Richard Fernandez passes along a BBC report that Saudi Arabia is already a virtual nuclear power. In collaboration with Pakistan, the Kingdom has assembled a nuclear arsenal (complete with CSS-2 delivery systems), which is presently distributed according to diplomatic convenience, with the war-heads held in Pakistan. Assuming that this report is roughly accurate, the chain-reaction of nuclear dominoes pushing the proliferation through South Asia into the heart of the Middle East has been all but completed, with only superficial formalities yet to be concluded.

It’s late, and I’m off to bed, so I’ll simply repeat: It’s late. Everything people care about is going to be side-lined by international events.

An unusually frigid gust of cynical realism from Walter Russell Mead:

Europe’s social engineers of the last generation seem to have assumed that the “dark forces” of nationalism and chauvinism had been left behind. That was partly true; the horrors of the two world wars have made many (though far from all) Europeans unwilling to fight anymore on ethnic grounds. But the subsidence of ethnic nationalism in European politics was also a function of the mass ethnic cleansings and genocidal killings that left most European nation states fairly homogenous. There was no “German Question” in Polish or Czech politics because there were no more Germans in these countries. The “Jewish Question” largely faded in postwar Europe, in part because of revulsion against Nazism, but also because the Jews were gone. Europe’s architects liked to believe that Europeans had transcended ethnic hatred, but much of Europe’s postwar peace came from the success of ethnic hatred in creating homogenous countries.

ADDED: WRM on Gnon.

The master jigsaw puzzle piece connecting US domestic and foreign policy together is the petrodollar. Federal debt production depends upon credibility in the US currency that is anchored by its privileged role in global hydrocarbons commerce. Knock out that privilege, and US dollar holdings become one speculative asset among others. The fiat house of cards begins to tumble (perhaps with shocking rapidity).

In this context, US monetary policy begins to look like a side-line of ‘friendship’ with the Saudis, which is dissolving into quick sand. Pepe Escobar at AToL explores some of the possible consequences. (It’s especially notable that the fracking revolution could accelerate a petrodollar crisis, rather than retarding it.) There’s also a China angle, which is always fun.

Disconcertingly for almost everybody, in different ways, the awkward retraction of US power from the Middle Eastern wasps’ nest tends inevitably to destabilize the global monetary regime. The more the Saudis feel jilted, the less their commitment to the petrodollar pact, but if this was ever a low-maintenance relationship, it certainly isn’t anymore.

Bomb Iran or your currency bombs. — Things might not quite reduce to that yet, but it increasingly looks as if they will.

Let’s all give a big welcome to Fukuppy (via).

(I’m working on a racist version called “Fukuppity”.)

Without wanting to set off the usual suspects, this research into Ashkenazi ancestry is fascinating. Based on MtDNA analysis, it is evident that: “Overall, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, and 8 percent from the Near East, with the rest uncertain, the researchers estimate.”

Jewish matrilineal cultural descent starts to look extraordinarily odd. Also, a final goodbye to Koestler’s Khazar hypothesis.

(via)

Either Stalin played the Anglosphere like a  cheap piano in World War Two, or something altogether more sinister was going on. Foseti clarifies the conundrum beautifully:

When the US finally joins the war, it does so with – as best as one can decipher – only a few clear war aims: 1) demanding unconditional surrender (of Germany and Japan – aka the only bulwarks against Soviet domination of post-war Europe and Asia); 2) establishing the United Nations; and 3) ending European (excluding Soviet) colonialism.

If you, gentle reader, can come up with a list of war aims that would be more destructive to mankind at the time than those, the next round is on me. Perhaps entirely coincidentally (or perhaps not) these aims would seem to all work towards the direct benefit of the Soviets. It’s almost like Soviets were making US foreign policy.

Each encounter with the phrase “government shutdown” sparks a detonation of euphoria. It could get quite distracting.

More here (with useful chart, and some acute comments).

Rick Moran, trying to stir up some gloom, makes the whole situation even more delicious: “And the hell of it is, the hard right wing in the House that has been pushing this futile strategy are not going to be blamed for the cave-in. It will be those who are deemed insufficiently supportive of a cause that never had a chance to succeed who will probably suffer the consequences.”
— Federal cardiac arrest and the accelerated disintegration of the GOP? Bliss was it in that twilight …

Does open acknowledgement of a firm commitment to deception count as honesty, or the opposite?

Ask the Cretans Germans:

German ministries insist that it is important not to detract from the effectiveness of climate change warnings by discussing the past 15 years’ lack of global warming. Doing so, they say, would result in a loss of the support necessary for pursuing rigorous climate policies. “Climate policy needs the element of fear,” Ott openly admits. “Otherwise, no politician would take on this topic.”

Rough Triangles analysis from William Lind:

… we think of jihad as something waged by Islam against non-Muslims, but quite often it has been between one Islamic sect and another. Now Islamists are once again declaring jihad on each other. In June the New York Times reported on an influential Sunni cleric who “has issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling on Muslims around the world to help Syrian rebels… and labeling Hezbollah and Iran” — both Shi’ite — “enemies of Islam ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.'” David Gardner’s Financial Times piece tells of a  “conclave of Sunni clerics meeting in Cairo [that] declared a jihad against what it called a ‘declaration of war on Islam’ by the ‘Iranian regime, Hezbollah and its sectarian allies’.”

How should the West react to all this? With quiet rejoicing. Our strategic objective should be to get Islamists to expend their energies on each other rather than on us. An old aphorism says the problem with Balkans is that they produce more history than they can consume locally. Our goal should be to encourage the Muslim world to consume all its history — of which it will be producing a good deal — as locally as possible. Think of it as “farm to table” war.

All we should do, or can do, to obtain this objective is to stay out. We ought not meddle, no matter how subtly; if we do, inevitably, it will blow up in our faces. Just go home, stay home, bolt the doors (especially to refugees who will act out their jihads here) …

Fernandez:

In other words America is gone, replaced by this tricycle of strife. And the paternal hand wheeling it down the road is Vladimir Putin’s.  Andrew Sullivan thinks this is proof, if any more were needed, of Barack Obama’s surpassing genius. He writes that America’s ejection is not a bug but a feature; that “Obama, reflecting American public opinion, is perfectly happy to have Putin assume responsibility for the Middle East. Let Russia be drained, bankrupted and exhausted by managing that fractious and decreasingly important part of the world.” In Sullivan’s view Putin is hurting his fist against Obama’s jaw.

But Sullivan doesn’t quite understand that Russia is not going to “manage” the Middle East but raise it up against America. Totalitarians don’t do management. They do conquest.  They do agitation. They do trouble. As for upkeep, Putin will be sending the bill to the White House. He will get Obama to pay for it. When Egypt starves expect the bill to come to Washington. After all, why use “food as a weapon?” Yet when the time comes to kiss the ring, Putin will receive the obeisance of the sheiks while Obama will be sent to the back of the bus, even if America is paying for the bus. That is nothing new. Perhaps Sullivan has never heard of Lenin’s bon mot “when we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope we use.”  Putin is probably familiar with the phrase:  heck, he probably went back by Time Machine and ghostwrote the original line for Lenin.

I’m not at all sure how much of this I agree with, but it’s brilliant, and indisputably thought-provoking.