europe, Asia and Japan, which lent the money back to the U.S. Treasury by buying Treasury bonds. The balance-of-payments deficit was no longer a constraint. It was a circular flow. Foreign military spending was recycled to finance the domestic American budget deficit.

Then you had the oil fight of 1973 and 1974. After the United States quadrupled its grain prices, OPEC quadrupled its oil prices. Because I was a specialist in the balance of payments, especially of the oil industry — which was my main focus at Chase Manhattan — I had numerous meetings with the State Department and the White House. They made it clear: we have made a deal with Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries. They can charge whatever they want for their oil. All we want is that the export earnings they make are invested in U.S. Treasury securities as their form of saving this money. That was the deal. It required the savings to be in dollars.

What has happened now is a replay of the same dynamic. The U.S. balance of payments, trade position and economic power have declined so much that it is no longer able to rely on this automatic self-financing of the balance of payments that it put in place after 1971. So it has had to ask: how can we hurt other countries if they do not recycle their dollars to the United States? For one thing, we are not going to give them a choice. If a country spends its oil earnings, balance-of-payments earnings or export earnings and does not turn these earnings over to the United States, we are going to close down its financial communication system — the SWIFT bank clearing system, where the debits and credits are worked out and transfers are made between countries.

China has created an alternative system so that countries do not need this. Back in 1971, there was not really another currency in which countries could save their oil-export earnings. Now there is. There is the Chinese currency, and there is gold. Once again, the gold is no longer being supplied by the United States, but you can buy gold in the market. Countries are buying gold because, so far, there is not an alternative artificial currency. To create that, you would need a new kind of international monetary fund, a new kind of central bank or world bank to administer it. The United States would never permit that under IMF rules, because it has veto power in the IMF.

So the only alternatives countries have are gold, Chinese currency, each other’s currencies, or a market basket of different currencies. That is what is occurring today. It means countries no longer have to denominate their oil, mineral exports or industrial exports in dollars. They can denominate them, for instance, in Chinese currency, because China is the most rapidly growing economy in the world. China’s system of socialism with Chinese characteristics — which is basically the same policy that made America rich in the nineteenth century with its industrial protectionism — enables it to be solid. Everybody needs Chinese renminbi in order to buy Chinese exports and attract Chinese investments. So the rest of the world, the BRICS countries and the Global South, are trying to develop an alternative financial and monetary system….

Regarding the sanctions: China is not really looking at itself as a rival to the United States. It is looking at what kind of trading sphere it wants to create. It wants to be independent of the United States and the whole U.S. system of trade and finance. It wants autonomy for China and for other countries. Multipolarity means countries can pursue their own sovereignty to create their own trade and investment relationships with other countries. That is already occurring.

China and Russia have already realised that they cannot maintain their own military, political and economic independence if the United States conquers Iran and essentially takes over control of the world oil trade, because it will weaponise this oil trade against them. So they have already said that they are going to support Iran to an increasing degree as America requires it.

The question is: what can they do to prevent American sanctions against Iran? The day before Trump visited China, the United States imposed new sanctions on Iranian banks and on any bank in the world dealing with Chinese refiners who were refining Iranian oil. So this is a direct financial attack on China. All China can do is insulate itself from the rest of the U.S.-centred financial system. It is not trying to replace the United States. The United States will always have its dollar. But what China and other countries want is an independent situation.

There is a BRICS meeting right now in India that I am sure is discussing that very thing. But there cannot be a BRICS currency — meaning a common ability to create money that everybody uses — because for that you need a common parliament, and all the countries would have to be the same political entity. That is not possible. What you need to do is create a new kind of international bank. I gather there are discussions behind the scenes….

Long before there is an alternative currency, there can be an alternative trading system. Other countries are insulating their own banks and traders from America’s sanctions, so that they can trade freely with Iran and give Iran the food, raw materials and industrial supplies that it needs. In order for them to work with Iran and help it recover, they have to make themselves immune from America’s ability to impose sanctions on their banking systems. That is exactly what they must be doing right now….

Neither Iran nor any other country needs to financialise its pension system. This is crazy. They are taking current revenue that they need, and instead of spending it as part of the production process, they are investing it financially to draw on it later. You do not have to pre-pay. You can do what the Germans did: pay as you go. You can do what Adam Smith suggested: pay as you go.

The University of Chicago says everything should be financialised. An economy does not need industry. You can make money through the financial sector alone. It is all about money creation and finance. But this is crazy.

If Iran believes that it can get rich by emulating the mistakes America has made — if it simply makes deep enough mistakes and impoverishes its economy by turning all its savings into financial investments instead of spending them on production, agriculture and industry — and that somehow then it will get rich, no. It will end up in the same destructive finance capitalism that the United States has.

The whole West has turned away from the dynamic of industrial capitalism that classical political economy outlined in the nineteenth century. You do not want economic rent, because it is not part of the production process. You do not want land rent. You do not want natural-resource rent. You do not want financial rent. All of that is an economic overhead on the economy. You want to minimise the role of the financial sector and make it entirely part of the government sector, as China has done.

If a country has its ministers trained in the United States, they are trained not to understand what money creation and finance are all about. They are trained not to understand the difference between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism.

*My articles appearing in Counterpunch are also shared in earlier issues of AveryMannBooksDispatch.

For most of modern history, geopolitics has been understood through visible markers: treaties, summits, conflicts, elections, and public diplomacy. These are the events that make headlines and shape public perception of international affairs.

But in my experience working across diplomacy, international law, and strategic advisory roles, the most consequential forces in global stability are often not visible at all.

They exist in systems—legal frameworks, communication infrastructure, financial networks, and institutional relationships that operate continuously beneath political cycles.

It is within these systems that power is exercised, constrained, and sometimes quietly contested.

The layer beneath policy

Diplomacy is often described as the art of negotiation between states. That is true, but incomplete. In practice, diplomacy also functions as the maintenance of long-term system stability—ensuring that relationships between nations remain functional even under stress.

Much of this work never appears in public discourse.

Negotiations over infrastructure access, data flows, maritime routes, and communications security can have more lasting impact than high-profile political agreements. These are not abstract concerns; they are the operational foundations of modern international relations.

When these systems are stable, geopolitical tension is absorbed. When they are vulnerable, even minor disruptions can escalate into strategic consequences.

Infrastructure as strategy

One of the most underappreciated elements of global security today is infrastructure—particularly the systems that carry information.

Undersea communication cables, for example, transmit the majority of global data traffic. They underpin financial markets, diplomatic communication, commercial transactions, and military coordination.

Despite their importance, they remain largely outside public attention and are governed by a complex mix of national jurisdictions, private ownership, and international agreements.

This creates a strategic environment where critical systems are simultaneously essential and difficult to fully secure within any single national framework.

The same pattern exists across energy grids, satellite systems, and digital networks. Each represents a point where physical infrastructure intersects with geopolitical interest.

The changing nature of influence

Traditional models of power focused on territorial control and military capability. Those remain relevant, but they are no longer sufficient on their own.

Influence today is increasingly distributed across systems that are interdependent and transnational by design.

As a result, strategic advantage often depends less on dominance and more on positioning within networks—legal, technological, and institutional.

This shift requires a different kind of analysis: one that accounts for indirect pressure, structural vulnerability, and the behavior of interconnected systems under stress.

Fiction as a form of analysis

It is sometimes easier to explore these dynamics through narrative than through formal analysis.

Fiction allows for the integration of complexity without reducing it prematurely. It can model relationships between diplomacy, intelligence, infrastructure, and human decision-making in ways that reflect how these systems actually interact.

That was the motivation behind my novel, Mr. Gobscheit.

The story follows a semi-retired naval officer and diplomat drawn back into a covert mission involving undersea communication infrastructure and emerging geopolitical tensions. While the characters and events are fictional, the underlying dynamics are drawn from real-world systems and experience.

The novel has recently received a Gold 5-Star Award from Literary Titan, which I view less as a personal recognition and more as validation that these themes resonate beyond specialist circles.

Why this matters now

We are entering a period where the boundaries between diplomacy, technology, and infrastructure are becoming increasingly blurred.

Understanding global affairs now requires attention not only to political leadership, but to the systems that enable or constrain decision-making at scale.

The most important developments are often not the ones that are announced. They are the ones embedded in the architecture of how the world functions.

And that architecture is becoming more complex, more interconnected, and more consequential.

About the Author / Learn More

I write under the pen name Avery Mann.

My background includes decades of work in diplomacy, international law, and strategic advisory roles across government and international institutions. Much of my career has focused on the intersection of global systems, policy, and security—experience that directly informs both my analysis of geopolitics and my fiction.

More about my work and books can be found at:

https://averymannbooks.com/

Mr. Gobscheit is available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and wherever books are sold.

#Geopolitics #InternationalRelations #Diplomacy #NationalSecurity #CriticalInfrastructure