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It goes without saying that the Iran nuclear deal is on its last legs and will likely die following declarations of Tehran leaders to no longer be beholden to uranium enrichment limits (in a Jan.6 statement) after the prior US pullout from the deal, but especially following the assassination of IRGC Quds Force Gen. Qasem Soleimani. Days after Soleimani’s death German foreign minister Heiko Maas warned the writing is on the wall as it marked the “first step towards the end” of the nuclear deal.

And now the deal’s final unraveling has just hit another crucial indicative milestone as on Tuesday France, Britain and Germany formally triggered the dispute resolution mechanism regulating conformity to the deal, seen as the harshest measure taken thus far by the European signatories. It essentially means the European powers officially see Iran as in breach of the deal; EU punitive sanctions are now on the table. 

“The European powers said they were acting to avoid a crisis over nuclear proliferation adding to an escalating confrontation in the Middle East. Russia, another signatory to the pact, said it saw no grounds to trigger the mechanism,” Reuters reports. 

However in taking the dire action, a joint statement underscored this should not be interpreted as meaning they’ve joined Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign, but are attempting to stave off an additional crisis of potential nuclear proliferation. 

The chief concern, however reluctant they may have been to trigger the mechanism, is described by a senior official’s quote to The Guardian:

Concern was most acute that Iran will be learning about centrifuge enrichment in an irreversible way. “The concern is they are going to learn something that it is not possible for them to unlearn,” one senior official said.

“We do not accept the argument that Iran is entitled to reduce compliance with the JCPoA,” the European signatories to the JCPOA said. “Our three countries are not joining a campaign to implement maximum pressure against Iran. Our hope is to bring Iran back into full compliance with its commitments under the JCPoA,” they said.

The mechanism was triggered upon the individual European states formally notifying the agreement’s guarantor, the European Union.

“To trigger the mechanism, the European states notified the European Union, which acts as guarantor of the agreement,” Reuters notes. “EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrell said the aim was not to reimpose sanctions but to ensure compliance.” But we highly doubt the Iranians will see the measure the same way. 

Tehran has for more than the past year leveled accusations that the Europeans are ‘too little too late’ with half-hearted measures to provide relief to Iran’s economy decimated by US sanctions, such as the ‘SWIFT-alternative’ special purpose financial vehicle INSTEX.

Meanwhile, seizing on the nuclear’s deal’s apparent unraveling in progress, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said something else that certainly won’t be taken warmly in Tehran: “If we’re going to get rid of it, let’s replace it and let’s replace it with the Trump deal.”

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

When Washington imposed sanctions on companies, the move drew criticism not just from Russia but from Germany as well. The sanctions, targeting firms building the pipeline that will increase Gazprom’s export capacity for Europe, were seen as interference in Germany’s internal affairs while the legislators who approved them saw them as a tool for deterring Russia’s energy influence in Europe. For some, however, the reason for the sanctions was the U.S.’s own energy plans for Europe.

The Trump administration is following an agenda of energy dominance, and this dominance has to include Europe, which is one of the biggest markets for natural gas and, what’s more relevant to the U.S., liquefied natural gas. However, lessons from history, and that’s a history of Gazprom, would suggest that the energy dominance approach won’t work – not in Europe.

Bloomberg’s Liam Denning recently reviewed a book by an IHS Markit expert on Russian energy, Thane Gustafson, titled The Bridge. The Bridge, according to Denning, contains, among other things, a cautionary tale for U.S. gas ambitions in Europe. The gist of it is that the European gas market is a lot more open and transparent than it used to be, and while this has served to reduce the influence of Gazprom on the continent, it has also served to deter anyone else that might want to try to take Gazprom’s place.

The truth is that today, Europe has developed a continental gas network, and that network features LNG terminals. This means that many European countries are today a lot more flexible in their gas imports than they were 30 years ago, when Russia and Norway dominated the market. There is just one catch: the LNG has to be cheap enough to beat alternative supplies.

Poland is already buying U.S. liquefied natural gas. The country is ready and willing to pay more if it has to, in order to reduce its dependence on Russian gas for a number of historical reasons. Yet last year Bulgaria, too, bought two cargos of U.S. LNG from Cheniere’s Sabine Pass liquefaction plant. According to the head of the state gas operator, the cargos were priced at the level of local benchmark prices.

Even so, Poland and Bulgaria are small potatoes. Germany is the biggest gas market in Europe and it will become even bigger as the country aims to shut down all its remaining nuclear power plants by 2022. This is why Gazprom is building Nord Stream 2 with Angela Merkel’s blessing, after all. And this is why the U.S. is sanctioning it if we leave aside the ideology that every government uses to advance its purely pragmatic agenda.

Germany imported $14.6 billion worth of natural gas in the first half of 2019. That was 14.8 percent higher than a year earlier, but the increase in volume terms was even greater: these came in at 2.66 million terajoules, which was 20 percent higher than the year-earlier period. Historically, most of the imported gas has come from Russia, followed by Norway and the Netherlands. Now that the Netherlands is shutting down its flagship Groningen field ahead of schedule, Germany will need more gas from Russia and Norway. It could import U.S. LNG as per a EU promise to President Trump, as long as the price is right, as the EU Energy Commissioner said last year.

Yet because of the open and transparent nature of Europe’s gas market, Germany is also buying LNG from Russia. Just last month Novatek opened its first LNG fueling station in Germany. It is the first LNG station of the Russian company in Europe and could mark the start of a network.

This is why energy dominance is a challenging goal in Europe’s gas market. The fact that Germany and others are building new LNG terminals does not obligate them to use these terminals for U.S. LNG. Qatar is right around the corner, so to speak, and so are Nigeria and Algeria – both large LNG producers. Competition is intense and it’s out in the open. The victory that EU competition watchdogs achieved in their fight with Gazprom’s long-term contracts paved the way to the current competitive environment that leaves both Gazprom and U.S. LNG producers at the mercy of market forces.

The start of approximately 400,000 job losses in the German automotive industry is already underway as the industry shifts towards electric vehicles, reported the Financial Times. 

Germany’s workforce is likely to contract by 1% in the next ten years as carmakers such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Volkswagen, and Porsche transition to electric car sales. 

The shift from a combustion engine to electric, and the resulting factor it might lead to job losses is merely a cover, or a narrative by the German press, likely created by the government, to shield the public’s view from collapsing car production in the country. 

Why frighten consumers and tell them German car production has crashed to 23-year lows when narrative creation in the press can assure everyone that the slump is because carmakers are doing away with dirty fossil fuel engines for a greener future. 

The German government expects carmakers to produce 10 million electric cars by 2030. With the addition of automation and artificial intelligence in factories, the need for humans will continue to wane and displace even more. 

The automotive industry in the country supports 800,000 jobs and indirectly supports 3 million more. 

“It is the joint responsibility of industry, trade unions, and politics to promote reskilling so that negative effects on the labor market can be kept to a minimum,” said Kurt-Christian Scheel, the VDA’s managing director that represents Germany’s carmakers.

Volkswagen’s Zwickau factory and Porsche’s Zuffenhausen assembly line have so far been converted to electric vehicle production without significant job losses, thanks to the bargaining power of unions. 

It’s time the German press and government stop blaming electric cars for the massive job losses that could soon hit the industry in the coming quarters and years and prepare for a financial storm as car production has already crashed to several decade lows. 

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Never reluctant to poke its nose into regions where it has no commitments or relevance, the Nato military alliance is stumbling round in Iraq, the crucible of Middle Eastern disruption. Following the U.S. drone-strike killing of Iranian General Soleimani and the deputy commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Nato’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, came out predictably with expressions of support for the assassinations.

Nobody in the West (and probably precious few elsewhere, other than Iran, if numbers could be independently ascertained) could in any way be supportive of Soleimani and the barbarous forays he directed that resulted in the deaths of so many innocent people. He deserved to be brought to justice — which does not mean that it was morally defensible or legally permissible to kill him.

And please take a moment to think about the driver of the car he was in, who was also blasted to bits. What possible justification could there have been for killing him? It couldn’t be claimed by even Pompeo or Trump that he had been planning to attack America or Americans. This pawn on the board of revenge was killed by a missile fired by a U.S. attack drone. And he will pass out of memory as quickly as the flash of the explosion that blew him apart. But in terms of morality and international law he is just as important as any general, and responsibility for his death lies firmly at the door of the White House.

The obvious course of action in the case of Soleimani would have been to institute proceedings for an alleged international criminal to be brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), but we can forget that, because the United States “is not a party to the ICC’s Rome Statute and has consistently voiced its unequivocal objections to any attempts to assert ICC jurisdiction over U.S. personnel.” The fact that the ICC “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression” is objectionable to the Washington Establishment because it is possible that U.S. citizens could be investigated.

But Stoltenberg, a supposed internationalist, ignores the ICC (which is recognised by only 14 of Nato’s 29 members), and all that he could come up with after the killings was the absurd adjuration that “Iran must refrain from further violence and provocations.”

The violence was a U.S. drone strike. The provocation was a U.S. drone strike. And the fact that Iranian and Iraqi citizens were butchered in Iraq by a drone-fired missile on the orders of a Nato member country appears to mean nothing to the head of that alliance.

Stoltenberg probably doesn’t remember that, as pointed out by a perceptive analyst, “NATO is the only organization in modern history that has had significant involvement in the arrest of people indicted by an international criminal tribunal; NATO was instrumental in assisting with arrests for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia” which in the 1990s was a major development. Unfortunately, Nato has moved further and further away from international conventions and legal requirements — as abundantly demonstrated by its catastrophic war against Libya in 2011 — and has been drawn ever closer to the go-it-alone interventionist style of its most powerful member state.

And now President Trump is calling the shots around the world, which includes demanding that Nato become more deeply involved in the festering quagmire of destruction and despair that the U.S. has created in the Middle East.

Following a telephone call between Trump and Stoltenberg on January 8, Nato issued a statement that “The President asked the Secretary General for NATO to become more involved in the Middle East. They agreed that NATO could contribute more to regional stability and the fight against international terrorism. They also agreed to stay in close contact on the issue. NATO plays a key role in the fight against international terrorism, including through training missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.”

What exactly does Trump mean by “more” involved in the shambles he has expanded in the Middle East? More troops? More drones? More extermination of innocent people who happen to be earning their living by driving a car?

Trump’s emphasis became clearer the day after he spoke with Stoltenberg, when he told reporters at the White House that “I think that NATO should be expanded and we should include the Middle East, absolutely. We can come home, largely come home and use NATO. We caught ISIS, we did Europe a big favour.” In addition to the staggering irony that, as noted by Reuters, the murdered Soleimani “played a major role in the fight against Islamic State militants in the region”, Trump “joked that the organisation could be called NATO-ME, or NATO plus the Middle East. He said he floated the possible name to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.”

Nato headquarters made no mention of the cretinous “NATO-ME” attempt at humour (if indeed it was that) which is not surprising because some Nato countries were taking action to secure the safety of their troops who Trump’s assassination strike had placed in greater jeopardy of their lives — without informing Nato or any individual member with troops in the region that there was about to be a major escalation in violence in the Middle East.

On January 7 it was reported that some Nato countries were withdrawing and relocating troops, with Germany moving 30 of its 130 personnel out of the country and Romania “relocating” all of its 14 soldiers. Of Croatia’s 21 troops, 14 were moved to Kuwait and seven returned home. Latvia and Denmark sent their troops to Kuwait, but Britain, with Nato’s largest non-US contingent, of some 400, did not announce any action to safeguard its personnel, and prime minister Boris Johnson unconditionally supported the killing of Soleimani, saying “we will not lament his death.”

Nobody expected Johnson or any other western politician to say they regretted Soleimani’s killing, and it was a typical Johnson comment — but there are reasons why Johnson constantly supports Trump, not the least of which is the British economy. (Morality and international law are irrelevant.)

When Britain leaves the European Union it will have to negotiate trade arrangements with many blocs and countries, not the least being the United States. There is therefore no possibility that Johnson would boldly go where many have gone before, and annoy Trump by contradicting him, because the petulant spiteful Trump would immediately refuse to engage in trade discussions.

Nato is on the UK’s back burner, and if supporting Trump’s policies about the Middle East and Nato is politically necessary, then so be it. Johnson agrees with Stoltenberg’s statement that “For me it’s no surprise that the United States is calling for Nato to do more, because that has actually been the message from the United States for a long time. . . We are looking into what more we can do.” But it is most unlikely there could be a Nato consensus about continuing a presence in Iraq, and if Trump demands additional military commitment by Nato countries, as seems apparent from his statement that “We can come home, largely come home and use NATO” in the Middle East he will put Stoltenberg and Nato nations’ leaders in an impossible situation.

Nato is floundering in the Middle East, and the best thing it could do would be to withdraw its military forces from the region. They have achieved nothing, and the future is bleak, to put it mildly. Get out now.

Saudi Arabia’s shortage of executioners didn’t stop the kingdom from carrying out a record number of death sentences in 2019, according to the non-profit Reprieve, which monitors how KSA handles capital punishment.

According to figures provided to ABC News, KSA executed 184 people last year, including 90 foreign nationals. The most common crime committed by the prisoners who were put to death was drug smuggling (82 were executed for smuggling narcotics) while 57 were executed on murder charges.

That’s compared to a total of 22 executions in the entire US.

Notably, KSA has seen a rise in killings since 2015, when Reprieve first started keeping track.

In 2014, 88 people were executed, with that number nearly doubling to 157 executions in 2015. Executions stayed at around that level until last year, when the state killed 35 more people than they had in 2018.

As we reported at the time, the Saudis killed 37 people in a single day, including a student who was supposed to be on his way to college in the US, which prompted Rep. Rashida Tlaib to lash out at the kingdom.

It’s not publicly known how many prisoners are currently on death row in Saudi Arabia. However, among those awaiting “imminent execution” are Ali al-Nimr, Abdullah al-Zaher and Dawood al-Marhoon, all of whom were sentenced to death for their roles in anti-government protests during the Arab Spring, nearly a decade ago.

Ali al-Nimr, Abdullah al-Zaher and Dawood al-Marhoon, pictured above

Maya Foa, Reprieve’s director, called on the US and UK to call out the kingdom’s record of executions in the “strongest possible terms,” arguing that that international pressure “can make a difference.”

While that may or may not be true, we imagine neither country would be willing to jeopardize such a mutually beneficial relationship.

Even evidence that Saudi officials were involved in orchestrating 9/11 couldn’t do that.

Instead, the jump in executions will inevitably be used by human rights advocates to bash Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has tried to enact liberal reforms like allowing women to drive while aggressively eradicating any whiff of criticism (for an example see what happened to dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi).