With the "Russian collusion" narrative disintegrating fast, as even the biggest Russiagate cheerleaders exit stage left now that the public's attention has shifted to the FBI itself for having created the narrative after planting at least one infiltrator - Stefan Halper - in the Trump campaign, overnight the NYT tried to pivot the collusion story away from Russia and toward the middle east, reporting that Trump advisers met with an emissary for two Gulf nations during the campaign, a meeting arranged by Blackwater founder Erik Prince, suggesting countries beyond Russia may have offered help.

Cutting-edge corvette 'Uragan' has been deployed to Lake Ladoga for tests before joining Russia's Baltic Fleet. The ship will boast Kalibr and Onyx missiles, as well as modern electronic equipment.

The 'Uragan' corvette has been towed to Lake Ladoga from the Pella shipyard in the city of St. Petersburg, Russia's Defense Ministry said on Friday. The vessel then proceeded to the sailing tests on its own.

"It is our right to transfer the Arabs ... The Arabs should go!" - Yosef Weitz, leading Zionist figure, director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), 1940

"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." - David Ben-Gurion, 1937

"The main thing is, first and foremost, to hit them hard. Not just one hit... but many painful [hits], so that the price will be unbearable. ... To bring them to a state of panic that everything is collapsing ... fear that everything will collapse ... The world will say nothing. The world will say that we are defending ourselves." - Current Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, 2001

While Israel claims "security" and "defense of its border" to justify the recent mass murder in Gaza, the historical record of Israel's founding fathers and government planners paints a different picture entirely. Aware that an "injustice was unavoidable" for their state to be established, the early Zionist settlers adopted a position of pure hegemony towards the Palestinians - which continues to this day. They had to be "shown the power of Israel" through the "use of force" until they were "compelled to concede" and "submit" to Israeli rule.

Yet, according to President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, the recent move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem marks the start of "the journey to peace," with "a strong America recognizing the truth."

"What a glorious day!" Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the event, telling Trump "You have made history."

Indeed - while legitimizing Israel's colonization of Jerusalem, as well as the massacre in Gaza only miles away, all while proclaiming a dedication to "peace" and "truth" - the event perfectly encapsulates what the U.S. really means when it speaks of "peace," and the "truth" of what policy towards the Palestinians really looks like.

The American Century, so triumphantly proclaimed in a 1941 Life magazine editorial by US establishment insider Henry Luce, was built on the control of oil and on an endless succession of wars for that control of global oil. Now, ironically, with the illegal and unilateral cancellation of the Iranian nuclear agreement by the US President, oil may be set to play a key, if unintended, role in the downfall of the global hegemony of that same American Century.

Each element of various countries' recent and increasing steps to get away from dollar dependency, in and of itself is insufficient to end the domination of the US dollar through Washington's ability to force other countries to buy or sell their oil only in dollars. Yet each unilateral provocation and sanction action by Washington forces other countries to find solutions only four years ago not deemed possible or practical.

Since the 1973 oil price shock following the Yom Kippur War, Washington and Wall Street have moved to ensure that OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, would sell its oil only in US dollars. That insured that demand for the US currency could be more or less independent of the internal state of the US economy or of the Government debt or deficits. That system, dubbed petrodollar recycling by Henry Kissinger and others at the time, was a vital underpinning of US global ability to project its power at the same time it allowed its major corporations to walk away from national domestic taxes and investment, in the process of out-sourcing to places like China or Mexico, Ireland or even Russia. Were a significant group of nations to abandon the dollar and turn to other currencies or even barter at this point, it could start a chain-reaction of events that would lead to sharp US interest rate increases and a new US financial crisis that would be far uglier than that a decade ago.

Recent developments appear to strengthen the likelihood of a world-changing 'parting of the ways' between the US and Europe. The EU sounds serious about rejecting Washington's wishes and sticking to the Iran Deal, investing heavily in Iran's economic development and by-passing the 'petrodollar system' to trade in euros if necessary.

Will European countries like Germany instead forge closer trade and security relations with Russia? Does Trump, and those among the US elites who support his doubling-down against Iran and for Israel/Saudi Arabia, realize the implications of this 'break-up' for US dollar hegemony? Is this the 'return to US isolationism' US coastal elites dread so much?

For all the criticism Trump's foreign policy receives - from the Left and from Globalists, for being a 'bull in a China shop'; from the Right and those who voted for him, for 'caving to the Deep State' - the US president appears to be broadly sticking to his election mandate of 'America First', a strategic outlook that may indicate the beginning of the dismantling the US Empire.

This week on Behind the Headlines, Joe Quinn and Niall Bradley (re)assess Trump's actions in the context of a global shift towards 'multipolarity'.


Running Time: 01:21:33

Download: MP3

Russian President Vladimir Putin said a naval standing force, including warships with Kalibr long-range land attack cruise missiles, will be permanently deployed in the Mediterranean Sea. The statement was made at a meeting with top military officials and defense industry leaders that took place in Sochi on May 16. One of the missions is delivering strikes against terrorist targets in Syria. 102 expeditions of ships and submarines are planned in 2018. The force will go through intensive training.

The Russian Black Sea Fleet has become a much different force in comparison to what it was just three years ago. Since 2015, the year the operation in Syria was launched, it has received 15 new ships, including two frigates and six conventional submarines armed with Kalibr cruise missiles. With S-400 and S-300V4 air defense systems, Krasukha-4 electronic warfare systems and shore-based anti-ship Bastion batteries deployed on the Syrian coast, the ships in Eastern Mediterranean operate in a relatively safe environment. Kalibr missiles have already been fired from frigates and submarines at terrorist targets in Syria.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad paid an unannounced visit to Vladimir Putin on Thursday evening at the Russian president's summer home in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi where the two leaders discussed the process for winding down the war in Syria, and notably the reduction of foreign troop presence in the country.

This marks the third such known meeting inside Russia between Assad and President Putin since 2015, and the first since two major instances of external airstrikes on the Syrian government dramatically escalated the prospect for broader war. The first was the April 13th US-led coalition attack involving over one hundred missiles on sites in and around Damascus; and the second was the May 10 Israeli attack on dozens of targets inside Syria in what was the biggest military escalation between the two countries in decades.

The steady deterioration of relations between these two erstwhile long-time allies is continuing with the latest political crisis between them that was sparked by the US' decision to limit the distance that Pakistani diplomats in DC could travel outside the city. Islamabad imposed reciprocal measures against American diplomats located anywhere in the country, and the situation has since remained frozen, but is nowhere near resolved.

While American-Pakistani relations have been worsening for the past couple of years now and especially since Trump's aggressive New Year's tweet against the country, they hit a low point when an American military attaché who had hit and killed a motorcyclist was originally forbidden from leaving the country aboard a US military plane that had come to retrieve him last week. A Pakistani court had ruled that he didn't have full diplomatic immunity but he nevertheless left the country on Monday under unclear circumstances.


It was presumably the legal actions initially pursued against this diplomat that infuriated the US to the point of wanting to humiliate all Pakistani diplomats in the American capital through the imposition of new travel restrictions, but Islamabad had a good reason for broadening its own reciprocal decree to include all American diplomats anywhere in the country. It was reported at the end of last month that the CIA failed in its secret plan to stage a jailbreak to free its local agent who was accused of cooperating with American intelligence in its quest to kill Bin Laden, and it's well-known that US diplomats sometimes clandestinely go beyond their official duties in running spies inside their host nation. That's probably what the Pakistanis are worried about after the news broke that the CIA was trying to organize a jailbreak, one which probably would have been violent and likely resulted in the deaths of some prison guards.

The European Union took steps Friday to avoid reimposed US sanctions on Iran and save the international nuclear deal as a rift with Washington widened.

The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, moved to help EU firms skirt US penalties and have member governments directly pay Iran's central bank for oil.

The commission, which took two other steps, said it was acting on a "green light" EU leaders gave at a meeting in the Bulgarian capital Sofia on Thursday.

The commission "launched the formal process to activate the blocking statute by updating the list of US sanctions on Iran falling within its scope," it said.