Sputnik: What is your opinion about Mr. Pompeo's speech?
Alexander Azadgan: Nothing that Mr. Pompeo has said is a surprise. As a matter of fact, when Mr. Rex Tillerson was fired and they brought this gentleman onboard, it's no surprise that he's defending the same old [policy] of the defeated neocons. Of course now we have John Bolton onboard as the national security advisor to President Trump. We pretty much forecasted…basically this old ugly imperialistic image that they're still trying to portray and project onto the rest of the world, not knowing that this model has not worked, that it never did, and now is in its last gasps.
I don't want to talk bad about the United States; it's my country. But really if you look back at our history, we have never kept our word when it comes to a less powerful entity, be it the Native Americans or whoever else…
Alexander Azadgan: There are two things going on. We have the European Union, which is trying to somehow keep itself together, because it's realizing with Brexit that it's not going to be powerful anymore. The globalists – the internationalists in the EU – want to preserve that model, and they want to pursue their own version of globalism which the US is very much against.
This is a battle of national sovereignty from different levels, because you have to understand that Iran didn't sign an agreement with the European Union; they signed an agreement with three countries, two of which are still in the European Union (Germany and France) and the UK, which is out. So we have that angle – the challenging of the US dollar vis-à-vis the euro, even though the euro was a CIA project from the beginning.
Now they want to pursue their own policy, and at the national sovereignty level – especially Germany. We are seeing the rise of Germany; we are seeing the [desire] of Germany to not be a vassal state to Washington. The Germans are expressing cooperation with the Russians, and unfortunately our American colleagues in Washington, the neocons, see this as a threat. They are addicted to imperialism, they are addicted to arm-twisting; they are addicted to sanctions…
There's also another level, which is regime change. The Europeans don't want any regime change. They have realized that this Islamic government has been in power for close to forty years, whereas their American colleagues are still under the illusion that they can pursue this regime-change binging, starting with Iraq, to Libya, to Yemen, to Syria, and they're on a roll with this, and their ultimate goal is always Iran. In Europe they don't have that mentality…
Sputnik: What's this idea that's been floating around about the euro being used by the European Union to pay for Iranian oil?
Alexander Azadgan: This could be a declaration of war, or an excuse for a declaration of war by Washington against Iran. Keep in mind that that's what Saddam Hussein was threatening in the early 2000s – to trade his oil in euro instead of dollars; same thing with Muammar Gaddafi with the golden dinar – the common currency of Africa which he had in mind.
Many European countries are in a dire situation, so they may really want to promote once and for all that an oil-rich country like Iran would trade its most valuable resources of natural gas and oil in euro, increasing the demand for euro.
There's this global effort to really reduce the global dependency on the dollar –we have the petro-yuan system that's being introduced; there are all sorts of movements. Everybody's now waiting to see what kind of severe reaction Washington would show to Iran; everyone is looking at that as a model of how punitive Washington could be against anyone who stands against its globalist agenda vis-à-vis the IMF, NATO, the World Bank – these mechanisms that have been controlling [countries] for the past eighty years, and which allowed the United States to print money and wage wars.
Alexander Azadgan is a senior geopolitical analyst and editor-at-large with Imperia News. The views and opinions expressed by Dr. Azadgan are those of the expert and do not necessarily reflect those of Sputnik.