Failed Iranian nuclear talks
It appears obvious to me that the failure of Iran nuke talks is a response to yesterday's call in Congress to send anti-tank weapons to Ukraine's Kiev government. In fact, when I heard that speech yesterday morning, my immediate thought was that some a-hole did it deliberately to block the Iranian talks from working out on Obama's watch. I think they knew exactly what the Russian response would be and wanted it that way. Easiest thing in the world to pull off.
Vladimir, I think Netanyahu's boys played you. Not that they weren't serious about sending weapons to Ukraine. Not that they aren't allied with making more money for military contractors. However, Merkel has been stopping anti-tank weapons since February. Europe would rather see Russia roll over Ukraine and wipe out the revolutionaries who staged the coup than see another Europe-centered world war erupt out of Ukraine.
I can understand though, why Vladimir Putin took that action. If I were him, I would probably do the same thing, even knowing what I know. It's a bargaining chip with the Obama administration. Kerry is in Kiev today, and he's got a big Obama legacy project on his back. If I were Putin, I wouldn't trust us as far as he could spit because the USA's word doesn't mean much, and this administration is still running its Russia policy out of the Ukrainian refugee camp from WWII. In fact, most of what we believe we know about Russia came to us through those Nazi-collaborator refugees who fled Ukraine and dreamed of taking it back. That's the same crew who engineered the takeover of most of Ukraine from Kiev. (The same boys who in Kiev recently banned displays of Soviet anti-Nazi medals, etc. and declared the Nazi collaborators the only true heroes of WWII.)
Why are we letting the Ukrainians run our Russia policy? Inertia plus this administration is unusually lacking in backbone or positions on most major issues. So it lays back. Plus the Israel lobby finds it convenient at times like this to fire off a shot in congress. Russia's realpolitik today is that the worse the Middle East gets, the less likely the USA is to intervene in Ukraine. For Israel, the more the Arabs kill each other, the better off they feel they are. And so we have strange bedfellows in the Iran nuke talks.