Friday, July 3, 2015

Recent Piece for Vocal International

Michael L.

Vocal International, out of Brussels, Belgium, has brought me in as a writer and adviser.

They focus on news as it is related to European lives and have mainly been assigning me pieces concerning the Middle East and its relationships to Europe, the West, and Israel.

My most recent article, entitled, Saudi Arabia to Go Nuclear,  is a mere 700 words and is concerned with the recent Russian-Saudi nuclear agreement wherein Russia will build, and help maintain, up to sixteen nuclear reactors in the Saudi Peninsula.

Here is a tid-bit:
My suspicion – and it is only a suspicion – is that the Russian-Saudi deal is, at least in part, a reaction to the nuclear deal that United States President Barack Obama hopes to shortly conclude with Iran. Analysts are predicting that Obama’s Iran nuke deal will fuel a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East and, in all likelihood, this is what we are looking at.  It could be that the primary motivation of the Saudis is simple economics.  By building nuclear facilities for domestic energy consumption they can sell more oil on the international market.  What is also quite likely, however, is that Saudi Arabia, like Iran, has cast its eye on the potential for a nuclear weapon. It seems highly unlikely that Sunni-controlled Saudi Arabia, not to mention Sunni-controlled Egypt, is going to look kindly upon a Shia bomb in the neighborhood.
You can read the piece in its entirety here.

3 comments:

  1. Mike your link "Saudi Arabia to Go Nuclear" is broken, no URL

    BTW isn't it curious that after 5 decades of people (mainly on the left) saying Israel shouldn't have nuclear weapons, because they supposedly create instability in the region. It's only now, facing the Iranian threat, that Arab countries are seriously pursuing nuclear weapons. Could it be that Arabs realized all along that Israel didn't threaten them.

    Ian

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    1. Ooops!

      Fixed. Thanks, Ian.

      Well, you know what they're saying now. Barack Obama brought Israel and the Arab states together... of course, they are coming together collective in opposition to Obama's foreign policy, but nonetheless!

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  2. Russians have a long experience of working with recalcitrant difficult Mideast regimes. Plus the Russians aren't worried about timelines or progress. It takes as long as it takes. But fundamentally SA is also looking at industrial scale desalination and one way to do that is with nuclear power plants.

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