Puppet Masters
By slapping "useless sanctions" on Iran's top officials, Washington has precipitated "the permanent closure of the path of diplomacy," the spokesperson for the Islamic Republic's Foreign Ministry, Seyyed Abbas Mousavi, said on Tuesday. "Trump's desperate administration is destroying the established international mechanisms for maintaining world peace and security."
His words were echoed by Iran's envoy to the UN, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, who said "there is no way that Iran and the US can start a dialogue" while Washington is applying economic pressure and sanctions against the country.
On Monday, the US announced plans to blacklist Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. President Trump explained that the new sanctions are a response to Iran shooting down a US drone last week, among other things. He also said that he had considered striking several targets on Iranian soil, but called off the attack.
But investors beware: while a pause is better than escalation, it won't refresh the economy enough to forestall a challenging path for risk assets. A pause, particularly one that comes without preconditions and follows a period of heated rhetoric, would be positive, signaling that both sides want to avoid further economic damage. If it coincides with Fed dovishness, a pause could boost investor sentiment and risk asset prices in the short term. However, we'd view this more as a set-up to sell risk than a catalyst to turn more bullish. Consider the following:
"Just like us, Iran is legitimately present on Syrian territory to help fight terrorists, invited by the legitimate Syrian government," Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters in Moscow on Monday, after a meeting with his Egyptian colleague Sameh Shoukry. Much of their press conference was dedicated to another meeting, however, as Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev was in Jerusalem for talks with his Israeli counterpart Meir Ben-Shabbat and US national security advisor John Bolton.
Further meetings between Patrushev, Bolton and Ben-Shabbat are scheduled for Tuesday, and the three are supposed to produce a joint statement.
Bolton was dispatched to Israel while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, after US President Donald Trump decided not to launch an attack on Iran last week. Pompeo's officially published agenda includes discussions of "dangers posed by Iranian destabilizing activity."
This focus on Iran to the exclusion of everything else was "counterproductive," Lavrov said. "Israel and the Americans are above all concerned with Iran, not just when it comes to Syria but also this region in general, and maybe even in a much wider geographical area."
"We consider it very, very dangerous how the situation is developing in [the Persian Gulf] as well as in Syria," the top Russian diplomat added. "There are attempts to turn the territory of Syria into a battlefield between Israel and Iran, between Sunnis and Shia. This is bad and only aggravates the crisis."
Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev stated in negotiations with US National Security Adviser John Bolton and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu that the Russian military has information that the US drone, destroyed in an incident on 20 June, was shot down in Iranian airspace thus confirming the information earlier provided by Tehran. The US, for its part, insists that the UAV was flying above neutral waters when it was destroyed.
The former vice president took to the pages of the Miami Herald on Monday to lay out his approach to immigration, positioning himself as the antidote to a toxic president who "is only interested in using his policies to assault the dignity of the Hispanic community and scare voters to turn out on Election Day." Those policies have created a "horrifying" situation at the border, Biden wrote, and have taken "a wrecking ball" to US relations in Latin America.
Ever eager to wield his credentials as vice president under the Barack Obama administration, Biden boasts that he was involved in crafting the prior government's policies toward Latin America, but Obama's legacy on immigration reflects dismally on a candidate running on a pro-migrant platform.
Throughout President Obama's two terms, more people were deported than under any previous administration, according to government data, earning him the unfortunate title of 'Deporter in Chief.' During Obama's first four years in office, nearly 400,000 people were deported per year, topping out in 2012 at over 409,000.
Despite Trump's reputation as a superhawk on the border, his presidency has seen fewer deportations per year than his predecessor, with around 250,000 in 2017 and 2018, and just over 280,000 so far this year.
Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin will likely include discussion of Iran, Ukraine, Syria, and issues of arms control, a senior White House official confirmed to Reuters. It's an encounter certain to send the president's detractors into a frenzy. They are still attempting to track down the notes of his interpreter from a previous meeting between the two leaders.
"The president is quite comfortable with any outcome" to his meeting with China's President Xi Jinping, the official said, adding that the meeting is an opportunity for Trump to assess his Chinese counterpart's position on the ongoing trade war. Trump has not met with Xi since the last G20 in Buenos Aires, and has promised to make a decision on whether or not to apply $300 billion in additional tariffs to Chinese goods following the meeting.
Trump will also meet with the recently-reelected Indian PM Narendra Modi, both one-on-one and in a trilateral meeting with Japan's Shinzo Abe to discuss a "free and open Indo-Pacific concept," the White House confirmed last month.
At the time I was the only British politician still traveling to sanctions-stricken Iraq and the only one who met regularly with the Iraqi leadership in the run-up to the war. As a sweetener, Boris, for it was he, threw in that he didn't "believe all that stuff" about weapons of mass destruction. Not that such disbelief was ever enunciated publicly of course. I passed on his request but the Iraqis, never having heard of him, turned down the request.
His call and its follow-up pressure taught me several things about the future foreign secretary and soon-to-be prime minister.
The decision marked the first time that a major sanction imposed on Moscow since its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region in March 2014 has been reversed.
With 47 member states, the Council of Europe is the continent's main human rights body.
A total of 118 parliamentarians agreed to welcome Russia back into PACE immediately and to blunt the assembly's ability to impose sanctions similar to those on Russia in the future. Sixty-two members of the parliamentary assembly voted against the move and 10 abstained.
In a resolution, PACE decided that its members' "rights to vote, to speak, and to be represented in the Assembly and its bodies shall not be suspended or withdrawn in the context of a challenge to or reconsideration of credentials." The assembly said this clarification of its rules was to "ensure that member States' right and obligation to be represented and to participate in both statutory bodies of the Council of Europe is respected."
"Due to the incendiary balloons launched from the Gaza Strip against the Israeli territories with an aim to cause fire in [Israeli] regions surrounding Gaza, it was decided that fuel supplies to a power station in the Gaza Strip through a border crossing would be suspended from today and until further notice", Avichay Adraee, a member of the IDF Arab media division, said on his Twitter.
The statement comes after fire balloons from Gaza caused at least 13 fires in southern Israel on 24 June, with two of them lasting well into the night of 25 June.
Israel imposed a maritime blockade on Gaza on 12 June after several of these balloons caused eight fires in the country's south. The blockade was eased a week later.
Benjamin Netanyahu is confronting both difficulties at once: a second round of elections in September that he may struggle to win; and an attorney general who is widely expected to indict him on corruption charges shortly afterwards.
Netanyahu is in an unusually tight spot, even by the standards of an often chaotic and fractious Israeli political system. After a decade in power, his electoral magic may be deserting him. There are already rumblings of discontent among his allies on the far right.
Given his desperate straits, some observers fear that he may need to pull a new kind of rabbit out of the hat.















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Goad, threaten, backtrack: Trump & Bolton's Iran policy is confusing, dangerous & achieves NOTHING