Breaking news
— Andrew Bridgen (@ABridgen) September 17, 2026
Macron to convene French security council tomorrow. Polish Prime Minister Tusk tells compatriots to be prepared for anything. German government does the same and sends troops to the Baltic states.
There is movement behind the scenes, and it does not bode well.
Psychologically preparing for their false flag and WW3. It's hard to miss at this point. https://t.co/WcJ9O74gl3
— ColonelTowner-Watkins (@ColonelTowner) September 17, 2026
Now that bad times have come for the House of Saud they are learning where they truly stand in the imperial pecking order.
The Saudis invaded and attacked Yemen more than a decade ago with no long-term strategy. They just financed a lot of Al-Qaeda terrorism, mass bombings, and assassination strikes.
They acted from a false sense of military superiority. They lost then and they're losing now.
Without a strong military it's foolish to project power. Saudi Arabia assumed it was a great power. But it is a collection of tribes with an ungodly amount of oil money. Yemen is the true power of the Arabian peninsula. The Houthis are reasserting Yemen’s natural position in the region. And it's not wise to assume they won't deviate ideologically if push comes to shove.
The Saudis still have some economic leverage over Washington, but do they have the guts to financially punish the United States and try to devalue its currency? I don't think so.
The Jews can afford to act like renegades and pirates because of the immense power they wield in Washington. The Saudis do not have that luxury. Besides, good times have made them weak and cowardly. And the Houthis smell that fear.
They should have made peace.
They should have known attacking a neighbouring country was a foolish thing to do.
II.
An excerpt from, "From Pawns to Global Powers: The Nations of the Middle East Strike Back" by Chas Freeman, February 14, 2023:
For the past two centuries, the West Asian and North African sub-region we call the Middle East has been the playground of external empires and great powers. But for millennia it was itself the birthplace of its own great empires and religions. Now, in the new world disorder, the nations of the Middle East are re-emerging as powers with regional and global influence. This is altering the relations of the United States and other external powers with them in ways that cannot be explained by “great power rivalry” and cannot be addressed by military means.
. . .The United States has assumed formal and informal commitments to come to the defense of countries in the Middle East, most clearly Israel and Saudi Arabia, but no Middle Eastern country, including Israel or Saudi Arabia, has ever accepted any reciprocal obligation to defend the United States or American interests. The classic definition of an alliance is a relationship between two or more nations embodying a broad commitment to mutual assistance in defense of common interests. By this standard, U.S. relations with Middle Eastern countries, other than Turkey (which is a member of NATO), are not “alliances” but “protected state” or “client state” relationships. They are a manifestation of American regional hegemony. In the new world disorder, the lack of reciprocity inherent in U.S. defense commitments in the region invites their reconsideration.
Israel was for long the only Middle Eastern country to disregard admonitions from its American great power patron and to act without consulting it. Israel attacked the U.S.S. Liberty and has murdered American citizens like Rachel Corrie, and, more recently, Shireen Abu Akleh with impunity. Foreign statements of concern, including American statements, over each new display of Israeli racism and disrespect for international law evoke nothing but derision from Israel’s leaders. In the Middle East, sovereign indifference to patrons is apparently contagious. Neither Israel nor any Arab country has joined the United States in condemning and sanctioning Russia for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. None is on board with isolating China.
Turkey refused to allow the U.S. to stage the 2003 invasion of Iraq from its territory. More recently, its air and land forces have repeatedly threatened U.S. units protecting the so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF), which Turkey considers to be linked to and led by terrorists. Despite Turkey’s formal membership in NATO, in practice, it is now best described as an “entente partner” of the United States and Europe – an entente being a limited partnership for limited purposes.
In 2015, Saudi Arabia assembled a “coalition of the billing” and invaded Yemen, demanding and receiving reluctant American support for its operations there. In 2018, Saudi agents murdered a Saudi journalist affiliated with the Washington Post. In 2022, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman refused to take a call from President Biden before accepting an apologetic visit by the president during which the crown prince rebuffed his pleas for actions that could lower the price of gasoline at the pump before elections in the United States.
Clearly, the days are over when presumed client states in the Middle East could be counted upon to comply automatically with directives from Washington. So is their exclusive reliance on Britain, France, Russia, or the United States for their strategic defense. They are busily establishing their own military presences and bases abroad to project power against each other and to control key strategic chokepoints. They now mount military operations beyond their borders that are not linked to those of any patron state or coordinated with one.
Raymond Thomas McNally (April 15, 1931 – October 2, 2002) was an American author and a professor of Russian and East European History at Boston College. He specialized in the history of horror and wrote many books on the subject. He co-authored several books with Radu Florescu (1925–2014), who was also a professor at Boston College.
American Historical Association:
Born in a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio in 1931, Raymond McNally received a Jesuit education at St. Ignatius High School, where he distinguished himself as a musician and student. The latter attribute earned him a scholarship to Fordham University. Initially a French major, he spent his junior year abroad living with a Russian family while studying at the University of Paris. He returned to America with a newfound interest in Russia.
After graduating from Fordham with highest honors in 1953, he was awarded a Fullbright Scholarship to study at the Free University of Berlin, where he pursued his doctoral degree. During that time, he specialized in 19th-century Russian intellectual history under the tutelage of Werner Philipp. His research culminated in 1956 with the publication of his dissertation, “Das Russlandbild in der Französischen Publizistik Zwischen 1814 und 1843.” Upon returning to the United States, McNally taught at John Carroll University in Cleveland for two years. In 1958, he began his career at Boston College, where he taught until he retired in 1999. Within the field of Russian intellectual history, McNally was a particular authority on the liberal intellectual Peter Chaadayev, an edition of whose major works McNally published in 1969. In 1971 he published Chaadayev and His Friends: An Intellectual History of Peter Chaadayev and His Russian Contemporaries.
McNally’s keen interest in classic horror literature and films, in particular the 1931 version of Dracula and the Bram Stoker novel on which it was based, led him next to investigate Dracula as an historical figure. The outcome of this inquiry was In Search of Dracula, co-authored with his colleague, Radu Florescu. A number of other Dracula volumes followed, including Dracula: A Biography of Vlad the Impaler, 1431–76 (1974) and Dracula: Prince of Many Faces (1989). More recently, he and Florescu published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time, McNally continued to give papers and publish articles on Chaadayev and his circle as well as on other aspects of Russian intellectual history.
A colorful and dynamic teacher, McNally acquired a broad following among students, both for his mainstream courses on Russian and European history and his more deliberately popular courses on Terror and Horror. His seminar in Russian intellectual history and his thesis direction enriched the preparation of several graduate students who went on to make important contributions to the field.
In addition to his roles as professor and mentor Raymond McNally founded in 1964 and headed the Russian and East European Center at Boston College, and in 1995, with the late Donald Carlisle, established the Balkan Studies Institute, housed at Boston College. His academic pursuits were complemented in the 1960s and 1970s by political activism and community service. An outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam and of the military dictatorship in Greece, he also served for 12 years on the town of Brookline school committee and on the Democratic State Committee of Massachusetts.
II.
This is a great interview of Raymond T. McNally and worth the listen despite the less than stellar audio at times.
It's rare for learned men to be engaging speakers and good storytellers. They usually talk dryly and without the audience in mind. Not so with Mr. McNally. He must have been a great professor.
Video Title: Joe Viglione's Classic Chat with Raymond T. McNally on Visual Radio. Source: joeviglione. Date Published: October 13, 2011. Description:
Dr Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, In Search Of Dracula, In Search of Frankenstein, Ray McNally's classic interview on Visual Radio. Thanks to guitarist Fred Pineau for introducing me to Ray in 1974 when we interviewed him together for Varulven Magazine. Ray invited me to Boston College in my Dracula cape one Halloween a couple of decades back.
An excerpt from, "The British Russophobia in the first half of the XIX century: the Military Aspect" By Evgeniy V. Kryzhko, Petr I. Pashkovsky, Nickolay N. Chemodurov, Timofey A. Charusov, Bylye Gody, 2019, Vol. 52, Issue 2:
The article considers the problem of the military aspect of the British Russophobia in the first half of the XIX century. It is established that in this period the foreign policy strategy of Great Britain was guided by the logic of the need to counter the growing military-political power of the Russian empire, demanding the development of appropriate ideological tools to give legitimacy to such a course and reach a public consensus on its implementation. Therefore, the British elites are beginning to develop and implement a large-scale anti-Russian information campaign, contributing to the emergence of the phenomenon of Russophobia, an important component of which was the military aspect. At the same time, the views of the military, on the one hand, seem to be rather restrained, reflecting the positive image of the Russian soldier, which was probably the result of the memory of the British-Russian allied relations during the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, the first resident reports are being published on the possible directions of Russian aggression against British India and the need to neutralize this threat by diplomatic and military methods. Based on the analysis of a broad source base and numerous studies, it is revealed that in the period under review, the genesis and spread of Russophobic sentiments among the political elite of Great Britain and their projection regarding the foreign policy aspirations of the Russian empire in the context of their interpretation as a direct or indirect threat to British society, the state and Europe as a whole can be traced. Such imperatives, which emanated from the British officers, were directed to the formation of stable Russophobic attitudes among the population of Great Britain so that the people would support the government’s political line to increase geopolitical pressure towards the Russian Empire.
An excerpt from, "The Origins of Russophobia in France: 1812-1830" By Raymond T. McNally, The American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, April 1958:
In the second two decades of the nineteenth century the picture of Russia presented in French journalistic writing was fear-inspiring. In particular, during the Napoleonic Wars and, even more pronounced after the advent of Nicholas I to the throne, French publicists initiated anti-Russian campaigns, which were destined to culminate later in the mid-nineteenth century as one of the catalyzing causes in the final alignment of France against Russia during the Crimean War. The purpose of this article is to trace the origins of this Russophobia in French pamphlets, travel books, and other popular works about Russia, as well as in diplomatic reports, before 1830. In the critical years of Franco-Russian relations, 1814-15 and 1825-26, I have also utilized the newspaper accounts of these times in tracing the roots of Russophobia.
The traditional view is that widespread fear of Russia in Western Europe was caused by the attitude and actions of Nicholas I when the liberal revolutions broke out in France, Belgium, and especially in Poland in 1830.1 However, it will be seen that a detailed study of the popular writings in France from 1812-30 requires us to make a serious modification of this traditional view held by most historians concerning the rise of Russophobia in the early nineteenth century.
In October, 1812, appeared one of the most influential works in the entire history of Russophobia: Des progres de la puissance russe by Charles-Louis Lesur (1770-1849), founder of the L'annuaire historique. In this book Lesur published the infamous and much misquoted "Testament of Peter the Great." Napoleon I had issued an order to publish a series of articles to show that "Europe is inevitably in the process of becoming booty for Russia." This "testament" was thus published through the designs of the French ministry of foreign affairs. The "will" was circulated again during the Crimean War; Napoleon III ordered it posted on public buildings in Paris and in the whole of France. Adolf Hitler had it republished during the last war. There appears little doubt that the "testament" was a forgery. Harry Breslau in the Historische Zeitschrift (1879) was the first to prove this.The true writer appears to have been Michael Sokolnicki, a Polish general who presented the document to the French Directory on Oct. 19, 1797, with the title Aperqu sur la Russie. His text is substantially the same as Lesur's, which purported to be a resume of the original document.
I don't know the veracity of this report about Trump backchanneling with the Houti terrorists. It could be bullshit. But this guy made a deal with the Taliban in a massive prisoner swap, which eventually led to the destruction of morale in the Afghan army and the surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban. So it could very well be true.
My advice to the Saudis and others in the Middle East: choose your protectors wisely! If you're not a Jew you're going to get screwed by Washington. U.S. policy is as simple as that.
The deal: Torch the strategically vital region because you're feelin' lucky, drag your regional allies into your disastrous war, then abandon them save your own ass. Trump oughta write a book on how he does this. https://t.co/ZSFWuApETY
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) September 16, 2026
BREAKING: Trump made a deal with Yemen’s Houthis in a secret meeting, promising not to strike seized Houthi-held territory or support Saudi Arabia and Saudi-backed forces in any form, in exchange for keeping the Bab el-Mandeb open to shipping, except to Saudi vessels, per…
— The Hormuz Letter (@HormuzLetter) September 16, 2026
