Happy Easter! Iran Update; Economics And Culture
Yesterday I wrote about why any JCPOA 2.0 that Trump manages to enlist Iran in today—in 2025—will be a far cry from the JCPOA that he foolishly exited in 2018, having yielded to Jewish Nationalist importuning. I’ll repeat that, but to grasp the dynamics of what’s going on in the indirect US - Iranian negotiations it’s useful to place this in the bigger context of the Iranian foreign minister’s statements about Iran’s close cooperation with Russia and China. Russia and China, of course, were signatories to the original JCPOA, which is part of the reason why Iran is consulting closely with them:
Ties with Russia, China key to global peace – Iranian foreign minister
“We have started trilateral talks between Iran, Russia and China on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program for some time now,” he said, adding that two such meetings have already taken place. “We are ready to continue these talks and expand them to other issues,” the minister added.
Araghchi expressed confidence that “Iran, China and Russia – in a coordinated move – can take effective steps towards international peace.” The three partners “are serious about this,” he insisted.
Iran’s tough line is almost certainly a product of that trilateral relationship. Front and center we know that Iran has stated that its enrichment program is “non-negotiable”, so any notion that Trump will ignore the nuclear ties between these three countries is almost certainly delusional. If Trump attempts a military “solution”—which he has termed “obvious”—we will all regret it. In light of these earlier Iranian statements, the Iranian foreign minister following the Rome indirect talks with some additional commentary. Note that Araghchi is basically enunciating a fundamental of all negotiations—a party that has once walked away should not expect to get the deal they walked away from:
Seyed Abbas Araghchi @araghchi
Relatively positive atmosphere in Rome has enabled progress on principles and objectives of a possible deal.
We made clear how many in Iran believe that the JCPOA is no longer good enough for us. To them, what is left from that deal are "lessons learned". Personally, I tend to agree.
The initiation of expert level track will begin in coming days with a view to hammer out details. After that, we will be in a better position to judge.
For now, optimism may be warranted but only with a great deal of caution.
Trump walked away from a good deal. Iran “moved on.” Any baseline will need to be based on current realities, not a return to the past. That’s similar to the Russia position on Ukraine:
Patarames @Pataramesh
Indeed JCPOA regulations won't work for Iran anymore
Iran has produced ~3000 advanced IR-6 centrifuges, while under JCPOA it could only test 30 IR-6 in 2025
Iran would be restricted to development work on the IR-8 centrifuge, but is currently working on the much more potent IR-9
And a further statement from Aragchi puts the ball in Trump’s court—it’s Trump who, having once demonstrated bad faith, has something to prove. No matter how Trump tries to sell this to the American public, it’s Iran that Trump needs to persuade to agree to any deal.
The second round of talks was once again constructive, and if the Americans continue to present realistic demands and good faith, an agreement is within reach.
Talks between nuclear experts of our countries [US & Iran] will begin on Wednesday in Oman, and on Saturday we will have the third round of talks, also in Oman, which will discuss the findings of the experts.
In case of any nuclear deal, it will be monitored by the IAEA, and no external party, including the United States, will be involved in monitoring our nuclear program’
This is the position that Trump placed himself in with his foolish cave to the Jewish Nationalist importuning. Iran had held to the terms of the JCPOA prior to Trump’s withdrawal but, in the face of Anglo-Zionist threats and sanctions, Iran moved on and has now advanced far beyond where they were back then—in every aspect of Trump’s claimed objections, including long range missile development. Pound wise, penny foolish. Trump pleased the usual knuckleheads in the short term but gave away the store in the longer term—if the goal was to limit Iran from approaching nuclear weapon status.
Today Larry Johnson has an excellent article that provides even further context. He begins with the positive: despite the rhetorical gymnastics of Trump 2.0, the US, desperate for a deal, is hewing to the demands that Iran has laid down—no doubt with Russian and Chinese backing.
But then LJ goes on to cite news of military developments that almost certainly played an important role in setting Trump 2.0 back on its heels when Netanyahu attempted to trick them into attacking Iran. “OTH” = Over The Horizon:
There are other factors that may be giving Trump second thoughts about starting a war with Iran. The Middle East Spectator is reporting that:
Iran’s 2,000 kilometer range ‘Sepehr’ OTH Radar has finally become operational, satellite imagery seems to confirm
The radar array is one of Iran’s most advanced over-the-horizon radars, more than 1,5 kilometers in length. It can detect takeoffs of individual aircraft or ballistic missile launches at a range of up to 2,000 kilometers, including inside the entirety of Israel.
Only a handful of countries have mastered such advanced OTH radar technology, and the radar provides Iran with valuable early warning of an imminent attack.
If the US intelligence community is confirming this report, then I believe that Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth are telling Trump that the Iranian’s have the capability to detect and thwart a military attack by either the US or Israel. At least I hope that is what is happening behind closed doors.
We also cannot ignore what Vladimir Putin is doing behind the scenes, most likely in concert with Xi Jinping, to help shape the deal between the US and Iran by assuring Donald Trump that Russia is fully committed to preventing Iran from building and using a nuclear weapon.
The odd man out is Bibi Netanyahu.
Read it all. Just as in the case of Russia, the US bargaining position with regard to Iran is not as strong as many believe. The article also links to a video interview of Alastair Crooke in which Crooke states that Iranian radar locked onto Israeli F-35s that were 70 miles outside Iranian air space—causing the attempted attack on Iran to be aborted.
Today being Easter, I’ve been saving an important article by Alastair Crooke that connects very well with an hour long video interview of political economist Philip Pilkington. In this article Crooke is repeating what he argued nearly a year ago, and which I treated in a post at that time:
In that post I dealt extensively with issues of “free speech” and the way in which the classical liberal/libertarian regimes that arose in the post 18th century West have—paradoxically, as it seems to some, but actually predictably—resulted in the undermining of freedom. The way this happens is that liberalism breaks up organic societal and cultural solidarity in the name of freeing individuals—but that leaves the ‘atomized’ individual bereft of support against the ambitions of the unitary liberal state which is bent on replacing organic societal structures with its own all embracing controls. This dynamic explains the failure of so-called conservatism to effectively oppose the progressive state—they share the same indifference/hostility to organic societal and cultural solidarity:
As Professor John Gray writes:
“At bottom, the liberal assault on free speech [on Gaza and Ukraine] is a bid for unchecked power. By shifting the locus of decision from democratic deliberation to legal procedures, the élites aim to insulate [their neoliberal] cultish programmes from contestation and accountability. The politicisation of law – and the hollowing out of politics go hand in hand”.
Crooke traces the origins of this illiberalism to liberalism itself—the Classical Liberalism that arose out of the Enlightenment and is now more generally known as Libertarianism. It is the championing of the individual which has—some would say paradoxically—led to the crushing of freedom.
…
In other words, in Western liberal democracy, the freedom of the individual actually becomes an instrument of social control. The atomized individuals are less able to organize and resist the unitary state. The mania we now see to further groom individuals to “shed their biological gender, their cultural identity and ethnicity” is part of that process of control, which explains the Ruling Class repression of even speech norms. The individual, as such, is de-humanized.
The impetus for this malign trend, as I long argued in the earlier version of Meaning in History, arises from the breakdown of Western Christian philosophy into nominalism and Kantianism (themselves the end products of the radical skepticism inherent in Platonic thought, as transmitted to the West by Augustine). Nominalism maintained that no common natures or essences could be known—only unconnected individuals. Unlike the Christian valorization of the individual as the imago Dei, this new ideology of the autonomous individual gave no value to the individual as such. In his individuality each individual is merely a part of the Hobbesian Leviathan.
Crooke argues that this atomization of all human relations—in the name of “freedom and individualism”—has led to de-civilization and un-freedom. Because no man can be free as an island. Only in a culture under God can true freedom be found:
Go back and read it all—it’s intimately connected with everything going on in our world. It forms the background for Crooke’s current briefer remarks. Crooke’s previous article was written before the 2024 election. He updates those themes in light of the first months of Trump 2.0. I quote here from the last half of the article:
Trump Axes a Stricken World Order – But There’s Opportunity Amidst the Turmoil
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Karl Polyani, in his Great Transformation (published some 80 years ago), held that the massive economic and social transformations that he had witnessed during his lifetime – the end of the century of “relative peace” in Europe from 1815 to 1914, and the subsequent descent into economic turmoil, fascism and war, which was still ongoing at the time of the book’s publication – had but a single, overarching cause:
Prior to the 19th century, Polyani insisted, the human ‘way of being’ (economics as an organic component of society) had always been ‘embedded’ in society, and subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations; i.e. subordinated to a civilisational culture. Life was not treated as separate; not reduced to distinct particulars, but was viewed as parts to an organic whole – that is, to Life itself.
Post-modern nihilism (that descended into unregulated neo-liberalism of the 1980s) turned this logic on its head. As such, it constituted an ontological break with much of history. Not only did it artificially separate the ‘economic’ from the political and ethical ‘way of being’, but open, free-trade economics (in its Adam Smith formulation) demanded the subordination of society to the abstract logic of the self-regulating market. For Polanyi, this “meant no less than the running of community as an adjunct to the market”, and nothing more.
The answer – clearly – was to make society again the dominant part to a distinctly human community; i.e. given its meaning through a living culture. In this sense, Polanyi also emphasised the territorial character of sovereignty – the nation-state as the sovereign pre-condition to the exercise of democratic politics.
Polanyi would have argued that, absent a return to Life itself as the central pivot to politics, a violent backlash was inevitable. Is such a backlash what we are seeing today?
At a conference of Russian industrialists and entrepreneurs, on 18 March 2025, Putin referred precisely to a ‘National Economics’ alternate solution for Russia. Putin highlighted both the imposed siege on the state, and set out the Russian response to it – a model which is likely to be adopted by much of the globe.
It is a mode of economic thinking that is already practiced by China which had anticipated Trump’s Tariff Blitz.
Putin’s address – metaphorically speaking – constitutes the financial counterpart to his 2007 Munich Security Forum speech, at which he accepted the military défie posed by ‘collective NATO’. Last month however, he went further – Putin stated clearly that Russia had accepted the challenge posed by the Anglo ‘open economy’ financial order.
To this I’ll add the Philip Pilkington video, which emphasizes Polanyi’s thesis, which Crooke finds so powerful—that there can be no healthy economy if a healthy society and culture is systematically undermined, as in liberal regimes.
Why Your Way Of Life Is Collapsing: Green Paganism & The Depopulation Bomb | Philip Pilkington
John speaks with economist Philip Pilkington to explore the unraveling of global liberalism, tracing its roots from British imperialism to America’s post-World War II dominance. Pilkington argues that economic liberalisation failed to universalise liberal values, as nations like China and India embrace markets while rejecting cultural liberalism. A multipolar world emerges, where non-liberal powers redefine global influence.
Family breakdown and demographic decline threaten Western prosperity, with collapsing birth rates and rising welfare costs signalling societal decay. Radical green ideologies, rooted in neo-paganism, prioritise nature over human welfare, risking a return to impoverishment. Pilkington envisions a post-liberal West reviving Christian values to restore stable families and economic vitality.
Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and investment professional. He is the author of The Reformation in Economics and the soon to be released The Collapse Of Global Liberalism. He also co-hosts the popular geopolitics podcast Multipolarity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------00:00 Intro
00:01:49 The collapse of the global liberal world order
00:08:43 Projecting the aftermath of the global liberal world order
00:16:37 The changing landscape of Hong Kong
00:25:49 The radical 'green' movement
00:32:05 The post-liberal world order and the West
00:39:37 The decline of productivity
00:46:12 Facing the depopulation bomb
00:53:47 The importance of traditional families ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Conversations feature John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, interviewing the world's foremost thought leaders about today's pressing social, cultural and political issues.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/04/test-scores-plummet-low-income-students-as-woke/
Also Happy Easter to you and family Mark. Tx again for marshaling these important thinkers and writers to challenge and enlighten us! You are a beacon and a blessing.