Okay, now to the mysterious US Air Force flight to Moscow earlier today. We now know that the plane carried CIA director John Ragcliffe for talks in the Russian capital. This is Radcliffe's first trip to Moscow since becoming CIA director.A source familiar with the trip would not say who Radcliffe actually met with or why. It's now the third trip we know of that Radcliffe has made to a country considered an adversary. In May, he traveled to Cuba as the US enacted heavy economic sanctions on that country.He ...

Turkey, a key US ally and Iran’s third-largest trading partner, is at risk of losing a significant portion of its energy needs if Washington makes good on a threat to economically isolate Tehran https://t.co/xxTfEQ8QIo ...

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's economic D-Day measures landing a little bit softly yesterday, something of a muted reaction after it was made clear that while Bessent was laying the groundwork for sweeping sanctions on any country doing business with Iran, he wasn't actually taking action just yet. Now, Bessent said that was by design. He said the US was giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior, but that he didn't want, in his words, to blow up the global financial system.But the primary t ...

Monday was supposed to be an economic D-Day for Iran, says @helloimserene. But the measures unveiled so far by the US look more like business as usual. https://t.co/oShF0Dhf8A ...

And as the United States has called this an economic D-Day against Iran, do the sanctions actually work without ultimately taking on Beijing with it. >> The sanction is mostly targeting on the Beijing connection uh with the Iranian trade and it's narrowly concentrated in oil. And from the Beijing perspective, I don't think it's going to defend Iran against the West because Chinese authorities care more about the dollar access in financing and market entry to the US.So if we compare this to the May episode w ...