science

What Happens To The Middle East If Russia & The US Stop Being Enemies?

Via Middle East Eye

Some call it the end of the post-war order. Others, a grand realignment. Regardless of how it’s defined, the Middle East faces a new paradigm: what happens when the US stops viewing Russia as a foe and instead as a potential partner, or at the very least, a neutral actor? American diplomats and analysts are still struggling to come to grips with this potentially historic shift.

When asked about a report that Israel was lobbying the Trump administration to let Russia keep its military bases in Syria, one career US diplomat in the region replied, “Well, that would be against our national interests?” They responded with silence when asked what would happen if the US president didn’t see it that way. Trump has said he wants to partner with Russia for “incredible opportunities”.

On Friday, Trump doubled down, saying he found it easier to deal with Russia than Ukraine, a country the US had been supplying arms and intelligence to until recently. Asked about Russia’s widespread attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid, Trump said Putin was “doing what anybody else would do”.
Via AFP

Trump, Nixon and the China analogy 

The US view of Russia as a foe working against its interests has defined the Middle East since the end of WWII, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt courted Saudi Arabia for Gulf oil. In the following decades, the US worked to counter the Soviet Union across the region.

The US’s support for Israel in the 1973 War led to an eventual peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. In the process, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat evicted Soviet military advisors who had been welcomed by Gamal Abdel Nasser. Until December 2024, the United States viewed the toppled Syrian Assad dynasty as a vehicle for nefarious Russian power projection.

Trump’s allies looking to explain his outreach to Putin have said he is trying to break up a bloc of states, mainly Russia, Iran and China, from coordinating against the US. They add that Trump’s overtures echo the strategic diplomacy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger opening up to China in the 1970s.

Chas Freeman, a former US diplomat, whose career spanned almost three decades, told Middle East Eye it was a “false comparison”.

“A better analogy to Trump’s opening to Putin is Sadat going to Jerusalem.” Freeman is reliable on the subject considering he was the interpreter for Nixon’s trip.

In the Middle East, Trump’s bid to work with Putin may reflect his priorities and a geopolitical world view. Some of Trump’s confidants have raised the alarm about Turkey’s expanding influence.

Steve Bannon & Mike Flynn’s worldview

Steve Bannon, a former Trump advisor whose podcast War Room has become required listening to those seeking to discern Trump’s world view, said recently that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was “one of the most dangerous leaders” in the world and wants to “re-establish the Ottoman Empire”.

Trump himself said that the collapse of the Assad government in Syria was merely an “unfriendly takeover” by Turkey….

SSA Confirms Over $7.5 Billion In Retroactive Social Security Payments

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA) announced the payment of billions of dollars to more than a million Americans after two provisions that reduced or eliminated benefits for certain individuals were recently repealed.
A Social Security card is seen along with checks from the U.S. Treasury in Washington on Oct. 14, 2021. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Last week, the agency said that it will start paying retroactive payments to people whose benefits have been affected by the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO). Through March 4, “SSA has already paid 1,127,723 people more than $7.5 billion in retroactive payments,” the agency said in a March 4 statement. “The average retroactive payment so far is $6,710.”

The WEP and GPO provisions “reduced or eliminated the Social Security benefits for over 3.2 million people who receive a pension based on work that was not covered by Social Security (a non-covered pension).”

In January, former President Joe Biden signed the Social Security Fairness Act (SSFA) which ended both GPO and WEP. Since the provisions no longer applied as of January 2024, millions of Social Security beneficiaries became eligible for retroactive payments.

“President Trump made it very clear he wanted the Social Security Fairness Act to be implemented as quickly as possible,” said Lee Dudek, Acting Commissioner of Social Security. “We met that challenge head-on and are proudly delivering for the American people.”

SSA said it continues to pay the remaining retroactive payments.

Furthermore, the elimination of WEP and GPO makes many beneficiaries eligible for higher monthly benefits starting in April. The exact increase in payment will depend on factors such as the type of Social Security benefit they receive and the amount of pension received.

Teachers, police officers, firefighters, federal workers covered by the Civil Service Retirement System, and employees whose work is covered by a foreign social security system stand to gain under the new changes.

Beneficiaries set to receive retroactive benefits or see an adjustment in monthly benefits will receive a mail notice from the Social Security Administration explaining the matter.

Most people receiving retroactive payments may get their notice two to three weeks after receiving payments since “the President understands how important it is to pay people what they are due right away,” SSA said.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) welcomed the SSA announcement of retroactive payments, according to a Feb. 27 statement. Earlier last month, she joined other lawmakers in sending a letter to the Acting Commissioner of the SSA, calling for quickly implementing the Social Security Fairness Act.

Murkowski said the WEP provision reduced Social Security benefits for people getting government pensions, while the GPO cut down benefits for widows, spouses, and widowers whose spouses received government pensions.

“I applaud the Social Security Administration for moving quickly to ensure Alaska’s public servants are able to access the benefits they are entitled to,” she said.

“I have been working on the Social Security Fairness Act for 22 years—and Alaskans have been waiting even longer for…

De-Dollarization Was Always More Of A Political Slogan Than A Pecuniary Fact

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

The three-year-long NATO-Russian proxy war in Ukraine contributed to the belief that the international community had bifurcated into the West and the World Majority respectively, with the outcome of the aforesaid conflict determining which camp will most powerfully shape the global systemic transition. This paradigm predisposed observers to imagine that BRICS, which represents the World Majority, is actively coordinating de-dollarization policies in order to decouple themselves from the West’s financial clutches.

That perception persists to this day despite last October’s BRICS Summit achieving nothing of tangible significance at all, including on the de-dollarization front, and leading members like India and Russia subsequently confirming in response to Trump’s tariff threats that they’re not creating a new currency. As it turns out, even before Trump initiated the nascent Russian-US “New Détente”, the international community wasn’t as divided over the past three years as many multipolar enthusiasts thought.

Complex interdependencies kept most of the main players together, including Russia and the West after Russia continued selling oil, gas, and critical minerals like uranium to the West in spite of their proxy war. Similar interdependencies account for why Indian External Affairs Minister Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar declared in mid-November that “India has never been for de-dollarization” and then reaffirmed this position last week when he said that “we have absolutely no interest in undermining the dollar at all.”

He also said that “I don’t think there is a unified BRICS position on [de-dollarization]. I think BRICS members, and now that we have more members, have very diverse positions on this matter. So, the suggestion or the assumption that somewhere there is a united BRICS position against the dollar, I think, is not borne out by facts.” 

The reason why it’s important to draw attention to his latest words is because of the global context within which they were shared as regards the nascent Russian-US “New Détente”.

Putin’s recent invitation to American companies to cooperate with Russia on strategic resources, including energy in the Arctic and even rare earth minerals in Donbass, will lead to Russia using more dollars in international trade if anything comes of this. That would in turn discredit the perception shared earlier in this analysis of Russia actively de-dollarizing, which Putin himself always said that it was forced by sanctions into doing and thus wouldn’t have ordinarily happened on its own.

A thaw in their tensions brought about by the US brokering an end to their proxy war in a way that meets most of Russia’s interests would therefore naturally see Russia using the dollar yet again. To be sure, it’ll still support the creation of platforms like BRICS Bridge, BRICS Clear, and BRICS Pay, but these would be aimed at preventing dependence on the dollar more so than advancing de-dollarization per se. The ruble will also continue to be used as Russia’s preferred currency in conducting international trade.

Nevertheless, any breakthrough in Russian-US relations would inevitably disappoint those multipolar enthusiasts who bought into the most ideologically dogmatic narratives of the New Cold War and consequently believed that Russia would forever eschew the dollar out of principle….

Classified X-37B Spaceplane Returns To Earth

About two weeks after the Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs published the first-ever in-orbit image captured by Boeing’s X-37 spaceplane, the US Space Force revealed early Friday that the top-secret spaceplane has returned to Earth.

Space Force announced the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle-7 (OTV-7) “successfully deorbited and landed” at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on early Friday around 0222 local time. 

Images posted on X by the space agency show military personnel in laboratory protective suits, like NBC and/or BSL-4 suits, approaching the X-37 after touchdown at Vandenberg. 

More images were posted on X of the X-37B, which concluded its seventh mission in orbit.

This time, X-37B remained in space for 434 days.

“While on orbit, Mission 7 accomplished a range of test and experimentation objectives intended to demonstrate the X-37 B’s robust maneuver capability while helping characterize the space domain through the testing of space domain awareness technology experiments,” Space Force wrote in a statement. 

USAF Public Affairs posted this image from X-37B late last month during a series of “experiments in a highly elliptical orbit in 2024.”

With each successive top-secret mission, the X-37B spends long and longer time in orbit:

OTV-1: launched on Apr. 22, 2010 and landed on Dec. 3, 2010, spending over 224 days in orbit.

OTV-2: launched on Mar. 5, 2011 and landed on Jun. 16, 2012, spending over 468 days in orbit.

OTV-3: launched on Dec. 11, 2012 and landed on Oct. 17, 2014, spending over 674 days in orbit.

OTV-4: launched on May 20, 2015 and landed on May 7, 2015, spending nearly 718 days in orbit.

OTV-5: launched on Sept. 7, 2017 and landed on Oct. 27, 2019, spending nearly 780 days in orbit.

OTV-6: launched on May 17, 2020 and landed on Nov. 12, 2022, spending over 908 days in orbit.

OTV-7: launched on Dec. 29, 2023 and landed on Mar. 7, 2025, spending over 434 days in orbit. 

. . . 

Tyler Durden
Fri, 03/07/2025 – 23:00…

Consumer Credit Jumps More Than Expected In January, Back Over $5 Trillion

We have repeatedly warned that with their savings – and especially “emergency covid savings” – gone or nearly gone, Biden admin’s residual savings data manipulation notwithstanding…

… US consumers had no choice but to max out their credit cards in order to “extend and pretend” their moment of purchasing greatness, or as we called it three months ago, their last hurrah (see In “Last Hurrah”, Credit Card Debt Explodes Higher Despite Record High APRs As Savings Rate Craters), a hurrah that would last very briefly as it was only a matter of months if not weeks before said cards were denied.

One month later, that’s exactly what happened, when to our surprise, revolving credit cratered at the fastest pace since the covid crash, contracting a whopping $13 billion, an event which for a country that lives on debt – literally – is unheard of outside of a recession.

Commenting on the plunge, we said that “we don’t know what sparked this sudden reversal in the favorite American pastime – i.e., to buy stuff one can’t afford and hope to pay it back some time in the future for a modest 29.95% APR – but we know what didn’t: falling rates… because they didn’t.” We then proceeded to show that the average interest rate on credit card balances were at the second highest on record ever though the Fed had already cut rates by 100 bps.

And while it would have been normal, if not expected, for credit card balances to continue declining with savings rates near record lows and with credit card rates at record highs, trust the US economy to do precisely the opposite of what is logical and according to the latest just released consumer credit data, US consumers exited 2024 with a bang after Consumer credit soared by a record $40.8 billion in December, a complete reversal of the November drop, and a month that sticks out like a sore thumb in the history of consumer credit as shown below.

And while one would expect that the record December surge in credit would quickly reverse at the start of the year amid the ongoing drawdown in savings – and the lack of holiday spending – the US consumer has a habit of doing just the opposite of what is expected, and according to the latest NY Fed data, in January consumer credit surged again, rising by $18.084 billion (from a downward revised $37.1 billion vs $40.8 billion previously), and the third highest monthly increase since June 2023…

… which sent the total back over $5 trillion.

Taking a closer look at the number, revolving credit – i.e., credit card debt – increased by $9 billion or roughly half of the near record $21 billion surge in December.

Non-revolving debt (i.e. student and auto loans) rose almost by the same amount, up $9.1 billion and also down from the $16.2 billion the previous month.

Looking at the composition of nonrevolving credit, the Fed reported that in…

‘Civil War Is Now Official’ – Syria Erupts Into Worst Bloodshed Since Assad’s Fall

Any lingering delusions that Syria could emerge from its Western-imposed, regime-change victimhood and enter an era of peace and stability were obliterated on Thursday, as 48 people were killed in battles between supporters of the deposed Bashar al Assad government and the country’s new radical Islamist regime. As all-out civil war looms, increasingly disturbing sectarian violence has an important minority sect asking for Russian intervention to safeguard their lives. 

Insane videos coming out of Syria after the announcement of an uprising against Jolani’s regime pic.twitter.com/sizIupxiSf
— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) March 7, 2025
In the town of Jableh, which lies in Syria’s coastal Latakia province, pro-Assad forces ambushed and killed 16 members of the regime’s security forces. In the ensuing retaliation, 28 pro-Assad militants and four civilians died, according to the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). Latakia hold the highest concentration of Alawites — the minority sect of Islam that’s principally found in Syria, with the Assad family themselves being the most prominent members. Alawites comprise about 10% of the country’s population. Notably, the province is also home to the Russian-operated Khmeimim air base. The ambush targeted regime forces who’d carried an operation in rural Latakia aimed at arresting a former Assad government official.
Thursday’s battles took place in Syria’s coastal Latakia province, which holds the greatest concentration of Alawites 

The ambush was well-executed, according to a security official in Latakia. “[In] a well-planned and premeditated attack, several groups of Assad militia remnants attacked our positions and checkpoints, targeting many of our patrols in the Jableh area,” Mustafa Kneifati told German news outlet DW. Those pro-Assad forces are said to have included soldiers loyal to former Syrian army General Suheil al-Hassan, though it’s unknown whether Hassan himself participated in the battles. The fighting spanned over a period of hours, with regime security forces responding to the ambush with helicopter gunships and artillery.

Alawites in Jableh countryside defend themselves after Al-Jolani gangs attack their villages #BREAKING #BreakingNews #Syria #عاجل #سوريا #جبلة #العلويين pic.twitter.com/6mBOUOEG2f
— Al-Julani gangs (@AlJulanigangs) March 6, 2025
Thursday’s fighting may be just a precursor to something far more intense: There are reports of large convoys of regime forces moving toward the Syrian coastal region. 

The combat comes alongside rising sectarian violence, with Sunni militants victimizing Alawites who had long enjoyed peace as the Alawite Assad family ruled the country from 1971 until December 2024, when President Bashar al Assad fled as Sunni extremists took over. While the new government repeatedly warns against sectarian reprisals against Alawites, citizens say security forces themselves have engaged in executions, kidnappings and home seizures. 

Videos are circulating on social media which purportedly show the horrors being visited on the Alawites. From a grisly video that’s said to show dozens of massacred Alawites in a heap, to another that’s described as capturing Sunnis shooting at the residences of Alawites in Homs province: 

So America, Turkey and Israel helped Osama bin Laden’s guys take over Syria – what’s the worst that could happen, right?
Okay, I know you’re remembering that time Obama…