I've walked the other end... the end where the silk came from. Stop and ask yourself how it got the name "Silk Road". Where does silk come from? Hazard a guess. It's not anywhere in the Middle East.
The Silk Road was a conduit for the trade of goods from east to west. It is irrelevant because there is no more land based transit of goods from east to west, nor is there any reason for such transit or practical potential for such transit. No matter who controls the western end of what was once the "Silk Road" there still won't be any goods moving through. No silk, no spices, no mobile phones or tools or computers or cranes or any other thing. There's just no reason for them to move by land.
That territory may be strategically and economically significant in other ways. The roads are of course tactically and strategically relevant: roads always are - but as a Silk Road - as a conduit for the traffic of goods from east to west - it's meaningless. There aren't any goods to move. They're all on ships. There may indeed be some potential for intra-regional commerce and movement along portions of the old "Silk Road", but that's not a "Silk Road" any more. The whole identity and function of the "Silk Road" was in moving the products of the east to the markets of the west... and that's gone elsewhere, never to return.
You mean this "secret" conversation?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...ops-Syria.html
I know you've seen that article, because on another thread you cut/pasted directly from it in reference to the supposedly "secret" deal, though without citing it. That "secret" was leaked almost immediately, and the deal stopped on the spot.
The KSA doesn't "protect Russian oil prices", they protect their own price. Of course that means the Russians also benefit, but that's not the purpose. The Saudis will do all they can (quite a bit) to keep oil above $100 a barrel, because that's where they want it to be, for their own reasons. That of course keeps the price up for the Russians too, but that's not about "secret deals", that's just the Saudis lookin' out for #1.
Yes, I know that. It's one of the reasons I thought the Iraq war was a bad idea from the start. Of course Saddam would eventually have fallen, if only to old age, and civil war and dissolution would be a strong possibility in any post-Saddam scenario. We just blundered in and jump-started the process, fired by the illusion of "installing democracy".
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