Susan Kokinda argues President Trump has opened a new diplomatic space to de-escalate the Iran conflict by working through a regional roster - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Gulf States, and back channels into Iran - while the U.K., EU, and NATO are absent and increasingly irrelevant.
Citing reporting that ministers met in Riyadh and that Egypt, Turkey, and Oman carried messages, she says this “Board of Peace” architecture is isolating Iran and weakening its proxies, pointing to Lebanon’s move against Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority’s condemnation of Iran, and Hamas considering disarmament.
Kokinda links Europe’s exclusion to self-inflicted energy weakness from Green and anti-Russia policies, noting rushed LNG moves and a delayed Russian oil ban vote.
She concludes Ukraine’s outlook darkens as Europe and Britain lack leverage, highlighting Zelensky’s scramble for support in London and Washington.
Chapters
00:00 The Midweek Update - Intro
02:09 The New Table — And Who’s Sitting At It
05:40 No Oil. No Gas. No Seat.
08:23 The Proxy War Loses Its Sponsor
Snapshots and Notes
Yesterday, President Trump made clear that the discussions with Iran are real.
And asked why he trusted the process, he dropped this bombshell...
“Because they’re going to make a deal.
“They’re going to make a deal.
‘They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually.
“They gave us a present.
“And the president arrived today.
“It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money.
“And I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a very significant prize.
“And they gave it to us and they said they were going to give it.
“So that meant one thing to me would deal with the right people.”
President Trump is not only dealing with the right people in Iran, he’s dealing with the right people in the region, the ones who matter in this conflict:
Pakistan
the Gulf states
Turkey, and
the back channels into Iran itself
Now look at who is not in that room, who he is not dealing with.
The United Kingdom
the European Union
NATO
Not only are they not in the room, but the British, the Europeans, and their insane green policies are literally out in the cold.
And with them, their proxy war in Ukraine.
But that’s not what the mainstream media says.
They say Trump backed down or blinked.
That’s the story they’re selling.
But what the media covers up, or what too much of the MAGAsphere just doesn’t get, is that Donald Trump has created a new diplomatic space where nations and their real economies are the currency of the realm,
not imperial manipulation.
Susan Kokinda has spent decades studying the empire’s great game and how financial control, managed conflict, and energy dependence are used to keep sovereign nations in line.
She knows what the map looks like when the system is losing.
And right now, it is losing.
Here’s what she is going to cover today...
The New Table — And Who’s Sitting At It (02:09)
So who is actually doing the diplomacy to resolve this conflict?
The Wall Street Journal told the story this week, and the roster is pretty remarkable…
link (paywall)
Foreign ministers from Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan gathered before dawn in Riyadh last week to work out a diplomatic off-ramp.
Egyptian intelligence opened a direct channel to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
Turkey worked the phones between Iran and Egypt.
Oman carried messages on maritime security.
And the president confirmed it himself, first in these remarks to the press…
“We have very much in mind our partners in the Middle East.
“As you know, a lot of them were surprisingly hit.
“And I was surprised to see it, and so was everyone else.
“But they have very much in mind in the discussion.”
And then the president acknowledged Pakistan’s role by reposting Prime Minister Sharif’s statement, which said…
Now look at that roster...
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Egypt
Turkey
the Gulf states
All of these countries are members of Trump’s Board of Peace, the architecture he began building with the Abraham Accords, and now operating at full speed under the pressure of a shooting war while still lining up billions in investment for rebuilding Gaza.
And that pressure is doing something else entirely, something the media is completely ignoring.
Iran and its proxies in neighboring countries are being isolated and defanged.
In early March, the Lebanese government banned Hezbollah and told it to turn over its weapons.
Ready for this? Then the Palestinian Authority publicly condemned Iran and sided with Saudi Arabia.
The Palestinian Authority condemning Iranian attacks on Gulf states and reaffirming solidarity with Saudi Arabia.
And Hamas, Iran’s own proxy in Gaza, is now seriously considering a disarmament proposal from Trump’s Board of Peace.
The entire axis of resistance, rhetorical edifice, has crumbled.
Iran’s military capacity is shattered, its supply lines to its proxies are severed, and the leverage is gone.
Unlike decades of managed diplomacy, which kept the region in permanent war, Donald Trump is doing what no one has been able to do for a very simple reason.
He doesn’t play the imperial great game.
He actually wants peace built on genuine economic development.
Now, notice who is not in that room...
No British foreign secretary
No European Commission representative
No NATO quartet
The players who dominated Middle East diplomacy for decades are simply absent.
And in terms of the military conflict itself, they are worse than absent.
They’ve been AWOL, and the president has publicly called them out on it.
Promethean Action and Decisive Liberty News are here to help you understand the magnitude of this shift, how the old strategic geometry of globalist institutions and ideologies is being replaced by American principles of statecraft and real economics. And we are both here to offer you a road map.
Be sure to subscribe to both below…
No Oil. No Gas. No Seat (05:40)
So why are Europe and Britain irrelevant at this table?
Because their own policies have collapsed their economies and have stripped them of any leverage.
That was noted with not a little bit of irony by Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and one of Putin’s chief interlocutors with the United States.
Here’s how he put it…
This is not a taunt.
That’s a statement of physical fact, which even the Telegraph admitted with the headline, Europe facing fuel shortage within days, warns Shell boss.
The EU built its entire post-Russia energy strategy on the assumption that Gulf LNG would always flow because the City of London had always managed those checkpoints.
Just enough to let Europe’s green fantasy be semi-functional.
That assumption is gone.
And here’s what makes this the empire’s worst nightmare.
It’s not just that the strait is disrupted.
It’s that there are now two energy superpowers who have decisively broken from the green agenda and the rules-based order.
And they’re not shy about it.
Here’s Donald Trump this week posting the numbers on American dominance in fossil fuel production thanks to his policies…
First in terms of oil production, then in terms of natural gas production, again, all as a result of his policies.
And here’s Dmitrieff posting Russia’s dominance across ALL natural resources.
Think about that.
The United States and Russia simultaneously flexing their sovereign energy power in the same week while Europe scrambles, no longer playing by free trade rules, no longer deferring to green energy mandates, sovereign nations acting like sovereign nations.
So what did Europe do this week when faced with all of this?
They blinked - twice.
The European Union, which has been slow walking a $750 billion LNG deal with the United States for months, suddenly fast-tracked it for a vote this Thursday.
And then, quietly, with almost no fanfare, Brussels pulled its scheduled April 15th vote to permanently ban Russian oil imports, citing current geopolitical developments.
They haven’t put that back on the agenda yet - what that means in plain English: they can no longer afford the ideology.
Dmitriev said it best:
… green agenda, Russophobia, no oil, no gas, no seat at the table.
The Proxy War Loses Its Sponsor (08:23)
And nowhere is that loss of a seat at the table more visible than in the situation facing Ukraine.
Because the patron Zelensky has always counted on is Europe, and in particular Britain.
And Europe just spent this week proving it has nothing left to offer.
The New York Times, of all places, captured Zelensky’s predicament with this headline…
But catch the subhead.
“The Ukrainian president has said he has a very bad feeling about the effects of the Iran conflict on Ukraine’s own war.”
The week before dispatching his team to Washington, though, Zelensky himself went to London to try and shore up support from his main sponsor.
The Telegraph called it his “Don’t Forget About Me” tour.
While in London, Zelensky met with King Charles for an unprecedented fifth time and addressed the British Parliament in person for the second time.
That’s Zelensky working his British relationship as hard as he can because London is the patron he knows.
But here’s the problem.
Britain has no energy cards left to play.
Starmer can sign defense declarations and talk about not losing sight of Ukraine, but he cannot supply what Trump’s new world configuration runs on, which is oil, gas, and physical economic leverage.
He doesn’t have it.
Zelensky’s very bad feeling is well-founded.
The war in Iran is not a distraction from Ukraine’s situation.
It’s a clarifying lens of a new strategic geometry.
The energy and economic framework that sustained the British directed proxy in Ukraine is being dismantled in real time.
Europe can’t fund it.
Britain can’t underwrite it.
The United States has moved on to a much bigger stage of history.
So look at the map.
The players shaping the new Middle East are
Pakistan
the Gulf States
Egypt
Turkey
... sovereign nations engaging with the United States administration that deals in physical reality, not imperial management.
Europe is screaming for the energy it spent years sabotaging its own access to, and Ukraine’s most powerful patron is a country which is pretty much out of cards.
They said Trump had no strategy.
The map says otherwise.
Iran did send Trump a present this week and the old world order got nothing because this is a new world being shaped by the principles of economic and political sovereignty and led by Donald Trump.
Promethean action is building a movement that understands that, Decisive Liberty News is as well.
