The Global Reset

The world is currently witnessing a great churn in geostrategic alliances resulting in a global realignment of security relations and partnerships

ON BEING ASKED IN an interview as to why and how suddenly Saudi Arabia and arch enemy Iran reached a Chinese brokered a peace deal to restore diplomatic relations after a history of bitter rivalry, Alastair Crooke, a former British diplomat simply answers, “Because America was not part of the mediation... because America was out of the equation”. That’s a profound if disquieting, observation coming from someone in the know. The deal itself raises possibilities of a negotiated peace in the war-torn Yemen, raging since 2014 in whichover 1,50,000 people have been killed. It is estimated that another 2,27,000 have died as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war and about 4.5 million displaced.

Key powers that have added fuel to the fire, instead of dousing it, are the US and its faithful ally Britain. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the preeminent think tank tracking arms sales, Saudi Arabia was the world’s largest arms importer from 2015 to 2019, the first five years of the Yemen war. Its imports of major arms increased by 130 per cent compared with the previous five-year period. Despite the wide-ranging concerns in the US and the UK about Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen, both continued to export arms to Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2019. The US sold some $64.1 billion worth of arms in this period to Saudi Arabia and another $23 billion in advanced weaponry beginning 2020 to the United Arab Emirates which was part of the Saudi-led coalition that was involved in relentless bombing of civilians in Yemen. In essence the war in Yemen is America’s war. Yet another war!