There is compelling evidence to speculate that what is now being attempted by the US in Syria, with its occupation of a large swathe of territory in the north west of the country, is a re-run of the Balkanisation of Yugoslavia in the 1990s — a sovereign state broken up and dismembered after the collapse of the Soviet Union in service to the unipolar world that had just come into being as a result.

The break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a state born out of the carnage of the Second World War, was stark evidence that for hawks within the US political and military establishment the Cold War had not ended it had been won – won by dint of America’s divinely chosen position as the “indispensable nation”, a credo first articulated by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright during an NBC interview in 1998.

READ MORE: Syria of Discord: Iran, US Clash Over Military Presence on Ground

Thus triumphalism abounded within the corridors of power in the land of the free, which cheered on by its willing vassals — such as Tony Blair’s UK government, and various eastern European satellites harbouring unresolved anti-Russian animus — produced an intoxication with overwhelming military power and strength, encapsulated in the eastward expansion of NATO.

© AP Photo/ Ariel Schalit

‘What We Are Seeing is the Collapse of the Attempt to Destroy Syria’ – Analyst

The unending wars and military interventions that have been embarked by the US and its allies since the 1990s, rather than push the frontiers of democracy, have produced nothing but human misery, chaos, and instability. And on a scale hitherto absent.Syria is only the latest country and society to experience the tender mercies of Washington’s self-ordained role as the world’s policeman. It does so not with the objective of maintaining the world as a safe place or democracy or human rights, as tirelessly claimed, but so that global corporations are able to function and prosper and exploit the world’s human and natural resources unimpeded. They call it free market economics. A much more accurate name is’ disruptive unfettered capitalism’, an economic model which is no respecter of borders or cultures, no respecter of even the concept of the nation state.

The presence of US military forces in Syria is illegal. This is a fact that no amount of obfuscation or dissembling can elide. It poses a threat to the security and stability not only of Syria but the entire region. The idea that the presence of US military forces in the country, or anywhere else in the Middle East for that matter, is necessary to bolster security and stability, this is an exercise in peddling fiction. Just ask the people of Iraq or Libya, two countries laid waste by Washington and its allies, if you do not believe me.

READ MORE: Drone Captures Syrian Kurdish Militants Hit by Airstrike in Afrin (VIDEO)

Adding to the pot of instability and US-inspired mayhem in the Middle East is the news that the gargantuan US military budget for 2019 is to include $300 million for the training and equipping of the SDF, Washington’s proxy ground force in Syria, in addition to $250 million to fund the ‘border security force’ in the country that’s been mooted. By way of a reminder, as with the SDF the planned border security force will largely comprise Syrian Kurds attached to the YPG. All this, it’s worth recalling, is being undertaken in clear violation of Syria’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity. It is the very epitome of might is right, redolent of that which sustained the Roman Empire.

The seeming willingness of the Trump administration to rupture its alliance and relationship with fellow NATO member, Turkey, with its commitment to arming and training the Kurds across Ankara’s southern border is remarkable, not to mention inexplicable. President Erdogan’s government has made no bones about the fact it considers it a threat to Turkey’s security, and has pledged to act accordingly. Indeed with its Operation Olive Branch military campaign against the YPG in Afrin, northern Syria, currently underway, involving ground forces deploying across the border in the process, the Erdogan government is making good on this pledge.

The fact is that along with Israel, Turkey is now exploiting the crisis and conflict in Syria to violate its sovereignty with wilful abandon.

It requires neither an abiding love or Russia nor a burning hatred of America to understand the necessity of a world in which no one nation is able or inclined to arrogate to itself the right to exercise global hegemony. Empires are doomed by virtue of the very premise upon which they exist, which is that nations and peoples can be dominated and subjugated by other nations. They cannot. Or at least they cannot over a sustained period.

If history teaches us anything it is that those who seek to dominate only succeed in sowing dragon’s teeth, inviting blowback and backlash. The monster that is Salafi-jihadism and the ensuing spate of terrorist attacks across the world in recent years leaves no doubt of it.

© Sputnik/ Mikhail Alayeddin

WATCH: Alleged Israeli Weapons and Ammunition Found in Deir Ez-Zor, Syria After Liberation From Daesh

The need to check the untrammelled power of Washington is self-evident. Since the Soviet Union was consigned to history in the early 1990s, the US has rampaged across the world like an out of control juggernaut of death and destruction. It has done so regardless of the administration or president occupying the White House.In Donald Trump, a man for whom subtlety is an alien concept, we have ourselves a US president who cannot seem to make up his mind whether he is a recurring character in the Sopranos or the elected leader of the world largest economy and nuclear power.

With his presidency, the sheer reckless, aggressive and capricious character of it, the time has come to pose the question: Who will save us from America?

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.

Nothing normally ever happens in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) without a reason, which is why the death of Prince Mansour bin Muqrin, along with seven government officials, in a helicopter crash near the Yemen-Saudi border at the same time as the aforesaid purge was taking place is hard to confidently attribute to coincidence.

The official reason given for carrying out this recent frenzy of arrests, demotions and sackings has been given as anti-corruption. However only the most naive could possibly believe, given the circumstances and timing, that this is the sole or even primary motive for such a drastic and far-reaching purge of the country’s upper echelons.

© AP Photo/ SSGT Sean M. Worrell/DOD

Helicopter With Prince, Government Officials Crashes in Saudi Arabia

At just 32 the crown prince is on course to be the youngest Saudi king in the nation’s relatively short history. Surrounded by rivals and potential rivals for his father’s throne — chief among them son of the late King Abdullah, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah — and what with the various crises that have beset the oil-rich Sunni theocracy of late, there seems no doubt that a changing of the guard driven by not only internal motives but also geopolitical reasons with Iran in mind.

The sudden resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, a close ally of the faction of the Saudi power structure that has just been upended by Prince Salman’s purge, merely adds to the intrigue involved in this affair. Someone in no doubt as to the connection between Hariri’s resignation, which the Lebanese Prime Minister blamed on an Iranian/Hezbollah plot to assassinate him, is Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the aforementioned Lebanese resistance movement. In a recent televised address to his supporters, Nasrallah claimed, “It was not his [Hariri’s] intention, not his wish and not his decision to quit,” asserting that the decision was “imposed” on him by his Saudi backers.

That, as mentioned, Saudi Arabia is a state currently engulfed by multiple crises is putting it mildly. The war in Yemen has entered its third year with no end in sight. Indeed the recent interception of a ballistic missile, launched from Yemen and headed for the airport in the Saudi capital Riyadh, is evidence of the quagmire the war has become for the kingdom. The human toll of the conflict on the Yemeni people — and deafening silence on the part of Western governments, especially the kingdom’s closest Western allies, the US and UK, over the war crimes committed against civilians by Saudi forces — has been so egregious as to leave no doubt, if indeed there could be any, of the desperation on the part of what increasingly resembles a rogue state to neuter the power and influence of Iran in the region.

The Shia behemoth, Iran, is as everyone knows Riyadh’s most bitter regional rival and mortal enemy. It is an objective that drives the kingdom’s foreign policy and alliances, both within and without the region, and which like a rabid dog coveting a bone is an obsession that has succeeded in banishing rationality from its actions in recent years.

The failure of the kingdom’s designs for regime change in Damascus, the failure of its war aims in Yemen, the sharp fall in the price of oil and its concomitant impact on the Saudi economy, an historically high level of youth unemployment at home and clamor of condemnation internationally over the country’s deplorable human rights record — taken together with its failure to weaken Tehran, despite doing its utmost to leverage US aggression against the Iranians, and we are witnessing a country in political meltdown.

© REUTERS/ Bandar Algaloud/Courtesy of Saudi Royal Court

Ex-US Military Official: Fear of Rising Iran Likely Influenced Saudi’s Purge

What should be borne in mind is that Saudi Arabia and Iran are already in a de facto state of war, and have been for a number of years. Each heads a countervailing and antagonistic regional axis of religious, political and geopolitical rivalry, pitted in a determined struggle that evinces no sign of abating. The Saudis, backed by Washington and the West, represent a rigid sectarian Sunni vision for the region, while the Iranians — along with their close allies Hezbollah, the Assad government in Syria, and in conjunction with Russia — are a pillar of non-sectarianism and resistance to US hegemony.

The Israelis, meanwhile, share in Iran a common enemy with Riyadh. Thus the under-the-radar visit to Israel by crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in September, despite both countries sharing no formal diplomatic ties, allows us to speculate that military and intelligence cooperation when it comes to dealing with Iran is now considered of such strategic importance by both countries that it supersedes any other consideration or difference between them.

In his classic Renaissance text, The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli provides a blueprint for any prospective leader determined not only to assume power but even more importantly maintaining power.

“The new ruler must determine all the injuries that he will need to inflict. He must inflict them once and for all,” Machiavelli writes.

Time will tell whether Saudi Arabia’s crown Prince Salman is, as some suggest, bent on opening the door to modernity and reform in a society that has long laboured under the stifling weight of religious sectarianism, oppression and with it corruption and hypocrisy on the part of its sclerotic elite. Whatever unfolds in the weeks and months ahead, Saudi Arabia is a state that currently exists in the cross hairs of multiple and enveloping crises of its own design.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

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