That is not a sunrise, but the explosion of the tanker

The Line is actually a massive success. Saudi Arabia has a massive problem, in that it is dependend on oil and gas, while radical Islam causes a lot of problems for switching to a more sustainable future. Especialls womens rights have improved a lot(still bad, but better). If you ban married women from talking with unmarried men, travel without guardian, drive a car and so forth, you are not using half your potential work force. These sort of strict laws also make the country less attractive to outside visitors. That however is required, when you have business travel and tourism.

If you want to avoid a big backlash, you need to bring the Saudi public on your site and crack down on the most radical faction. A utopian project like the Line is perfect for that. It can inspire the public, while distracting from the crackdowns. It also works as great advertising for tourism. If you are able to deliver something similar, then you have a pretty good product. That is not as true for the Line itself, but for other parts of Neom. A big port in the area makes sense and tourism on the Red Sea is big business in Egypt.

It is really great that there are still people on the internet, who can be convinced by facts. Otherwise you would have given me a source proving me wrong.

If you look at polling, then it is the opposite and still a large group, who see themself as European.

Source: https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2230

It is always good to not look at what geopolitcal actors say, but what they do. For example the Make in Europe initative, the massive trade deals with Mercosur, India and a lot of other countries and blocks recently, a move towards local weapons and software purchases, working on replacing Visa and Mastercard with the digital Euro and so forth.

European countries were in general close allies of the US. That created a close reliance, which can not be cut without a lot of pain overnight. The biggest issue seems to be Russia right now. Having the US as a NATO member at least on paper defending members against Russia is usefull. As are the ability to purchase some American weapons, without European alternatives or with too low production numbers like Patriot. The smart move is to reduce the dependence on the US steadily, while not causing too many big breaks, which hurt Europe.

Probably a good comparison is what happened with Russia after the full scale invasion. A lot of yelling at each other. Massive fights on different positions and then half a year later the EU mostly cut off Russian fossil fuels, managed to set up a steady supply of arms and other aid to Ukraine, provide support for millions of refugees and so forth.

There is such a thing as Europe. Not just as a continent, but as a political and cultural block. The main actor being the European Union, which is somewhere between the closest alliance and the weakest federation in the world. One key part about the EU is that it has strength somewhat independ from the members governments. The main parts of that are the European Comission and Parliament. The European Union then has a close sphere of influence mainly defined by the countries actively working on joing the EU and the EEA. Somewhat also the UK, which is in a weird position due to Brexit.

All of that is actually also chaning from an identity point of view. As in people see themself as citizens of Europe and their indiviual country. Even the far right is moving on that, with the more moderate(and they are still evil) no longer questioning the EU as such, but rather how it works. You can also see the European flag flown at protests in a lot of different places like for example Georgia.

Fuck no!

In 2023 there were 772 LNG carriers in the world. Most of them will obviously not run Russian LNG, so this actually hurts.

Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and Iraq have all been attacked by Iran and do not officially recognize Israel. That has some real consequences. For example you can not travel to Saudi Arabia with an Israeli passport.

In the EU this is classified as a motorcycle and not a car though.

The crazy part is that you can buy a similar Chinese microcar in europe for half the price.

It only works when you take crack.

If Iran continues bombing Arab countries, then this war might well end up with Israel being recognized by basically everybody.

The funniest solution would be Maduro becomes US president and Venezuela gets Trump.

Shell and BP are British. It is more likely that Marathon, Valero and Philips66 will profit from this since they are US American.

That might well change in the coming days. A lot of them are from Iran after all and they are not going to sell them to Russia right now.

Angry bollard noises

We can only judge by Iran’s response, and since they’re making a cohesive military counterattack by bombing US Bases, we can see the country hasn’t lost its leadership.

Iran has not been able to do that. So far we have seen low number of missiles attacking individual bases. Anybody including Iran knows that you want to launch as many missiles as possible at the same time against a target, so air defense can not deal with all of them. They have done that in the past, but not this time.

The other part is that Iran seems to know that a good number of Arab countries have closed their air space to the US. This includes the UAE. So there being Shahed attacks against Dubai is really really stupid from a strategic point of view. The UAE could easily allow them to actually use the air space or they even have a territorial conflict over some islands. It is not like Iran could do much, if the UAE took them back right now.

You mean the implementation of the United Nation Security Council Resolution 1973?

Not really. Thankfully it takes a bit of brains to make the move, so the world gets the USAs best.