The author should stick to what he knows.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.

His discipline is totally useless against Muslim maniacs. And, that's why President Trump is doing what he has to do.

A person so useless who criticises Trump after only a few weeks of warfare is extremely bumptious.

Andrew Hastie, the great white hope of the Liberal Party (very briefly and before he voted with the other drones for Labor's hate speech laws against everyone but the real, unmentioned problem, Muslim radicals), is also against Trump who, he bleats, should have consulted “us” before he ripped into Iran.

“Us” being Australia and other Western countries, presumably. Why on earth would Trump consult countries who don't want to be involved in their own security: against the very country that sponsors terrorism in their countries.

Hastie carried on about being “pro-America”; fought alongside Americans; his marriage to an American; his father was saved by an American medic, blah, blah, blah.

But, Trump should have consulted the pissweak countries who have done nothing to deserve such a courtesy!

It's going to be a very long time before the Liberal Party forms a government again, even though we have the most incompetent leftist Labor government in history.

Why not check out a website that confirms Alon's essay. It is titled Farewell America http://nealgabler.substack.com

Iran has held the ME and it's own people hostage for a long time.

The world is feeling pain as a result of the oil crisis, but Iran and the ME are experiencing pain too.

If it's brinkmanship over who can deal out and receive pain, then the ME has had a long history of feeling pain, often from it's own rulers, so it probably has some capacity in this regard. But I would consider the west as having it's own significant pain enduring capacity, at least in certain spheres.

At some stage the ME needs to decide what their identity is going to be, and whether they are going to allow Iran to play chicken with trains, and ME future.

In essence will they choose between chaos or order.

The west is supposed to be the standard of stability in the world, it aspires to be higher, but you can't do this without marginalizing the lower the unstable.

There probably needs to be a restructuring of power in the ME, it doesn't have to mean "diluting of Washington's centrality"- perhaps another is/ought fallacious dream from the Woke Marxist movement.

I don't think investing in "expanded ties to China, Russia, and Asian importers" is going to increase stability and order and security for the ME. China and Russia have their own problems of stability and order and associated authoritarianism.

Israel already has it's own significant links with Russia.

The US has to pull Europe into line, because it can't run everything itself- if this means "discarding restraint, sidelining allies, and weaponizing American power for short-term political gain" then that's what needs to be done. President Trump has lobbied Europe to shoulder it's share of military spending, which it has neglected for many years, finally but too slowly Europe is waking up to the realities of the near future.

Hopefully Europe will put as much effort into creating stability in the future, as it has in attacking Trump and his stability policies in recent history.

In recent history legalism has attempted to undermine President Trump's policies to create stability. The Democrats need to support Trump in his efforts to secure everyone, but they just want to chop his legs off. How long are the Democrats base going to blindly put their heads in the sand, blind to the train of chaos coming down the track. When the train hits there will be many sorry souls wandering around saying "poor me". I'll say you did it to yourself and to me. I warned you but you played chicken with the train, and sneered and attacked me and hurt me from your petty middle management positions of tediousity, when I warned you.

And I'll say- "It serves you right!"