Middle Eastern pressure pot overheating!

Key Markets report for Friday, 4 April 2025

Things are getting ever uglier in the Middle East and the new administration in Washington is dealing with it like an elephant in a china shop. Bombing of Yemen is continuing. On Wednesday, the US Air Force struck water infrastructure facility at the coastal Hudayah province, cutting access to fresh water to 50,000 people. In spite of all this, Ansar Allah has continued launching drone and missile strikes both against Israel and against US naval vessels in the Red Sea. They claimed that they downed another US “reaper” drone (their 16th trophy so far) and also that they scored a direct hit against one of the vessels in the Harry Truman aircraft carrier strike group.

Houthis unbowed

Whatever the case, bombing Yemen is probably a dumb gambit, at least according to Donald Trump. Indeed, the Yemenis have endured ten years of bombardments, either by the Saudi Arabian forces, with the aircraft, bombs, missiles and targeting intelligence provided by the US, another 16 months of bombardments by the Western alliance’s operation “Prosperity Guardian,” and now more bombardment by US forces under Trump’s command. During these last ten years, in addition to bombardments, the Yemenis endured famine and a cholera epidemic, but they haven’t bowed to the empire and they haven’t capitulated.

So why is the US administration insisting on continuing to bomb Yemen? It could be the result of an impotent rage and the imperative to project power and intimidate any and all aspiring resistance movements in the region? That’s likely, but the bombings also reflect an absence of imagination and diplomatic IQ. If the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything that sticks out will be dealt with like a nail: submit to our will, or we’re going to hurt you. The only new twist that Trump’s cabinet brought to task is saying, “we’ll hurt you harder than you’ve ever been hurt before…” So, pretty bigly, and everyone should run scared.

Precision targeting (nudge, nudge, wink, wink!)

This might have done the trick 20 or 30 years ago, but it’s clearly not doing the trick today, perhaps because the empire is making threats with the same tired weapons systems and depleted ammunition that they’d been using all these decades. They’re also using the same intelligence sources and apparently have no idea what they’re dropping bombs at. After the first round of bombings last month, Trump’s National security Advisor Mike Waltz identified one of the targets as “their top missile guy.” They did not know the man’s name, but somehow they knew he was their top missile guy.

For anyone who still clings to the illusion that the “intelligence community” has special and precise knowledge about what they’re doing, they should only remember the Afghanistan Papers which showed conclusively that they often haven’t even a faintest clue. In a recent interview, former marine officer and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter gave his own testimony about Centcom’s “precision targeting.” He worked with the US Central Command and was, “heavily involved with targeting Iraqi SCUD missiles … their production capacity, their command and control, and their operational activities, to try and interdict their launches.”

Later, Ritter became a UN weapons inspector and had the opportunity to go to Iraq and “visit every place we attacked.” Here’s what he said:

“We misidentified the vast majority of targets we bombed; we claimed that we did nore destruction on them than we did and oftentimes we hit things that had nothing to do with what we thought we were doing... We didn’t hit a single SCUD launcher in the entire war, despite diverting thousands of combat sorties dedicated to that task.”

The weakness was confirmed today with the announcement that the US will redeploy some of its Patriot air-defence batteries from South Korea to the Middle East. Why that? Apparently to protect against the Houthi ballistic missiles. How many batteries? Apparently, all of two of them. And these were not surplus Patriot systems rusting in storage - they were deployed to South Korea for defensive purposes, so this redeployment is only temporary and done in coordination with Korea’s government. That is, of course, unless the batteries end up destroyed.

Israel’s explosive message to Turkey

But Yemen is not the administration’s only headache in the Middle East. On Wednesday this week, Israel launched multiple bombing raids on Syria, hitting military installations including the T4 airbase near Homs where Turkish forces were planning a military base with air defence facilities intended exactly to prevent Israeli air raids. An Israeli official, quoted by the Jerusalem Post stated that, “Our airstrikes in Syria are a message to Turkey not to establish a military base there or interfere in our operations.” It seems surreal that the Israeli government thought that they needed another confrontation with a new enemy in the region but they also clearly regard dropping bombs as the only tool of foreign policy.

So far, there has been no reaction from Turkey, but it’s hard to imagine that they won’t plan countermeasures. Turkey itself is in a deep political and economic crisis. At the same time, there’s boiling anger against Israel among the Turkish population and an escalation against Israel could unite the population behind the country’s leadership (which, presumably is still Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but that’s not exactly clear of late).

There could be a biblical-scale escalation

In other words, Turkey, NATO’s second largest military force, could use a distraction about now and mount a confrontation against Israel. So far, Turkey’s proxy in Syria, Al Jolani has been very conciliatory towards Israel, but this could change soon and if the situation escalates, this could be well beyond the Trump administration’s or NATO’s ability to control.

At this time it would be hard to predict how the whole situation might evolve. The Trump administration is still poised for a strike against Iran. The opinions remain very divided as to whether they’ll go through with it or not, but the farther they push the war preparations, the harder it could be to stand down and reverse course. Either way, with the Israeli government now acting unhinged and the Trump government bending over backwards to show their unconditional support for whatever Benjamin Netanyahu decides to do, the circumstances are rife with risk and Turkey’s role in Syria could detonate an irreversible escalation that could reach biblical proportions.

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Trading signals for Key Markets, 4 April 2025

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