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| Map of Greater Middle East (Morocco to Pakistan) |
Why is oil, the most traded commodity, priced and traded in US Dollars? Does oil trade help maintain the US Dollar as the international trade and reserve currency and solidify US control of the global financial system, giving the US a very powerful tool to control the world?
What is the history of West's involvement in the Middle East? Can it be traced back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in early 20th century?
When did the United States take over where Britain and France left off? Cold War? Iranian leader Mosaddegh's overthrow by CIA? Suez Crisis?
Energy revolution is in full swing in Silicon Valley with widespread use of solar panels, electric vehicles and storage batteries. Like other technologies emerging from Silicon Valley, this energy revolution will spread to the rest of the United States and the world in the next decades. How will it change US policy and posture in the Middle East?
Does the US involvement in the Middle East pose a threat to Pakistan? Is Pakistan next after Iran? Will Pakistan's nuclear weapons help keep Pakistan secure? What economic and other powerful tools does the United States have to put pressure on Pakistan or any other country?
ALKS host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with Misbah Azam and Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com).
https://youtu.be/DQIUue1tb4A
Related Links:
Haq's Musings
South Asia Investor Review
Muslims in Silicon Valley
US Dollar as International Trade/Reserve Currency
Soleimani Was the Hardest of the Hardliner
Sykes-Picot Agreement in Middle East
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
Putin Challenges American Exceptionalism
Remittances to Pakistan Up 21X Since Year 2000
Modi's Kashmir Blunder
Godfather Metaphor for Uncle Sam
Clean Energy Revolution
Destructive Power of Drone Swarm on Saudi Oil Installation
US Dominates List of World's Top Universities
Indian RAW Agent Kulbhushan Jhadav Used Chabahar
Iran-Saudi Conflict
Pakistan's Nuclear Program
Iran Nuclear Deal
1971 India-Pakistan War
Chabahar vs Gwadar Ports
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Riaz Haq's YouTube Channel
PakAlumni Social Network
4 comments:
SIPRI Study: #China is now the 2nd largest arms producer in the world, behind the #UnitedStates but ahead of #Russia. #India is the world's 2nd biggest arms importer. #Pakistan is 9th largest arms importer. https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2020/new-sipri-data-reveals-scale-chinese-arms-industry
New research from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) suggests that China is the second-largest arms producer in the world, behind the United States but ahead of Russia. This research represents the most comprehensive picture of Chinese companies’ weapons production to date.
In the past, a lack of transparency has meant that the value of Chinese companies’ arms sales has been either unknown or difficult to reliably estimate. For this reason, the SIPRI Top 100—an annual ranking of the world’s 100 largest arms-producing and military services companies—has so far not been able to include Chinese arms companies.
Advances in reliable estimates
SIPRI has identified information from 2015–17 on the value of arms sales by major Chinese arms companies. The research looks at four companies for which credible financial information is available. The companies cover three sectors of conventional arms production: aerospace, electronics and land systems. With the increase of available data on these companies, it is now possible to develop reasonably reliable estimates of the scale of the Chinese arms industry.
China has some of the world’s largest arms producers
Based on estimated arms sales in 2015–17, the four major Chinese arms companies chosen for the study can now finally be compared with the major arms companies from the rest of the world. In 2017, of the 20 largest companies in the SIPRI Top 100, 11 were based in the USA, 6 in Western Europe and 3 in Russia. If the four Chinese arms companies investigated in the study were included in the Top 100, they would all rank among the top 20, with combined estimated arms sales totalling $54.1 billion. Three of the companies would be ranked in the top 10.
The largest of the Chinese companies is Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC), which with arms sales totalling $20.1 billion would rank sixth largest in the world. China North Industries Group Corporation (NORINCO), which would place eighth in the Top 100 with sales of $17.2 billion, is in fact the world’s largest producer of land systems.
Weapon production more specialized
Contrary to most other major global arms producers, Chinese arms companies specialize primarily in one arms production sector, for example AVIC produces mostly aircraft and avionics. Most of the large non-Chinese arms companies produce a wider range of military products across different sectors—covering aerospace, land systems and shipbuilding within one company.
For editors
These new estimates are most likely still an underestimate. A lack of transparency in the arms sales figures of Chinese arms companies continues to hinder a complete understanding of China’s arms industry. This new research, however, acts as an important scoping study that opens the possibility for further research and prepares the ground for a fuller estimate of Chinese arms sales.
A century-old treaty of Sèvres imposed on #Turkey still haunts the #Mediterranean. It prefigured the borders and political futures of #Israel, #Syria, #Lebanon, #Iraq. But it’s not remembered in the West as much as the infamous clandestine Sykes-Picot pact https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/08/10/treaty-sevres-erdogan-turkey/
The blueprint set out by the treaty had a lasting legacy, in part prefiguring the borders and political futures of countries like Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. But it’s not remembered in the West as much as, say, the infamous clandestine Sykes-Picot pact, because of what followed in Turkey. Nationalists in the Ottoman ranks, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, rejected Sèvres and waged a series of wars that cast out the French, Greeks and Italians from Anatolia and compelled the Europeans to settle on new terms with the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which defined Turkey’s modern borders. Nevertheless, the memory of colonial Western schemes to deprive Turkey of sovereignty — and the armed struggle needed to foil them — still stalks the Turkish political imagination.
“Sèvres has been largely forgotten in the West, but it has a potent legacy in Turkey, where it has helped fuel a form of nationalist paranoia some scholars have called the ‘Sèvres syndrome,’ ” wrote Nicholas Danforth, a historian of 20th-century Turkey, in a 2015 piece marking the 95th anniversary of the treaty’s signing. “Sèvres certainly plays a role in Turkey’s sensitivity over Kurdish separatism, as well as the belief that the Armenian genocide — widely used by European diplomats to justify their plans for Anatolia in 1920 — was always an anti-Turkish conspiracy rather than a matter of historical truth.”
The treaty looms even larger now. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has a penchant for posturing over historic symbols, began meeting toward the end of last year with the leader of the U.N.-backed government in Libya in a former palace of Ottoman sultans in Istanbul. In the aftermath of one of these sessions, Erdogan explicitly linked his government’s newly emboldened foreign policy to a moment of historical reckoning. “Thanks to this military and energy cooperation, we overturned the Treaty of Sèvres,” he said, hailing his country’s willingness to once more project power across the Mediterranean.
In the months since, Turkish drones and military support have helped the Tripoli-based government turn the tide of battle in Libya’s messy civil war. Erdogan, thanks to Libyan backing, has secured maritime exploration and potential oil drilling rights in the Eastern Mediterranean that put Turkey into a new tussle with other countries in the region, including Greece, Egypt, Cyprus and France. The new Turkish claims clash with those of Greece and Cyprus and flared long-running tensions among these troubled neighbors.
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As Cold War bonds fade, older realities are coming to the fore. When Macron toured Beirut after the explosion last week, promising to help deliver a new political status quo for an infuriated Lebanese public, it was a reminder of the potency still of the French legacy in its former protectorate — and a welcome exercise of soft power for a president more tormented at home.
Pentagon pushes A.I. research toward lethal autonomous weapons
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/pentagon-pushes-ai-research-toward-lethal-autonomous-weapons/
There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles.
That's especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.
It's unclear if the Pentagon is currently formally assessing any fully autonomous lethal weapons system for deployment, as required by a 2012 directive. A Pentagon spokeswoman would not say.
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NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. -- Artificial intelligence employed by the U.S. military has piloted pint-sized surveillance drones in special operations forces' missions and helped Ukraine in its war against Russia. It tracks soldiers' fitness, predicts when Air Force planes need maintenance and helps keep tabs on rivals in space.
Now, the Pentagon is intent on fielding multiple thousands of relatively inexpensive, expendable AI-enabled autonomous vehicles by 2026 to keep pace with China. The ambitious initiative — dubbed Replicator — seeks to "galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said in August.
While its funding is uncertain and details vague, Replicator is expected to accelerate hard decisions on what AI tech is mature and trustworthy enough to deploy - including on weaponized systems.
There is little dispute among scientists, industry experts and Pentagon officials that the U.S. will within the next few years have fully autonomous lethal weapons. And though officials insist humans will always be in control, experts say advances in data-processing speed and machine-to-machine communications will inevitably relegate people to supervisory roles.
That's especially true if, as expected, lethal weapons are deployed en masse in drone swarms. Many countries are working on them — and neither China, Russia, Iran, India or Pakistan have signed a U.S.-initiated pledge to use military AI responsibly.
Oct 31
1,
This thread is From a WikiLeaks cable dated January 24, 2007,
documenting a meeting between Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ), then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and now President of the UAE, and R. Nicholas Burns, the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs at
Show more
Warfare Analysis
@warfareanalysis
·
Oct 31
2, MBZ views on free elections: “Middle East is not California”
"MBZ: if we want to make peace." In "The Middle East," he insisted, "is not
California." In the post 9/11 world "in any Muslim country you will
see the same result." While members of the U.S. Congress and
Show more
Warfare Analysis
@warfareanalysis
·
Oct 31
3, MBZ views on Quran schools: MBZ calls Quran schools “some Taliban schools”
“Correcting the situation required education, according to MbZ, a process that will take 25 to 50 years of focused effort to turn around deeply-rooted cultural phenomena.
In the western part of
Show more
Warfare Analysis
4, MBZ: Muslims should never have free elections, We should worry about 3 Islamic counties: Egypt 🇪🇬, Saudi Arabia 🇸🇦 , and Pakistan 🇵🇰.
“MbZ countered that, "free elections in the Middle East" could eventually mean that the U.S. would "have to find
somewhere else to get 17 million barrels (of oil) a day."
In Iraq, MbZ said, elections had produced "a disaster."
As for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and pressure from jihadists inspired by Iran,
he said he was not worried about the UAE, which could hold out for a
long time: "The Iranians will have a hard time coming here, but we
will lose Arab countries like Lebanon and Palestine.
Thank God for Hosni Mubarak (described as a family friend of the Al Nahyan).
If Egypt has free elections, they will elect the Muslim Brothers."
There were three large Islamic countries to worry about, according to
MbZ: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan.”
https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1984515658084704702
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Warfare Analysis
@warfareanalysis
6, MBZ calls Muslim scholars “some holy man in Mecca”
“Referring to the UAE situation, MbZ opined that of the 60,000
soldier UAE armed forces and its loyalties, some 50 to 80% would
respond to a call of "some holy man in Mekkah."
He repeatedly alluded to being "stoned" by his own citizens if he pushed some
subjects too openly.
Acknowledging the prodding by the U.S. to hold elections, MbZ said the process would take at least 20 years and that focus should be on the next generation.
"When I travel to Saudi
Arabia, I meet with 80-85 year old Saudi leaders who never learned of
the internet until they were 70. There is a big gap in Saudi
Arabia." MbZ said the UAE is addressing the educational aspect of
the problem by privatizing government schools with the aim of
privatizing 25% in 5 years so that there will eventually be 0%
"talebani Quran schools."”
https://x.com/warfareanalysis/status/1984515669862293546
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