EU-USA relations: The EU must wake-up to the fact that the "erraticly" acting US Trump Administration is not a friend of the EU, and must act accordingly

"I am the greatest - Trust me it's real"

It was confirmed that the British Ambassador to the US labelled President Donald Trump as "inept," "insecure" and "incompetent," a UK government official reported Saturday to CNN.

And many  diplomats stationed in Washington, although they are not openly saying it, consider the British Ambassador  hit the nail right on the head.

Mr. Trump’s order to attack Iran recently in retaliation for its downing of a spy drone, and his abrupt reversal minutes before American forces carried it out, have intensified global doubts about the president’s judgment and the power wielded by the United States.

The appearance of erratic decision-making “adds to the confusion of his allies and adversaries,” said Nigel Sheinwald, a former British ambassador to Washington who once conducted hostage negotiations with the Iranian government. But it is also part of “a continuing picture of American uncertainty about the use of power,” Mr. Sheinwald said. “It is the leitmotif that runs throughout U.S. history.”

If leaders of Britain, France and Germany — America’s main European allies — saw Mr. Trump’s aborted attack as a point of no return for his own reputation, or for the United States’ global standing, they did their best to hide it.

The public response of Western politicians has been largely cautious, sometimes confused — but only implicitly critical..

Another sore point for the EU is that the United States is also intensifying its trade fight with the European Union over aircraft subsidies, proposing new tariffs on EU goods worth $4 billion.

The tariffs, announced late Monday by the United States Trade Representative, cover 89 products including meat, cheese, pasta, fruits, coffee and whiskey.

They could be added to a list of EU exports worth $21 billion that the USTR said in April would be subject to tariffs.

The threat to target more European goods comes just days after the United States and China agreed to resume talks on a trade deal. President Donald Trump said he would hold off imposing new tariffs on China.

Washington has also been locked in a dispute with the European Union for years over two of the world's biggest airplane manufacturers — Boeing (BA) and Airbus.

It is high time the EU starts calling a spade a spade and, starts playing hard-ball with the US. They have a lot of cards they can play and should not scare away from doing so.

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Iran-US relations: Are the US and Israel creating an excuse to go to war with Iran which could very well lead to Armageddon

It certainly seems so.

All the signals are pointing to a well prepared scenario by the war mongers in the Trump Administration, in close cooperation with the Israeli Netanyahu government.

Here are some of the alarm signals:

1. US unilaterally pulls out of the multi-national Iran Nuclear Agreement.
2. Israel heats up its rhetoric against Iran 
3. US Administration launches sanctions against Iran
4. US Administrations recently showed a clearly fabricated video, which it labels as showing Iranian military trying to remove an unexploded mine from a burning tanker, which was actually hit by torpedoes. 

The Trump administration keeps saying that it doesn’t want to go to war with Iran. The problem, however, is that some top officials continue to make statements that could pave a dubiously legal and factually challenged pathway to war.

If that’s the intention, a major flare-up between Washington and Tehran could lead the administration to say it has the right to launch what would be one of the nastiest, bloodiest conflicts in modern history — even if it really doesn’t legally have that authorization.

For months, President Donald Trump and some of his top officials have claimed Iran and al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that launched the 9/11 terror attacks, are closely linked. 

That’s been a common refrain despite evidence showing their ties aren’t strong at all. In fact, even al-Qaeda’s own documents detail the weak connection between the two.

But insisting there’s a nefarious, continual relationship matters greatly. In 2001, Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), allowing the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.”

Which means that if the Trump administration truly believes Iran and al-Qaeda have been in cahoots before or after 9/11, then it could claim war with Tehran already is authorized by law.

That chilling possibility was raised during a House Armed Services Committee session early Thursday morning by an unlikely pair: Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a top Trump ally, and Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), a Pentagon official in the Obama administration. 

“The notion that the administration has never maintained that there are elements of the 2001 AUMF that would authorize their hostilities toward Iran is not consistent with my understanding of what they said to us,” said Gaetz. “We were absolutely presented with a formal presentation on how the AUMF might authorize war on Iran,” added Slotkin right after, although she noted no one said they would use it to greenlight a fight.

Pompeo even wrote on Twitter that he thinks can bypass Congress to strike Iran, when he wrote: ""In alignment with what Rep. Gaetz said, we were absolutely presented with a full formal presentation on how the 2001 AUMF might authorize war on Iran…Pompeo said it with his own words…a relationship between Iran and al Qaeda.” 

A 2018 study by the New America think tank, based on roughly 470,000 declassified files obtained from Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound in 2011, showed no links between Iran and al-Qaeda to commit terrorist acts. “In none of these documents did I find references pointing to collaboration between al-Qaeda and Iran to carry out terrorism,” Nelly Lahoud, the study’s author, wrote in a blog post last September.

What the documents do show is that Tehran was deeply uncomfortable having al-Qaeda on its soil, and that bin Laden fiercely distrusted Iran.

For example, Iran detained al-Qaeda members — and some in bin Laden’s family — for abusing the conditions of their stay in the country. An al-Qaeda operative thought Tehran was keeping some of its members hostage: “Iranian authorities decided to keep our brothers as a bargaining chip” after the US invaded Iraq in 2003, a document reviewed in the study read. 

It turns out that Iran and al-Qaeda actually have been at odds for a long time.

When Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, he started off his announcement with a striking statement.

“The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror. It exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Taliban, and al Qaeda,” he said.

It’s an argument the Trump administration continues to push and it is a dangerous statement, which can result in dire consequences for the Middle East, and if Russia and China get involved, could eventually lead to Armageddon.

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