“From direct negotiations between the United States and Iran for the first time in nearly half a century… to coordinated diplomatic and military movement across the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond… the old geopolitical order is being replaced in real time. This is not chaos. This is strategy.”
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This is required viewing if you are interested in what is happening in Iran, the Middle East and the world. It’s a great take on the events of today and historically. I hope he’s right. ABN
Besides enjoying what he did, I love the sound of spoken Hungarian. What looked like defeat, may turn out to be a victory for Europe as well as Hungary. ABN
President Trump appeared for an extensive interview with Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business. The interview is essentially broken down into two interrelated contexts, the Iran conflict and the overall economic issues. There are two segments, in this post we focus on the first segment.
Here Trump is discussing the overall economy and there is an unusual dynamic in the background. As the Iran conflict unsettles the oil/gas markets and the overall global energy sector, there are two facets to the USA impact.
On one hand, say the Main Street side, Trump understands the price of gasoline is being impacted by the overall price of oil. For Americans the increase in gasoline price is moderate compared to the rest of the world; however, each dollar spent on gasoline is a dollar the middle-class doesn’t have to spend on something else. That can have a negative impact on GDP overall, but the dollar spent stays in the U.S. economy.
On the other hand, say the Wall Street side, Trump also understand as more global markets seek to export U.S. oil, the U.S. energy sector expands GDP through increased export value. In my estimation, the Quarter #2 GDP is expanding at a much higher rate (due to the export of Oil/Gas) than the internal impact from higher gas prices. I expect to see significant increases in GDP growth as a result. Those Q2 calculations will come at the end of July this year.
Trump also hits on a good -albeit politically incorrect-point about the preceding illegal alien influx, supported by Joe Biden. The economic migrants who entered the country illegally were not -as a whole- the type of migrant looking to be responsible for their own economic outcome. These were illegal aliens comfortable with govt handouts and govt subsidies. This is why it remains critical for the U.S. economy to capture and deport those who entered illegally during that period.
The Trump administration is seeking to get other nations to cut back on global humanitarian aid and ‘promote America First values’ by investing in US companies, according to new reports.
The ‘trade over aid’ initiative will be an opportunity to use the United Nations system to ‘create business opportunities for US companies,’ per a cable sent to all US embassies and consulates.
In the cable reviewed by The Washington Post, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered all US diplomats to issue a démarche – an official call to action – to all foreign nations by Monday that asks them to support the new initiative.
The US plans to introduce this idea at the UN at the end of April, according to the cable.
‘For decades, government aid has been flowing from developed to developing countries with only limited impact,’ according to one of the notes the outlet obtained.
‘It has not solved the world’s economic development challenges, and it has often created dependency, inefficiency, and corruption.’
‘Donors and developing countries are ready to try a new development aid model,’ the note continued.
Even before Trump returned to power in 2025, Western nations including Germany, Sweden, Canada and Norway have been reducing foreign aid since at least 2022.
And since Trump’s proposed reordering of the global aid system, France, Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom have largely followed suit.
Data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that aid from its members has dropped by about 23 percent from 2024 to 2025.
Many people have requested that I outline some context on the Iran conflict; so, here it is.
What follows is my own researched perspective on the challenge that President Trump is facing. I anticipate the non-interventionists will not be happy with it, and also the Israel First crowd will not like the brutal pragmatism of it. Alas, having spent a great deal of time watching things unfold, here’s my take.
Start with this question: Considering all the years the debate over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has persisted, why haven’t its strongest allies, China and Russia, ever provided Iran with a nuclear weapon?
Now, before anyone jumps into the nuclear non-proliferation perspective, let me remind you we are not going to pretend things here. You can pretend that Beijing didn’t give the DPRK nuclear weapons by pretending that North Korea isn’t a proxy province of China. Or you can stop pretending. The choice is yours!
So, what’s different? Well, in the DPRK example, Beijing holds the control mechanism. For Iran, giving religious fanatics a nuclear weapon would be tantamount to giving the Muslim Brotherhood the ability to start World War III.
As recently noted, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman urged President Trump not to back down from this moment of consequence and to eliminate the Iranian threat once and for all. MbS is about as close to a Middle East pragmatist as you can find. In response, a desperate British Prime Minister Keir Starmer rushed to Saudi Arabia hoping to change the position of MbS. Great Britain is almost out of fuel.
That’s a good place to start looking at the regional perspectives.
VP JD Vance’s 35-year-old chief of staff is Jewish pro-Israel strategist Jacob Reses.
Vance delivered a Jewish wedding prayer at Reses’ wedding in January. The Vice President hardly goes anywhere without Reses and maintains a close personal relationship with him.
While opposed to mass immigration, abortion, and strong on social issues like transgenderism, Reses is a fervent Zionist who celebrated the erection of Israel’s flag “over the rubble” of Gaza.
Reses has been outspoken about his Zionism from an early age. At Princeton, Reses served as treasurer of Tigers for Israel, where he vocally criticized a pro-Palestine student group that targeted the hummus maker Sabra over its alleged links to Israeli human rights abuses in the occupied territories.
Reses has publicly advocated for a coalition between conservative Christians and Jews. In September 2025, he reposted Joe Lonsdale’s post remarking that Jews should no longer be “squeamish” about the majority’s invocation of the “Christian deity” and other elements of the Christian faith.
Israel’s veiled threat to Moscow came just after Russian media warned traffic cameras in Moscow were vulnerable to the same exploits that Israel reportedly used to monitor Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence before assassinating him.
Israeli military spokeswoman Anna Ukolova has drawn outrage in Moscow after threatening that Russian authorities who “wish Israel ill” could be subject to “elimination,” while suggesting Israel could hack into Russian closed-circuit television cameras to identify and track targets.
Asked by a journalist with Russian radio broadcaster RBC whether Israel had access to Russian traffic cameras, Ukolova declined to answer directly but warned that “Khamenei’s elimination shows our capabilities are serious” and that “no one who wishes us harm will be left aside.”
She added, ominously, “I hope Moscow does not wish Israel ill right now – I’d like to believe that.”
Ukolova’s statements came just days after it was revealed that a large number of Russian CCTVs were potentially using BriefCam – an Israeli video analysis software that closely matches the description of a program the Netanyahu regime reportedly deployed to track Iranian movements outside the home of Iran’s Supreme Leader before they assassinated him during their February 28 sneak attack.
UPDATE: Below is a thoughtful comment I found under the article above. It describes precisely how a great deal of mind-control works. Define the terms, commandeer the psycholinguistics and you will control entire civilizations, and move them in any direction you like. ABN
1. Humans are highly cogno-linguistic. We perceive reality largely by the language that we use to describe it. Most everyone believes and presumes that you have to be able to think something before you can say it. The more dominant-reality is that, above a certain base-level of perception and communication, you have to have the words, language, grammar, and comprehensive-concordance-syntax by which to say something before you can think it. Whosoever controls language – controls the mind – for better or for worse.
2. The world is ever-increasingly controlled and administered by people who genuinely believe whatever is necessary for the answer they need. Administrative agents of broadly-defined entrenched-financial-power have solved the criminal-law enigma of mens rea or guilty-mind by evolving or devolving (take your pick) into professional-schizophrenics who genuinely believe whatever they need to believe for the answer they need, and who communicate among themselves subconsciously by how they name things, and by how things are named for them. They suffer a cogno-linguistically-induced diminished-capacity that renders them largely-incapable of perceiving reality beyond labels.
3. Their core business-model or modus operandi is called a systematized-delusion:
“A “systematized delusion” is one based on a false premise, pursued by a logical process of reasoning to an insane conclusion ; there being one central delusion, around which other aberrations of the mind converge.” Taylor v. McClintock, 112 S.W. 405, 412, 87 Ark. 243. (West’s Judicial Words and Phrases (1914)).
American Buddhist Net 