For the past eight years, the Obama administration did everything in its power to empower Iran.  That included enabling Russia to became the leading member and the protector of the Iranian regime and its nuclear program.

This has created President Trump’s most urgent foreign policy challenge.  To face it, he has three basic options – the best of which is to cut a deal with Russia to ditch Iran.

The problem is that since Trump’s election, the Democrats, their allied media outlets and powerful forces in the US intelligence community have been beset by a Russia hysteria unseen since the Red scares in the 1950s. 

That Obama bent over backward to cater to Putin’s interests for eight years has been pushed down the memory hole, while the Clinton Foundation making hundreds of millions with corrupt Russian allies of Putin is ignored. 

How will Trump overcome this to make his greatest deal?

Iran is once again capturing headlines following more provocative ballistic missile tests in the Strait of Hormuz and Persian Gulf in recent weeks.

At the core of these tests, which violate the UN Security Council resolution, stands Tehran regime’s elite force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or Pasdaran.

The IRGC was and is an instrumental tool for the clerical regime to preserve its survival and maintain power at home for the last 38 years by domestic repression complemented with sponsoring terrorism and fundamentalism under the banner of exporting “the Islamic Revolution” abroad.  This elite force reports directly to the Supreme Leader.

In a new book, Iran: The Rise of the Revolutionary Guards’ Financial Empire, published earlier this month (March), the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), documents a major corporate and money grab by  the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the IRGC.  Thus the book’s subtitle:  How the Supreme Leader and the IRGC Rob the People to Fund International Terror.

It maps the vast business holdings and wealth amassed by the IRGC and the Supreme Leader.  It’s time to take that terrorist-sponsoring wealth away from them.

It is possible to go through an entire education to PhD level in the very best schools and universities in either the American or British system without any of your teachers or professors breathing the words “Friedrich Hayek”. This is a pity.

Hayek died 25 years ago last week (March 23) at the age of 93, yet his ideas are very relevant to the 21st century. He was the person who saw most clearly that knowledge is held in the cloud, not the head, that human intelligence is a collective phenomenon.

What Hayek argued is that human collaboration is necessary for society to work; that the great feature of the market is that it enables us to work for each other, not just for ourselves; and that authoritarian, top-down rule is not the source of order or progress, but a hindrance.

This explains why free market capitalism is pro-humanity, and why opposition to it is anti-humanity.

This is about What We Know and.. What We Don't Want To Know.

Let’s start by looking at what Wikileaks revealed about the CIA in their recent “Vault 7” document dump, which you can find here.

I am taking these leaks as real. Whether you like Julian Assange and his team or not, they have a stellar record of presenting the truth.

The ruling gangs in DC and allied media look very, very bad in comparison. I believe Wikileaks far more than I do politicians and news-readers, and I think that's the only rational choice.

Also, please bear in mind that new batches of CIA leaks may appear at any time. According to Assange, the recent batch was less than 1% of what they have. Perhaps the remaining documents will be very mundane, but I rather doubt it.

With that said, there are five big revelations I think you should see:

The US shale industry has become a hydra-headed monster for Russia – and OPEC too. Before they have contained one threat, fresh dangers keeps popping up in new and expanding zones.

This war of attrition in the crude markets is lasting far longer and biting deeper than the energy exporting states ever imagined. It profoundly alters the geo-strategic contours of energy, and the global balance of power.

New technology is reviving old US fields already written off as largely exhausted, and in the latest twist the impetus is spreading to 'super-basins' in Latin America that threaten to replicate the US success story in short order.

"The tiger is out of the cage and it is going to be very hard to put it back in again," says Gerald Kepes, upstream chief for IHS Markit. "There are multiple basins that could really take off."  Yes, out of the cage and eating the Russian bear alive.

Last week, the Dutch elections of March 15 were billed around Europe and beyond as a battle royal between the forces of populist evil, as represented by Geert Wilders and his Freedom Party (PVV), and virtually everybody else in the motley crew of Dutch electoral politics.

The victory of prime minister’s Mark Rutte’s VVD party (which lost 20% of its seats) over Wilders’s PVV (which added 25%), was greeted rapturously as a monumental defeat for populism and a great triumph for Europe across the political spectrum. In fact, it was nothing of the kind.

If its coverage showed anything, it was that the European press, much like the American mainstream press, has become a one-trick pony that is good at demonstrating political bias, but rather useless in helping one understand where Europe is going.

For these elections did have some profound implications for the future not only of the Netherlands, but all of Europe, that were nearly completely missed in the tons of ink spilled on partisan post-mortems.

Most profoundly: an openly Islamist party made it into a European parliament on its very first try.  This is a paradigm change documenting the growth of political Islam in Europe.