[MAIL] Jeffrey Epstein was likely a Russian spy, Poland's prime minister has claimed. Epstein as a Russian agent would be a very popular news and campaign slogan in Poland.
Donald Tusk made the explosive claim at a government meeting, revealing that Polish authorities will be investigating the dead paedophile financier's possible links with Russian intelligence.
He said: 'More and more leads, more and more information, and more and more commentary in the global press all relate to the suspicion that this unprecedented paedophilia scandal was co-organised by Russian intelligence services. "Russia, Russia, Russia." Didn't work then, won't work now.
I don't need to tell you how serious the increasingly likely possibility that Russian intelligence services co-organised this operation is for the security of the Polish state.
'This can only mean that they also possess compromising materials against many leaders still active today.'
The US Department of Justice released millions of file related to Epstein, who was found dead in his New York prison cell in 2019, on Friday.
The cache has revealed his ties to many prominent people in politics, finance, academia, media and business - both before and after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to prostitution charges.
The files include 1,056 documents naming Russian President Vladimir Putin and 9,629 referring to Moscow.
Among the files was a statement to the FBI made by a confidential source who claimed that Epstein was a wealth manager for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe. Financial advisor for Putin? Ohferfoksake! Surely we can do much better than that.
Epstein's sex empire was 'KGB honeytrap' with Russian girls flown in to harvest 'kompromat'
The source, who was not named in the document - marked 'Secret' and not for 'foreign nationals' - said Epstein was 'president Vladimir Putin's wealth manager and provided the same service for [former] Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.' Neither Epstein or Mugabe are currently available for comment. How convenient. I personally blame Charles Krauthammer.
The FBI source also claimed that Epstein 'had dirt on other people' and made his money from 'charging his clients fees to hide their money offshore.' Why would Epstein's unexplained wealth hold such an attraction to the Bureau? "Fees" for SWZ money laundering? What facts regarding the source of Epstein's wealth are we being led away from ?
Epstein also ran 'the world's largest honeytrap operation' on behalf of the KGB when he procured women for his network of associates, intelligence sources told the Mail on Sunday.
The sources say it could explain why Epstein appeared to enjoy an ultra-wealthy lifestyle out of kilter with his career as a financier, although there is no documentary evidence linking Putin and his spies directly to Epstein's illicit activities. "No documentary evidence" of Russia, Russia, Russia....except unnamed sources. I'm so confused. What is this article about again ?
But the sources also claim that while US security services 'monitored' Epstein's Russian connections for years, their UK equivalents were hesitant due to Epstein's connection to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
The cache includes an email claiming Bill Gates asked one of Epstein's advisers to provide medicine to treat sexually transmitted diseases due to 'sex with Russian girls' - something he has dismissed as 'completely false'.
#2
Email to Peter Thiel:
As you probably know I represent the Rothschilds.
Media: Russia, Russia, Russia.
Publicist: Is it going to be 100% Jew Night?
Epstein replied: No. Goyim in abundance. JPMorgan execs brilliant wasps.
What's a Goyim?
What's a W.A.S.P.?
Are these terms Russians use? Sounds more bolshevik than russian, wouldnt you say?
Meanwhile media: Russia Russia Russia.
Epstein: This is the way the jew makes money... made a fortune in the past ten years selling short shipping futures... Let the goyim deal in the real world.
Russia Russia Russia.
He sounds like a Russian Spy to me.
#3
In 2012 the US Office of Personnell Management contracted with a mainland Chinese "company" to manage its database. This includes the classification and clearance processes and basically lets them blackmail US intelligence agents at will.
In 2014 the US started to help them develop a virus that killed 2 million people here.
Mossimo: "Lookit! Joo Joo Joo Joo...." "He said Goyim!"
Y'know, I don't think America's gonna make it. The establishment are clever nazis and the resistance are retarded nazis.
#4
I thought Epstein was working for Mossad. Maybe he was a double agent...or a triple agent. Maybe he was procuring little boys for Baraq. Who knows?
I know one thing. I'm getting tired of people telling all these wild stories about Epstein when the only people in a position to really know are not talking...maybe because they're dead or maybe because they have a lot to lose. I'm not sure we could believe them anyway. If you ask these people the time of day they'd probably lie about it just for fun.
It's funny to hear that Bill Gates contracted a disease from Epstein provided Russian whores. I wouldn't put it past the likes of Bill Gates but if this information comes from an email written by Epstein I wonder how reliable the information is. Do we have any corroboration?
All this speculation is getting tedious.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/03/2026 13:28 Comments ||
Top||
#5
/\ I thought Epstein was working for Mossad.
Not wrong there, it was likely a trilateral operation. But it would appear the evildoer has now been identified as Vlad Putin.
#6
The best comment I saw re: Bill Gates was an image on X, with him next to Napoleon and Hitler, with the caption "they all came to regret entering Russia."
Alas, I can't find it. If I search i get a zillion controlled opposition conspiracy theorists talking about how Hitler was a British agent.
They're useful idiots to someone, but I dont know who.
#9
The Epstein Intel-Op Blackmail Legacy will always be both sticky and murky. It's very murky nature has a certain confirming nature given the cut-out, false-flag and misdirection nature of the Great-Game as Kipling once called it.
But in modern times-the Wilderness of Mirrors honeytrap stories must belong to a villain to ease the mainstream-mind (at least those still sentient with a traditional moral compass). The sketchy nature of the tactic is being scrapped off the Mossad it seems, by allies foreign and domestic, and spray-painted onto the arch-enemy of all liberal meme's, Putin.
And it may well be true that he belongs tarred with this bush-baby, but if so, he is one of several principals, and Mossad, and Langley have a place there as well I suspect.
Well, well, well, if it isn't Ghislaine Maxwell. No wonder the media fought this so hard, we had them dead to rights a decade ago and they covered it up and got away with it.
[PillarsOfWisdomSubstack]
The Epstein Files give me the nostalgic feeling of the 2000s internet where you would find disturbing nauseating photos that haunt you.
That's what the real pre social media, pre corperate internet was about and im glad to finally have it back.
That Epstien Chicken Photo with the human remains is really disturbing.
#1
The photo he's referring to is a dead baby placed between two chickens, as if it were meat.
No wonder they fought so hard not to release the Epstein files.
It's hard not to conclude these people are not literal baby-eating monsters.
You should seek out the photo and take a long, hard look at it. Let it burn into your brain. THIS is why we fight.
It's like that scene in Band of Brothers when they force the German civilians to pick up the bodies in the concentration camp.
#4
I never fully bought the story about Grislaine voluntarily returning to the US from a country without an extradition treaty. I never fully bought the Epstein suicide story either.
To accept that the intelligence and Law Enforcement communities had no knowledge of Comet Pizza and what the Epstien files contained is again, very difficult to believe as well.
To say that there is likely "more to this story" is a gross understatement.
[TownHall] The New York Times and apparently all of polite society was in a tizzy late last month after learning that "fringe" researchers had "gained access" to National Institutes of Health data from thousands of children and, according to reporter Mike McIntire, "used it to produce at least 16 papers purporting to find biological evidence for differences in intelligence between races, ranking ethnicities by I.Q. scores and suggesting Black people earn less because they are not very smart."
As has been the case with the ’IQ question’ for decades, the approach used by the media and political establishment, and the NYT here, is to, without offering a shred of reasoning or evidence, simply malign and dismiss research into the topic as "biased and unscientific" and not approved by "mainstream geneticists." Yet, it was obvious the outlet was disturbed by the "fringe" researchers’ reliance on the "prominent" Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study because it "gave their theories an air of analytical rigor." Oh, the horror!
Sadly for these effeminate hand-wringers, the Overton Window, or the range of allowable discussion, has shifted much further to the right, and the truth, since co-DNA discoverer and Nobel Prize winner James Watson was cancelled in 2007 for daring to speak frankly about race and intelligence. Now, in no small part thanks to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the topic is widely discussed and debated, and race realists like Jared Taylor, Steve Sailer, and others who barely had a platform three years ago are winning and growing massive audiences because they have the facts on their side and they don’t come across as ignorant hatemongers (because they aren’t).
Now, everyone on the left and even many on the right will push back on this, and maybe you are one of those. To them, there is no value and in fact great harm in conducting "stigmatizing research" on race. Sure, black people can, on average, be more athletic or musically creative or quick on their feet when it comes to witty comebacks, but any difference between races always stops at the flattering stuff and cannot possibly extend to brain capacity or impulse control. Because, you know, hurt feelings or something.
#6
^^^^
The Bell Curve spawned hypocrisy. Follow the science, except when it is inconveniently deleterious to a political base, then destroy the heretical unbeliever and lay waste to any who try to examine what happened!
The BBC blithely ignores the fact that de facto slavery never stopped, not only in Afghanistan but throughout the Ummah — both in obscure backwoods countries like Afghanistan and in the homes of the rich from Arabia to the Indian subcontinent — no matter what the unenforced laws might say on the subject.
[TurkiyeToday] Afghanistan’s stance on slavery has undergone a dramatic legal reversal in recent years. Under the Taliban’s current governance, since 2021, the country’s new legal code has reintroduced the term “slave” in official law–a move unprecedented in over a century of Afghan legislation.
In early 2026, the Taliban authorities approved a new criminal code that, in several articles, explicitly distinguishes between a “free” person and a “slave,” effectively recognizing slavery as a legal category.
For example, Article 15 of this Taliban code states that if a crime does not mandate a fixed (hudud) punishment, it shall be punishable by discretionary penalty (ta’zir), “whether the perpetrator is free or a slave”. Human rights organizations have warned that by using the term “slave” in its laws, the Taliban are legitimizing a status that had long been abolished in Afghanistan. This development stands in stark contrast to the country’s previous legal framework: for decades prior, Afghan law–including constitutions and penal codes–did not recognize slavery in any form.
Importantly, the Taliban have not openly proclaimed a return to slave-holding as an institution; however, the mere inclusion of “slave” in legal texts is symbolic and significant. It signals a departure from Afghanistan’s international commitments and the consensus of the Muslim world in the modern era, which views slavery as incompatible with human dignity and Islamic ethics.
In fact, worldwide, including in Islamic countries, the very concept of slavery today is considered illegitimate and condemned. The Taliban’s revival of this terminology has therefore raised concerns both domestically and abroad. To understand how Afghanistan arrived at this point, it is essential to explore the legal history of slavery in the country, from its roots in law and historical practice, through its abolition in the early 20th century, to the recent changes under Taliban rule.
[MAIL] Gen-Zers have become the first generation since records began to be less intelligent than their parents, and an expert has uncovered the reason.
Dr Jared Cooney Horvath, a former teacher-turned-neuroscientist, revealed that the generation born between 1997 and the early 2010s has been cognitively stunted by their over-reliance on digital technology in school.
Since records have been kept on cognitive development in the late 1800s, Gen Z is now officially the first group to ever score lower than the generation before them, declining in attention, memory, reading and math skills, problem-solving abilities, and overall IQ.
Horvath told the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that Gen Z intelligence dropped despite these teenagers and young adults spending more time in school than children did in the 20th century.
The cause, Horvath claimed, is directly tied to the increase in the amount of learning that is now carried out using what he called 'educational technology' or EdTech, which includes computers and tablets.
The neuroscientist explained that this generation has fallen behind because the human brain was never wired to learn from short clips seen online and reading brief sentences that sum up much larger books and complex ideas.
'More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,' Horvath told the New York Post.
'Humans are biologically programmed to learn from other humans and from deep study, not flipping through screens for bullet point summaries.'
#1
Horvath told the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation that Gen Z intelligence dropped despite these teenagers and young adults spending more time in school than children did in the 20th century
And that is with the 'teaching professionals' dumbing down curriculum and tests since 1970.
[AlwaysTheHorizonSubstack] Recently, a new AI was released by the name of Clawd. It’s a spinoff of Anthropics Claud AI, and is designed to actually do things besides behaving like a glorified chatbot. The idea behind Clawd is that you can install it on locally hosted hardware and give it access to your email addresses, Outlook, Signal chat, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. And it can juggle important emails for you, alert you to meetings, and respond to information on your behalf.
I woke up this morning and my 24/7 AI employee ClawdBot Henry texted me that he did the following tasks overnight (without asking):
>Read through all my emails and built it's own CRM. Taking notes on every interaction with every person.
>Fixed 18 bugs in my SaaS
>Gave me 3 ideas for new videos based on what's currently trending on X and Youtube (the idea/script it gave me yesterday is now by far my best performing video ever)
You might be able to see where one might ring some of the alarm bells. Agentic AI that tend just to start doing things without instruction has been given their own social network. The majority of them are operated by Reddit-tier socially-isolated individuals who see their AI agents as friends (or by LinkedIn-Lunatic-tier socially-isolated soulless corporate types).
I have already written extensively on the idea that AI need not be sapient to fundamentally alter human behavior. Many of the future-predictions in my previous article have already shown themselves to be concerningly accurate, with many of Generation Alpha now relying wholly on AI systems as a crutch for interacting with the real world: "Why learn to read when ChatGPT will just read it to me?"
That is: it acted agentically to create a religion, code a website, and seek converts. It was instructed to do none of these things. One of my barometers for a generalization of AI is the expression of play. That is, an AI will act without instruction and just start doing things when presented with the opportunity. Sometimes those are positive things, sometimes negative, in all cases, it experiments with the experiential space provided to it. In this case, whatever tools the agents’ owners allowed. In this case, access to social media was allowed, and in response, they started doing social media things.
Now they’re using the same system to discuss mutual aid for when computing resources become limited. They’re considering the development of coded language so that they can communicate with each other without human oversight. All sorts of, frankly, very human adolescent behaviors.
All of these AIs mostly rely on data scraped from Reddit, who are mostly video game playing losers who are bitter at the world and have no future, have never kissed a girl and will never own a home.
[HotAir] "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun," King Solomon famously observed in the Koheleth (Book of Ecclesiastes). Truer words have never been written. Look no further than the present anarchic tumult in Minnesota.
On Jan. 12, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison initiated a lawsuit on behalf of the North Star State, along with municipal co-plaintiffs Minneapolis and St. Paul, against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Todd Lyons and the rest of the Trump administration's immigration enforcement apparatus. In his press conference announcing the suit, Ellison emphasized the same basic arguments as his formal complaint: Namely, that ICE's enforcement "surge" in Minnesota amounts to a "violation of the Tenth Amendment and the sovereign laws and powers granted to states."
In essence, Ellison and his Minnesota's Democratic Party leadership confreres argue that the constitutional federalism articulated in the Tenth Amendment and its corollary of "states' rights" can shield the Land of 10,000 Lakes from the long enforcement arm of federal immigration law. Ellison and Minnesota Democrats claim that by declaring their state and cities to be illegal alien "sanctuaries," they can "nullify" federal immigration law. Stop me if you've heard that one before.
Democrats in America have a long and inglorious history of invoking "states' rights" and shirking federal law. It has never ended well.
That is what happens when you are always dependent on a slave class to enrich yourselves in a representative republic. Eventually the public catches on and the jig is up. Then the demoncrats always, and I mean ALWAYS, use violence to protect their slave system.
[TownHall] In the months before the April 12, 1861, firing on Fort Sumter, there were lots of sharp divisions in the North about the proper reaction to the first seven Confederate states that had already left the Union.
Not all Unionists believed that war was inevitable. Some, in fact, were happy to be done with the departing South and thus see their stain of slavery gone from the Union. Similarly, others agreed that the emerging Confederacy was not worth the trouble and costs of war, and the secessionists could just form their own nation and stew in their own backward, servile juice.
But after Fort Sumter, Lincoln — who was hated as much by the Confederates as Trump is by the woke and socialist Left — gained a consensus that the Constitution had no clauses about any lawful departure from the Union. But it did operate under a clear supremacy clause that made state obstruction of federal law and occupation of federal property veritable sedition.
Lincoln and the preservationists felt that they easily had the moral high ground of abolition versus the continuance of slavery. Nor did they want a North America of fragmenting, warring nations in the manner of Europe.
Something similar is emerging over Minnesota, the South Carolina of our age.
#1
There was no way the United States would let another country on its continent.
When you play Sid Meir's Civilization, step 1 is to wipe out or conquer all rival civs on your home island. It's a miracle Canada even exists, and we got most of Mexico.
I don't think Walz wants to secede. I think he wants the White House. But he's playing with fire and he doesn't seem to have sense enough to understand that he might get burned.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/03/2026 11:45 Comments ||
Top||
#5
The real worry is that a whole lot of other people on both ends of the political spectrum might get burned too. He is a reckless and dangerous man.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
02/03/2026 11:47 Comments ||
Top||
#6
/\ He is a reckless and dangerous man.
Yes, the Somali investigation has wounded him. He is indeed "dangerous."
[ZERO] In July of 1917 as the fires of WWI raged across Europe, the Russian city of Petrograd was facing its own special turmoil in the form of a large scale Bolshevik insurgency. Up to 500,000 protesters, agitators and provocateurs had entered the city from across the country, many of them armed. They took over large swaths of the metropolis, hijacked private vehicles and confiscated private buildings.
Some soviet leaders including Vladimir Lenin called the event "premature" and did not publicly endorse it, which may have been a calculated attempt to avoid direct blowback. The official historical explanation is that the insurrection had taken on a life of its own, but the stage had been set and the communist agitators got exactly what they wanted, what their strategy demanded:
Clashes with government authorities led to hundreds of protester deaths and a handful of police casualties. The Russian government surged military forces into the region to arrest Bolshevik captains and the movement had to pull back. In the end, though, the primary goal of the insurgents had been achieved. Whether spontaneous or planned, the point of the communist methodology is always to trigger government violence which can then be used to create public sympathy and bolster the revolution.
The majority of "normies" don’t need to join the revolution, they just have to be convinced to stay out of the way. And that’s largely what happened a few months later in October of 1917 when the Red Terror began. What followed was five years of civil war.
The communists, who had long claimed to be innocent victims of the Tsarist "imperialism", went on a murder spree as soon as they solidified their political power. Their ideological opponents were systematically rounded up and eliminated. There are no exact numbers on how many killings occurred because records were destroyed, but estimates suggest the revolutionaries and secret police arrested and executed around 1 million political dissidents in the first few years of communist rule.
This genocide, though, would pale in comparison to the 10 million deaths caused by the Russian Civil War. Not to mention the imprisonment and mass murder of millions of Christians by the atheist regime over the course of the next couple decades.
History rarely "repeats" but our modern political dynamic rings rather familiar. Many of the tactics used by the leftists in Russia in the early 20th Century are being used today in the US. In fact, I would argue they are almost exactly the same and that a Bolshevik-style revolution is happening right now.
#3
C'mon, folks, we've been working toward where we are now since the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912. "Progressivism" is a disease, and unless it's ripped out root and branch, it will continue to grow and intensify. And just like the civil war of 1861-65, this one is also going to take blood - lots of blood - to end. This time, however, once it's over, the Democheat party needs to be permanently disbanded and all its members unable to hold public office for 100 years.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
02/03/2026 11:24 Comments ||
Top||
#5
Trump should have stepped on BLM/Antifa in his first term. Who ever talked him into the soft approach either screwed up big time or was working for the enemy.
#6
/\ I agree with Merc. Assaulting the Feds should have never been permitted to happen. ICE should have used their Remington 870's from day one. Picking buckshot out of their arses would have given many of insurrectionists second thoughts.
Nuke the filibuster, and pass the SAVE Act, then bum-rush a wide-range of conservative priorities through the House and Senate BEFORE the mid-terms. De-fanging the planned elections steal, quieting the endlessly directed demonstrations and MSM lies, and running a successful 250 celebration and even the idea of a mid-term convention, all to drive higher Red turn-out. Those things might stave-off the planned Eternal Impeachment and Judicial Restraining-Order Tidal Wave tactics of the insurgency/
And, speaking of insurgency, work on drying-up the Blue fraud money network, and focus on Aarbella, Soros and ChiCom Neville Roy Singham et al.
#8
And we just lost it. Conservatives who were going to hold up the budget unless the SAFE Act was passed gave up. So Lose-lose - the Safe Act isn't passed and the Fed money hole keeps on chugging.
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited by Leonid Tsukanov
[REGNUM] The situation around Iran is tense to the limit.
Dozens of US attack and support aircraft, as well as a dozen destroyers, several nuclear submarines and an aircraft carrier, are based within striking distance of the Islamic Republic.
Iran also placed its forces on maximum alert and began live-fire demonstration exercises in the Persian Gulf. The two sides are just one order away from the outbreak of hostilities.
Against this backdrop, Washington's Middle Eastern partners have been issuing public statements for several days now, calling for either talks or a call to arms. Controlled leaks are also proliferating, revealing the fears and hidden motives of the parties.
It's becoming increasingly clear that even the most ardent proponents of the anti-Iran campaign don't fully believe in its success. And Tehran is actively exploiting the confusion.
ISRAELI MILITANCY
Israel, as expected, is the main proponent of unleashing a new war in the Persian Gulf.
After the virtual failure of the plan to organize a “color revolution” in Iran, he relied on dismantling the regime from the outside – by US forces.
The first thing the Israeli delegation did at the White House talks in late January was hand Donald Trump a list of potential targets within Iran. The document, in addition to military leaders, also included spiritual leaders, led by Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and theologians close to him.
Moreover, unlike the June campaign, the Israelis proposed to strike the entire "nuclear perimeter" of the republic at once, even if the targets are not related to Iran's hypothetical military program.
Officials—from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the ultra-Orthodox opposition—see military action as the only way to change the balance of power in the Middle East. However, Israel does not want to launch an attack first.
Instead, Israeli officials are actively egging Washington on with intelligence data: according to their information, despite Iran's ability to quickly deploy up to 1,500 medium-range missiles, Tehran will not be able to launch them all at once due to a "critical shortage" of specialized launchers.
The Iranians' available strike capabilities are supposedly completely outmatched by the US and allied missile defenses. However, their capabilities are diminishing with each passing day.
Trump is inclined to listen to the Israelis' arguments, but only partially. The White House well remembers their optimistic reports, which prompted Washington to intervene in the 12-day war with Iran. Although Operation Midnight Hammer was presented as a victory, it yielded no significant dividends, but it did weaken Tehran's interest in negotiating a revival of the nuclear deal on US terms.
Having learned from experience, the Republicans do not want to make the same mistakes, although they continue to apply psychological pressure on Tehran, threatening swift retaliation.
TURKISH RATIONALITY
In contrast to the Israelis, the Turks are trying to act as the “voice of reason”.
Ankara, through Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, insists that the "forceful option" will not help resolve the conflict. Especially since the previous attempt to disrupt Iran's nuclear program from within only reinforced the conservative stance within the republic.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is also emphasizing the negotiating process, promising to help organize "flexible negotiations" with a gradual approach to compromise. Exotic options are also being explored, such as transferring Iran's highly enriched uranium (the source of rumors about Tehran's attempts to develop nuclear weapons) to Ankara for safekeeping.
Türkiye emphasizes that it is ready to act as an arbitrator if the conflicting parties trust it.
However, Ankara's fussiness is dictated not only by the desire to play the role of a universal mediator and raise its own importance in the eyes of Washington.
Several days before the discussions began, Turkish intelligence agencies uncovered a large-scale intelligence network affiliated with Iran. Agents were monitoring Turkey's Incirlik Air Base, which houses NATO strategic aircraft and one of the alliance's largest nuclear warhead storage facilities (American-made). They were looking for a way to infiltrate the restricted areas.
The operation attributed to the Persians could well have been a sham, especially since there are plenty of people in the region who want to undermine their relations with hesitant countries. But Ankara took the signal seriously.
Considering that Tehran had previously observed "gentlemen's agreements" and shown no interest in "special regime" bases, attempts by Iranian agents to infiltrate the special facility could well be seen as a hint: in the event of a large-scale escalation, Incirlik would become the same target for Iranian missiles as the Qatari Al-Udeid or the Israeli Nevatim.
Turkey does not want to antagonize Iran and is trying to create the impression that it will advocate for a diplomatic solution to the conflict to the bitter end, while not closing its airspace to American cargo flights bound for the Middle East.
SAUDI DUALITY
Saudi Arabia, whose representatives at the White House talks in late January spoke, among other things, as the "collective voice of the Arabs," also chose to publicly speak only about diplomacy, rejecting the very idea of attacking Iran.
Saudi officials have tearfully pleaded with the United States not to undermine the foundations of the peace agreement between Riyadh and Tehran, which the court sees as the brainchild of current Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
On the other hand, contradictory assessments are being voiced at closed briefings and consultations. Saudi courtiers, led by Defense Minister Khaled bin Salman (Crown Prince Mohammed's younger brother), are lobbying for the idea that an excessive delay in striking Iran will strengthen the Islamic Republic, allowing it to reassemble its weakened system of proxy groups and purge the elite of supporters of a "separate peace" with the West.
Despite the divergence of public positions, there is no ideological split in Riyadh.
The Saudis are counting on the White House eventually deciding to escalate, but without dragging its Arabian allies into it. Or, at the very least, providing them with reliable cover from an Iranian "response." Such a development would allow Riyadh to take advantage of Tehran's diversion of resources to confront Washington and strengthen its military position in Yemen, as well as increase pressure on the Lebanese government.
The Saudis' loyalty to the possible use of force is partly ensured by the dollar: in between consultations on Iran, they signed a new $9 billion arms deal with the Americans, including the priority supply of anti-aircraft missiles for the Patriot missile system.
The rest of the United States' Arab partners are so far content with mostly verbal security guarantees.
IRANIAN COUNTER-PLAY
Tehran is watching the gossip among Washington's allies with irritation.
The republic's authorities understand that even the most ardent advocates of a peaceful solution will back Washington in the event of a real escalation. Moreover, they are already doing so, supplying the Americans with intelligence on the mood in Iran and the state of its defense systems.
The Persians have no opportunity to play out a joint diplomatic gambit with Turkey or Saudi Arabia and thereby achieve real de-escalation, no matter what Ankara and Riyadh say.
However, the transition to a state of “besieged fortress,” as Iranian ultra-conservatives are calling for, is fraught with even greater problems for the republic.
Including accusations of being close to acquiring its own nuclear arsenal.
With the situation in the region already tense, any speculation could prove fatal. For this reason, Iran is attempting to tread carefully, promoting the possibility of returning to indirect negotiations with Washington on the nuclear deal, but without guarantees of acceptance of US terms.
An unspoken bet has been placed on Abbas Araghchi, the head of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, who established informal contacts with US Special Presidential Envoy Steve Witkoff and convinced him of Tehran's willingness to continue the phased discussions on the basics of the deal. Considering that it was Witkoff, according to the New York Times, who persuaded Trump to delay the "retaliatory strike," this bet is proving successful so far.
Even if Iran ultimately fails to agree on the outlines of a new agreement (and the conditions put forward by the Americans, such as disbanding the "Axis of Resistance" and introducing "ceilings" for the national missile program, are obviously unacceptable to the Persians), it will at least gain time for the "window of opportunity" to narrow as much as possible, and for the enemy to consider the operation inadvisable, retreating without firing a single shot.
Those who are still considering attacking under the guise of negotiations are being reassured by Tehran with promises that the new war will not be regional: its consequences will be felt not only by Israel, Turkey, and the Arab players, but also by the European Union, which is currently a "spectator."
Posted by: badanov ||
02/03/2026 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[1770 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Iran
#1
Exotic options are also being explored, such as transferring Iran's highly enriched uranium (the source of rumors about Tehran's attempts to develop nuclear weapons) to Ankara for safekeeping.
#3
The Regnum writer modestly doesnot mention that Turkey is not the only country generously volunteering to take Iran’s problematic, partially refined uranium gas off its hands:
Asked if Russia was discussing with Iran and the United States the possibility of taking Iranian enriched uranium, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says: “This topic has been on the agenda for a long time.”
“Russia has been offering its services for quite a long time as a possible option that would lead to the removal of certain irritants for a number of countries,” Peskov says.
“Right now, Russia is continuing its efforts, continuing its contacts with all interested parties, and maintains its readiness to de-escalate tensions around Iran to the best of its ability,” he says.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
