The Telegraph, 28 MAY 2017— Largely missed last week was the remarkable geo-political shift which took place when President Trump lined up Saudi Arabia and Israel in what is being called “a Nato-style coalition” against the country they all agree is at the heart of most of the Middle East’s problems: Iran. Instead of his campaign rhetoric seeming to oppose the US to all Muslims, he is now allied with half the Muslim world.
This followed the ghastly farce of the Iranian presidential election, when again we were told that the victor, Hassan Rouhani , was a “moderate” against a “hardliner”. As I have reported many times, Rouhani is an utterly ruthless operator, who had presided since 2013 over a collapsing economy and what Amnesty International called “a staggering execution spree”, murdering and imprisoning so many dissidents that Iran has per capita the highest execution rate in the world.