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

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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.

Over the past two days, a number of important developments have taken place in Donbass and Ukraine.

Firstly, on May 17th, a group of NATO troops from the US and Canada stepped into a minefield near Avdeevka, a move which ended in explosions and, according to DPR reports, deaths and woundings. This news was published by Russia's leading news agencies, which is in itself an important development, since earlier such resources had been very cautious in speaking of NATO involvement in the war in Donbass. Most significantly of all, Rossiiskaiia Gazeta, the official organ of the Government of the Russian Federation, shared the news.

To briefly recap, Avdeekva is a small satellite town of Donetsk. Since the very beginning of the conflict, the town has been occupied by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Avdeekva is known as an industrial giant, whose coke-chemical plant has worked throughout all four years of the war and been a major source of contention between oligarchs. The overwhelming majority of Avdeevka's residents support the DPR, and one of Donetsk's lines of defense runs right in front of the city. It is in this very city that Ukrainian troops and OSCE observers have been spotted collaborating during military operations.

Allow me to draw the reader's attention to the fact that the DPR's military intelligence reported at least two days before the minefield incident that the Ukrainian Armed Forces' command is preparing a provocation involving NATO troops. It seems that they were deliberately sent into the minefield to blame Western troop deaths on DPR military sabotage. Such information was shared with journalists on May 15th by the speaker of the Donetsk People's Republic's army, Eduard Basurin.

Israeli actions in Gaza are similar to those perpetrated against Jewish people during Nazi persecution, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. Days earlier, he called Israel a "terrorist" and "apartheid" state.

"There is no difference between the atrocity faced by the Jewish people in Europe 75 years ago and the brutality that our Gaza brothers are subjected to," Turkish President Erdogan said on Friday, as cited by AFP.

"The children of those being subject to all sorts of torture in concentration camps during World War II are now attacking Palestinians with methods that would put Nazis to shame," Erdogan reiterated.

The Turkish strongman was speaking in Istanbul, where presidents, prime ministers and other dignitaries from over 40 Muslim states gathered for an emergency meeting of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The gathering showed support for Palestinians and condemned the inauguration of the US embassy in Jerusalem. The OIC has also pledged to create an "international peacekeeping force" to protect the Palestinians.

In 2018, the Syrian war entered into a new phase of the conflict marked by the increased tensions among key powers involved in the standoff. The collapse of ISIS' self-proclaimed Caliphate, which used to be a main formal enemy of both the US-led bloc and the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance, has sharpened the contrast between the goals of the two sides.

The Damascus government, Iran and Russia seek to solve fully the militancy using depending on the situation both diplomatic and military means and to restore the Syrian territorial integrity. In turn, real goals of the US-Israeli bloc and their allies are to limit the Iranian influence in the region, to prevent the Assad government from restoring full control even in a diplomatic way of the country and to establish a weak puppet government in Damascus, if this would be possible in some case.

This is why President Trump's statements about "withdrawing" US troops are followed by reports about new US military facilities under construction in northern Syria. The same reasons are behind the increased Israeli military activity. Tel Aviv would see any strong Damascus government, especially with close ties to Iran, as a threat to its national security.

Representatives Mark Pocan, Dan Kildee, and Hank Johnson Jr. were denied the opportunity to witness conditions on the ground firsthand.

The Trump administration's response to the killings of dozens of Palestinian demonstrators by Israeli soldiers was to fault the organizers of mass demonstrations by people who are living in nightmarish conditions on the Gaza Strip. While a White House spokesman claimed that "the responsibility for these tragic deaths rests squarely with Hamas," the man Donald Trump has charged with renewing the Middle East peace process, presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner, literally faulted protesters amid reports of the mass killing and wounding of Palestinian men, women, and children who were objecting to Israeli policies. "As we have seen from the protests of the last month and even today, those provoking violence are part of the problem and not part of the solution," Kushner claimed at a ceremony marking the opening of the new United States embassy in Jerusalem.

But responsible members of Congress-many of them with long experience observing the Middle East-saw the circumstances more clearly, and responded in more realistic terms.