Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke): There is no world order left to restore. The West knocked legal and moral norms aside. What remains is dollar coercion and the bomb. Eurasia can build a defensive order first: escape from the dollar and from sanctions, not a concert of powers. “Yes, the world order, well, there is no world order now. It’s been completely trashed. I think that underlying this is the fact that, particularly in the West, we’ve lost the sense of moral values. We’ve let them go. We have only fragments of them. And so when you have no moral values—none of the values which came historically to us from what it means to be human, from what our civilizations told us, those narratives, those myths, those stories that gave the moral architecture to life and to society—we live by those narratives. They formed us and shaped us, and now they’re mostly gone, and we live in a rather crassly material, mechanically rationalist world, and those values are no longer present. It’s all about power and coercion. And so we have a world order that values nothing: legal norms, the norms of morality, the civilizational structures that used to attach to the West are now replaced by bombing of civilian areas, by threatening financial ruin on societies, by actually threatening even to annihilate civilizations. How do you have a world order in this construct? It’s very difficult, because the underpinning commonality of values is just not there anymore. The Russians believe they have values held in common. It’s also an Orthodox Christian state. But quite clearly it’s no longer the case. Those values and those underpinnings have gone. And so what the other states—China, Russia, Iran, India and others—can do is really not to have a proper multipolar order. The best they can do, probably, is to have a deterrence, a defensive order: an order whose prime purpose is to escape from the hegemony of the dollar, to escape from the hegemony of sanctions, to escape from all of those elements. So we are left, therefore, in a world of geopolitical confusion and immorality, with no morals, no sort of final hurdles to clear. They’ve all been cleared. All of the legal norms have been just knocked aside. Moral norms knocked aside. Children, women being killed en masse didn’t matter. All of these things have really made the possibility of having some sort of concert of powers come into existence almost impossible to imagine beyond the sort of defensive element. And that, of course, is where kinetic defense comes into play: to have enough missiles, to have enough means of projecting power. You need these to compensate for the fact that there’s no common language, no common basis for a multi-global order. So the old order is definitely gone, and the new one is probably going to take shape, but it won’t come smoothly. It won’t flow into a new world order, because I think it’ll be very disruptive. We’ve got to go through a process of catharsis, constructive destruction first. And so the destruction is taking place in the Middle East, with Iran changing the whole global order in the Middle East, and with Russia and China changing the global order in Eurasia. So yes, we’re getting there, but it’s going to take some time before that happens. What are the conditions to make that happen? Well, really, either there has to be some form of economic implosion in the West that deprives it of its dollar hegemony and its ability to sanction people, to coerce people through the financial system, or else there’s going to be a geopolitical collapse in the West. But that is still going to mean we’re going to have to move through a rather difficult, turbulent geopolitical process which will be very dangerous and very concerning for people, because it may produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous outcomes.” The concert is finished. Settlement outside the dollar is the first architecture that can exist. The physical economy will settle the rest.

Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke): Voting did not open the system. Romania’s election was cancelled until Brussels got the right name. Germany is still talking about banning the AfD. Young people cannot buy a house. Protest meets militarized police. The establishment has closed the exits. “Elections have not changed anything. They may ultimately change something in Germany. I think they will, but not quite yet, because they’re still thinking in Germany about how to ban the AfD from taking part in elections. Remember what happened to Romania when they had an election? It was just cancelled. It was cancelled until they went on and chose the right candidate for Brussels. We have destroyed most of the political bridges. So young people today can’t get a job. The prices of everything are beyond their reach. They can’t afford to buy a house, can’t afford to rent easily. So what are they going to do? If they protest? You’ve probably seen some of the rushes by the armed, militarized police. They just come in great swaths to attack protesters. There were examples of that just in the last days in France. Strong action against protest. If protest doesn’t work, if voting can’t change or reform the system, what is going to happen? Well, people increasingly are going to turn to violence. That’s, I think, sort of inevitable. It’s a pity, but people have lost all confidence, all trust, all sense of believing in the establishment—the European establishment or the Brussels establishment. They are being closed in and closed in, and there’s only one way out.” A system that cancels the vote and criminalizes protest has already abandoned republican government. The living standard is the other ballot. Brussels cannot print that either.

Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke): Saudi Arabia is a pillar for one family. If it is no longer oil wealth for Wall Street and the petrodollar, there is nothing there. MBS had Trump as his security. That is gone. The reserves went into NEOM. He cannot deal with Ansar Allah because Washington runs the state. “Saudi is a pillar that rests on one person, one family—one family that gerrymandered the succession so that they can become king. Don’t forget Salman changed the succession. It’s supposed to go from brother to brother to brother, and he changed all of that. He has alienated most of the family. It rests on a very fragile pillar. Unless they are seen as the source of oil wealth for Wall Street, for the petrodollar, for Washington—if that cannot be sustained—then what is there to Saudi Arabia? Nothing. There’s nothing there beyond that. This is a huge humiliation in terms of Saudi culture. MBS had Trump on his side. This was his security. This was his basis for going ahead. And suddenly it’s clear to all the rivals, all those people in his own family. You recall the Ritz-Carlton episode, where he literally imprisoned them in a hotel and hung them upside down until all the money came out of their pockets. They were just literally humiliated. Some of them have disappeared. Some of them have been humiliated. And there are the tribes that have been largely dispossessed of their income. So what’s going to happen? Well, there’s no money. The reserves that were built up. No one’s getting paid at the moment. Contracts, building sites—nothing is being paid. There is no money to pay anything. There’s no money to buy people out. There was a big reserve built up of cash, but most of that has gone on these big projects like the NEOM hotel and these other projects, and there’s none of that left. So bin Salman is on his own there, with everyone looking and wondering. This is the end of a colonial structure. The colonial structure is collapsing in the Gulf, and the Saudis are the lynchpin of that. Why doesn’t he just do a deal with the Yemenis? The answer is he’s just too embedded in the United States structures. He can’t do it. He’s always been wholly embedded with US presidents, with the US military structures, down to the last element. They run the state for him, and he just cannot do it. He cannot make a deal with the Houthis. The consequences are huge. Saudi Arabia is not selling oil. It doesn’t have money. It’s not allowed to sell its treasuries. It’s been trying to sell shares, but even its allies in the Gulf don’t want to buy them except at a huge discount, because they’re not sure that Saudi will be there as we know it tomorrow or the next day, or next month. There’s a great reluctance, even from Gulf allies, to come and help him out. We’re seeing a huge shift. All of these post-colonial states are hanging by a thread, because Saudi Arabia and its connections with Israel—and its use by Israel as an Israeli platform over many, many years—have been the pivot for the whole Gulf region. Everyone is watching that. At the same time, Iran is mobilizing a million people into these self-sacrifice battalions of a thousand people each. A million! This isn’t to defend against some expeditionary force from the United States coming and landing on the other side of the Hormuz. I don’t think that’s even possible. I don’t think it’s likely to happen. I don’t think they can go; where would they launch from? How would they arrive? What would be the transport? Who would supply them? How would they fight? What would be the purpose of it? I think in Washington and the Pentagon, everyone came to the conclusion to pursue this, to go on with war against the Houthis, who have effectively won against Saudi Arabia. It seems pointless and would end badly, end much worse, because it might widen and become a much wider regional war involving Iraq. If I were Bahrain or Kuwait seeing the Iranians mobilizing a million men, I would be very frightened indeed. I’m sure they are. This was the bedrock of Israeli policy, the big gamble: to isolate, defame and undermine Iran and to base everything on the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia as the means to assimilate itself into the Middle East—into the region. Now that is visibly shaking before their eyes. Inflation is everywhere. It has gone global. The crisis that was coming has come. It’s arrived. Inflation everywhere is going up because everything moves by diesel in Europe and in America. That’s the delivery system. The trains, often the boats, survive on diesel. So everything is going up. Prices are going up everywhere. Airfares are going up.” The City built the Gulf on oil, garrisons, and a dollar ledger. The physical economy is sending the bill.