Breaking News:  Trump raises the white flag, surrenders to Iran

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Do not be put off by the several minutes at the start of this podcast without video image only sound. The producers were obviously in a great hurry to prepare the podcast for uploading on the internet and sacrificed a bit of visuals. Be assured that I am speaking from the very start.

My nearly 20 minute long interview with News X World this morning was prompted by the breaking news coming from Trump – that, in his words, the latest productive talks with Iran have shown that a deal may be possible and accordingly he has suspended for 5 days his most recent threats of ‘obliterating’ Iranian power generating plants if they do not open the Straits of Hormuz to normal tanker traffic within 48 hours.  Meanwhile, the Iranians deny that any talks have taken place with the United States.

What are we to make of this?  As I say in the interview, I believe this is a surrender by Trump which he tries to mask in the language of successfully negotiating a deal, suggesting that he remains in control of the situation even when he does not.

Of course, with Trump you never know what is real and what is illusion.  It is also possible that he is just buying time until more US forces arrive in the region and he can proceed with his attack on Iran, saying then that the negotiations failed.

Nonetheless, I stick with my interpretation of a surrender. If Trump declares that U.S. objectives of degrading Iranian defenses worked and there is no longer a threat of their building a bomb or continuing production of their missiles then, logically, he can accede to the most important concession which Iran is demanding of the US today, namely that the more than decade long economic sanctions be lifted. This would provide the country with a big inflow of export earnings, all the more so that their strikes on neighboring Gulf States and their restriction of tanker flows through the Straits of Hormuz have significantly raised the price levels and demand for their hydrocarbons. Thus, Iran could earn its own ‘reparations’.

Quite exceptionally, the News X World host asked for my advice to investors and I offered my thoughts on gold, stocks and Certificates of Deposit under present volatile conditions.  I can foresee numerous comments from readers on that issue.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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3 thoughts on “Breaking News:  Trump raises the white flag, surrenders to Iran”

  1. you are officially certifiable. Wow. In other news, MacArthur actually surrendered to Hirohito on the Missouri.

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  2. Trump’s pronouncements seem to move the stock, commodity, etc. markets for a few hours, due to AI-trading bots taking quick note.

    ;-(

    I have not found them to correlate with subsequent reality much, lately.

    Liked by 1 person

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