Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke) describes a long-running project to establish a single Western-led world order, one that requires severing people from family, community, and national sovereignty. He traces its modern form through the neoconservative movement and Zionism, and argues that the wars in Ukraine, Iran, and Yemen are not separate conflicts, but instruments of the same design. Alastair Crooke: “And it’s a design for world government. And it would be led by Western civilization. When Rubio spoke in Athens, he said what we have to do is we have to get back. The West has to dominate. It has to be the civilization that sets the rules, that sets the template for a world order. All the values we thought we had, law, morality, all of these things, rectitude in business, all just eliminated. But nonetheless, it goes on, the idea that it’s inconceivable that there could be a world in which the West does not give it its orders. It started off partly with the Enlightenment. It started off with the founding of the Illuminati. It started off with Sabbatai Zevi. It started off with Freemasonry. It started off with the Hellfire Clubs. All of these movements and others converged together on the idea of a single government. We had to move away from the connections people had with family, with their community, with their country, and sever all of those things. It was very clear. Rousseau made this very clear in the Enlightenment: we had to do away with religion. We had to do away with connections to family, those things that held us in their sway, with community, with all of those organizations. We had to do away with those and become one element in this. And he said our religion is now going to be that of mechanical reasoning. Eventually, partly in the 1890s, it moved to America and became the neocon movement. It moved to Europe. It moved to the Middle East as Zionism. All these wars we’re facing, apparently separate, distinct individual wars, Ukraine, Iran, in Yemen, are actually part of a single structure, a single attempt. The grand design wishes to use these to impose that one world order. Why on Iran? Why on Russia? Because they were civilizational states. But because the West was in the leadership in business and in money affairs, it would be run by the oligarchs combined with the political leadership of that time to control us all.” Judge Napolitano: “As you point out in this article, as far back as 1846, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Benjamin Disraeli, said the world is governed by hidden forces, and nothing’s changed.” Alastair Crooke: “Exactly. Exactly. And nothing has changed. And he made this warning several times to Parliament and said there are movements that are coalescing together that intend to impose this on us, and of course they have huge resources. The only thing that’s changed since that time was, you remember, at that time, in the sort of early 19th century, around about Disraeli’s time, the family financial structures of Europe became impossibly rich. They made fortunes out of the war against Napoleon. They made fortunes out of supporting the war in America on both sides. They financed the war of Japan against Russia. All of these things were there, and they made lots of money. They were more powerful than the state. The Round Table by Lord Milner, was established about that time and effectively wrote the Balfour Declaration establishing Israel. It wasn’t written by the government, but by Balfour. He had nothing to do with it. It was this group of extremely wealthy people who had access to intelligence and to the defense system, who were operating above the government and dictating the government’s foreign policy. And all of this is part of the grand design, if you like, to weaken those forces that are opposed to Western domination, a Western world government, with the ultimate aim being, of course, China.” The alternative to oligarchical rule is a world of sovereign nations cooperating for peace, scientific progress, and economic development. No nation has the right to dictate humanity’s future. The choice is between perpetual geopolitical confrontation and a new order based on mutual development.

Alastair Crooke (@AWCrooke): Iran is no longer firing warning drones. It is hitting engine rooms. Tankers have been out of the circuit for months; the cost of chartering a supertanker from the U.S. Gulf to China has reportedly reached $80 million, diesel inventories are severely depleted, and Saudi oil infrastructure has come under attack. The replacements are not off-the-shelf. “Iran, I think, attacked six vessels yesterday or the day before in one day. Some of them are on fire, badly on fire. Some of them seem to have struck mines. I’m not sure exactly where, but these are big vessels. One of them is a container ship from the UAE. And what is different this time is that Iran is aiming for the engine room. Before, they fired drones that did a certain amount of damage, but it was quite often superficial, and it was intended to be a warning message: turn around or else. Now they are attacking the engine rooms. And this changes things in a very great way because when the engine room is taken out like that, those vessels are not going to be repaired anywhere near that site. They’ll probably have to go to Malaysia or India or somewhere and go into a dockyard for repairs, taking them out of commission for many months probably. So this has had a big effect on the shipping costs. Even if you take it away from Hormuz separately, I saw statistics that at the moment to hire a big tanker, one of these very large tankers for a voyage from America to China, is now costing about 80 million. Huge amounts. It’s actually costing more than launching one of Elon Musk’s rockets into space, which is slightly cheaper, and probably about the price you could have bought a vessel like that before. This is rather ignored in the calculus by a lot of the commentators. The shipping is becoming really problematic. The losses are high. The owners don’t want to risk them. It’s hard to get shipping, and it’s becoming hugely expensive. And so those trading firms that do trade and have commission vessels are passing on the costs of this to, for example, the container owners, and the contents of those containers are going to cost very much more by the time they reach a shop. Because this is what’s happening. I think Maersk has already put a special levy on containers now. Nothing to do with the oil question. This is to do with the fact that shipping has become so expensive. So we have all of that taking place. It’s increasing inflation, and the figures have just come out in the United States, and it’s heading towards 4%. And we will see the bond market reacting to that, I imagine, later today or tomorrow. So all of this is creating a bigger crisis, and the other crisis is really that there is no diesel. It’s not just that there have been vessels stopped and there’s been a squeeze on Hormuz in the Middle East and middle distillates, which is what you need for diesel or kerosene. But it is also because much of that is either in the wrong place, or refineries that need a particular type of distillate cannot get it, or there is no shipping to bring it to the place. So there really is, the amount of diesel in inventory is really low, if not nonexistent. And I think a diesel crisis has been called for Europe. What that’ll mean, we will have to see, but in Europe everything moves by diesel. In terms of delivery of goods to shops, of foodstuffs and things like that, they are all moved by diesel-powered vehicles. So it’s getting worse in terms of the economy. But the tensions are growing. What’s happening in Saudi Arabia is very serious. The infrastructure of Saudi Arabia is being destroyed. Its biggest field has been attacked: one of the eastern fields, part of the large field that supplies 30%, perhaps, or used to supply 30% of Saudi oil, has been attacked. So all of these things come together, because that infrastructure is not going to be replaced cheaply or quickly. There are bits of it you can replace quickly, for sure, but some of it is not something that you can buy off the shelf. In the complex structures of refineries and so on, you can’t just order one, and it’ll come by courier the next day. It’s not like that. They have to be made to order, and they have to be custom-made. So those will take perhaps a couple of years to supply, maybe longer. And the cost of all this is going to be very high. So for Gulf states and for a country like Saudi Arabia, the cost of replacing this is going to be, if they have the money, going to be very high indeed.” The petrodollar system rests on the physical movement of oil and the industrial capacity that makes that movement possible. When ships are disabled, fuel supplies are disrupted, and specialized industrial infrastructure is damaged, financial claims cannot make the missing capacity reappear. The empire can issue paper claims on the world’s wealth. It cannot print the ships, diesel, or industrial machinery required to produce that wealth and move it to market.