© AP / Carolyn KasterFILE PHOTO: CIA Director William Burns arrives to testify at a House Select Committee on Intelligence hearing at the Capitol in Washington, DC, March 9, 2023.
During an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia this week, Burns "expressed frustration" with Riyadh and said Washington "felt blindsided" by its renewed diplomacy with both Iran and Syria, multiple unnamed sources told the Journal on Thursday.
The foreign ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia held talks in the Chinese capital on Thursday, where they discussed a number of issues related to the new initiative, including reopening embassies in both countries, designating ambassadors, and even a visit to Riyadh by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.
After years of strife as regional adversaries, Tehran and Riyadh concluded the normalization pact on March 10 following secret talks mediated by Beijing, agreeing to resume formal diplomatic relations after they cut ties in 2016. The deal marked a major diplomatic achievement for China and a significant shakeup in the geopolitics of the Middle East.
Since the agreement was announced, top diplomats from Saudi Arabia and Iran have spoken on the phone at least three times, and hope to reach compromises on several outstanding issues - namely the war in Yemen, which has raged on for more than eight years and left hundreds of thousands dead.
Tehran is also working to reestablish contacts with the United Arab Emirates, another Gulf monarchy long at odds with the Islamic Republic. Earlier this week, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri said his country had appointed an ambassador to Abu Dhabi for the first time in nearly a decade. Riyadh is also reportedly seeking to reach a similar understanding with Syria, and hopes to invite President Bashar al-Assad for a visit later this year, according to Reuters.
While the White House has welcomed the new diplomacy in public, Burns' reported complaints to Saudi officials this week could highlight concerns over Beijing's growing influence in the region. Tensions between Riyadh and Washington have also been on the rise since last year, when OPEC+, a group of major oil exporters led by Saudi Arabia, opted to slash production. The move reportedly "angered" President Joe Biden, who claimed the cut would benefit Russia, another large energy exporter.
Reader Comments
They, and everyone else, can see the impending collapse of the dollar. Happening already. The US ship is sinking. The rats are abandoning the ship. They don't want to sink with it.
The ones who should be most nervous are the Israelis. When the US loses its power, who will protect Israel from the punishment for its genocidal actions? The karmic debt will have to be paid. Meanwhile, peace seems to be spreading all over the region.
Fraudi’s have been UK Zionist’s partners since before Fraudi King Faisal
“PERHAPS THE MOST famous of all Arab-Zionist negotiations is the one that began in June 1918 between Faisal In Husain (1885-1933), later king of Iraq (1921-33), and Dr Chaim Weizmann, long-time president of the World Zionist organization and later president of Israel. Faisal's relations with the Zionists and his attitude to the Palestine question have been the subject of much speculation, comment, and propaganda. The presentation here of forty-one relevant documents, largely (but not exclusively) from the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem,' is an attempt to clarify thoserelations. There is no doubt an imbalance in the origins of the source materials for this study. This imbalance may be explained largely in terms of availability. Perhaps because of differences in attitude towards the safe- guarding of written documents and towards the importance of this par- ticular affair, Zionists and British officials seem to have been far more interested than the Arabs in establishing and preserving contemporary written records surrounding this episode. None of my inquiries to Pales-tinian institutes in Beirut has yielded any comparable documentation. That which exists in Arabic is for the most part in the form of remi-niscences long after the event. The prevailing interpretations of Faisal's relations with the Zionists are confusing and contradictory. On the one hand, most Zionists hold that Faisal had fully understood, and at one time had accepted, Zionist aims in Palestine; indeed, Weizmann's autobiography makes the somewhat exaggerated claim that the two men had shared a 'lifelong friendship." [Link]
"Judaism (ZIONISM) does not accept the cultural and social assumptions around it and therefore it has an inbuilt revolutionary position.... There is something built in to Judaism that says: 'We don't work with the whole world, rather WE ARE AGAINST THE WHOLE WORLD' !" (Rabbi Dr. Yehuda Brandes, Head of the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and Leadership. Jerusalem: Haaretz - 2 September 2011)
All War is Deception.
“Deception is a state of mind and the mind of the State.”— James Jesus Angleton Head of CIA Counter Intelligence 1954-1974
Independent free minded thinkers don’t need confirmation bias “Group Think” to determine what’s true or not for their wheelhouse.
Answers are known. Zewsmedia is a complete mind f*@k joke at this point.