... to lie in fear of the Shiite expansion.
The Saudis have long been vocal about their
concern over the prospects of a Shiite crescent encompassing Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, and Yemen could now become another ally of Iran, completing the encirclement of Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi response to the Houthi rise was akin to panic, as they rushed to pressure the Arab League into deciding to set up a coalition and launch an air campaign despite the risk that this approach would merely repeat U.S. mistakes in Afghanistan ...
... the whirlwind events in Yemen, which few predicted and hence have generated numerous
forecasts
regarding the consequences for the broader security of the Arabia Peninsula and the Middle East as a whole. They
state
that the Yemen crisis will trigger Saudi Arabia’s decline, because the Yemenis will drop their domestic squabble and close ranks to face the external threat. Others
believe
that the area is in for a full-scale war between the Sunni and the Shiite with direct and indirect involvement ...
... military parade. May 22, 2012
Every day Hadi remained in power aggravated the situation in Yemen, and the number of people dissatisfied with his rule was constantly increasing. In this regard, it is not surprising that the former president, supported by Saudi Arabia and fleeing to Aden, tried to weaken the northern territories. It is not accidental that at the beginning of March 2015, he called on the leaders of Taiz and Ibb governorates to recognize him as the legitimate president of Yemen and to provide ...
... interests on their national debt that the net loss from selling less product would be unbearable in the short run, even if it may yield better returns in the long term. Some others would instead benefit, but deliberately chose not do so, most notably Saudi Arabia. Countries belonging to this group may be employing this strategy to gain a competitive advantage over a broader time horizon. If you are interested in an in-depth analysis I refer you to my previous article A Chess Match for the Control ...
... since WWI, what will America do now?
Going forward, here’s what we can expect:
1.) America will try very hard to distance itself from the Gulf.
It’s amazing that it’s taken us so long to realize how much our money going into Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Gulf states comes back to haunt us: though Joe Biden recently got in trouble for saying so, support for ISIS and other Islamic extremists and terrorists from very wealthy individuals motivated by the Saudi state-sponsored ...
... into the excess of offer, which inevitably led the price to decline and eventually drop dramatically, since the onset of the crisis around June 2014.
One key aspect is that producing countries, and notably OPEC's highly influential member Saudi Arabia, refrained to cut their output, which has inevitably aggravated the situation.
There are currently two theories trying to make sense of the position of Saudi Arabia, that I will analyze in a moment. Both of them are reasonable, and non ...
... in prices is fraught with unexpected consequences.
Conspiracy, the laws of the market, and the oil weapon
When everything is so bad, conspiracy theories are the simplest explanation. What they boil down to is the idea that the USA and its OPEC ally Saudi Arabia have taken a political decision to bring about a collapse in prices in order to weaken Russia for acting, as they see it, too independently in the international arena, especially in Syria and Ukraine.
diepresse.com
Sami Faraj, President of ...
In what is being branded as an effort to provide palliative assistance to reduce hunger and boost democracy building living standards Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank and Ban Ki Moon, secretary general of the United Nations, have launched a plan that expands the strategically significant “Horn of Africa” to encompass 18 percent of the total continent.
Their recent trip to Addis Ababa and Mogadishu to buzz up the project was reported with optimism by major western media and...
...
Henry Kissinger, who commended RIAC members during discussions a few months ago, recently posited that Iran is a bigger threat than ISIS because, as a political and religious institution, it has been around longer, and has long held the goal of removing Saudi Arabia as the center of world Islam.
Days before that statement, in a Wall Street Journal teaser article promoting his new book, Kissinger warned that the current world order is collapsing. He used the word “governance” several times ...
... gets ransoms from kidnappings. But that’s not enough to maintain its men and buy arms.”
With ISIL’s growing independence, comes a shrinking ability to control the organization from the outside. This new development actually prompted Saudi Arabia to adopt a stronger stance against the terror group, even though it was keen a few months ago to use its men against President Bashar Al Assad in Syria.
In a rather ironic turn of event, the very warnings which President Al Assad issued ...
